Cilka's Journey(97)

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She hears the commotion of dozens of people yelling before she hears the train. The fog in her head clears with the realization night has become day. Her transport out of Vorkuta is pulling in to the station.

She joins the others, running, all heading to the same place. The train has beaten her to the station and stands waiting, its engine running. She is pushed and jostled and knocked to the ground several times. Picking herself up, she keeps moving. The queue for the doors is long. The stationmaster has left his room and walks up the line of waiting passengers, checking their papers. No ticket is handed over. Cilka takes the form from her pocket and holds it out for him.

The stationmaster’s hand reaches for it.

“Thank you,” she says to him.

With one hand on hers, he smiles down at her and nods encouragement.

“Good luck out there, little one. Now, get on that train.”

Cilka rushes toward the open carriage door. As she is about to step up into the train, she is pushed heavily aside by two men wanting to board ahead of her. The compartment is looking very full. She reaches her arms into the scrabble, desperately trying to get ahold on the doors so she can swing in. The train whistle calls, warning them all to get on board. There is yelling and pushing in front of her, and a man falls from the pack, back off the carriage steps, and lands on the ground, twisted beside her.

“Are you all right?” she says, letting go of the door and reaching down to him. People continue to shove and swarm around them. He looks up and beneath the hat are the startled brown eyes of Alexandr.

“Cilka!”

She reaches under his arms to help him up, her heart thumping wildly in her chest.

“Oh, Alexandr. Are you all right?” she repeats, her voice choked with tears.

He winces as he stands, the stream of people behind them thinning out. Her hands are still under his arms.

The train whistle sounds again. She looks to the door. A small gap has opened in the crowd.

“Let’s go!” she says. Her hand goes to his and they climb onto the train together, Alexandr’s foot clearing the platform just as it starts moving.

In the carriage, Alexandr puts his arms around Cilka.

She weeps, openly, into his chest.

“I can’t believe it,” she says.

She looks up into his eyes, soft and kind.

“I can,” he says. He strokes her hair, wipes the tears from her cheeks. In his eyes she can see everything he has been through, and, reflected, her own eyes and everything she has been through.

“It is time to live now, Cilka,” he says. “Without fear, and with the miracle of love.”

“Is that a poem?” she asks him, smiling through her tears.

“It is the beginning of one.”





EPILOGUE


Ko?ice, Czechoslovakia, January 1961

The bell dings on the café door and in walks a glamorous, tanned woman with a heart-shaped face, painted lips and large brown eyes.

Another woman, with curls in her hair and showing her curves in a lively floral dress, stands up from a table to greet her.

Gita walks toward Cilka, and the two women, who have not seen each other for almost twenty years, embrace. They are so different from how they were back then: now they are warm and healthy. The moment is overwhelming. They pull back. Cilka looks at Gita’s lustrous, curled brown hair, her plump cheeks, her shining eyes.

“Gita! You look incredible.”

“Cilka, you are beautiful, more beautiful than ever.”

For a long time, they simply look at each other, touch each other’s hair, smile, tears leaking from their eyes.

Will they be able to talk about that other place? That time?

The waitress comes over and they realize they must look a sight—pawing at each other, crying and laughing. They sit down and order coffee and cake, sharing more looks, delighting in the knowledge that these are things they were not allowed, that it is still a daily miracle to have survived. These simple pleasures will taste different, for them, compared to anyone else in this café.

First Cilka asks about Lale, and is delighted to hear about how he and Gita found each other in Bratislava after the war, what they went through after that, and how they have settled in Australia. Gita only stops smiling when she says that they have been trying a long time for a baby, with no success. She touches her stomach, reflexively, under the table, as she says this.

“Alexandr and I, too, have had no success,” Cilka says, reaching out to clutch her friend’s other hand.

And then, working backward, Gita asks—voice lowered, huddling in closer—if Cilka would like to talk about the Gulag.

“It is where I met Alexandr,” Cilka says, “and made other friends too.” It is too hard to articulate the relentless bone-chilling cold, the constant flow of sick and injured and dead prisoners, the rapes she again endured, the humiliation and pain of being imprisoned there, after the other place.

“Cilka,” Gita says, “I don’t know how you could bear it. After everything we’d already been through.”

Cilka lets the tears run down her cheeks. She never speaks about this with anyone. No one around her, except Alexandr, knows she was in Auschwitz, other than her only Jewish neighbor who had been hidden as a little boy all throughout the Shoah. And few people know she was in Siberia. She has done her best to put the past behind her, create a new life.