The Things We Cannot Say(31)

“I do. But I feel better when I talk about it. I want to understand.”

“You can talk to me. I don’t understand, either, but I’ll always listen to you.”

“I know, big sister,” she said, and then at last, her little smile returned.



CHAPTER 9

Alina


We owned an unusually large allotment of chickens for a family in our region, because in the dry years when the crops did not perform well in our poor soil, our family had always survived on a steady diet of eggs. Now those eggs had to be carefully collected and counted, and I didn’t dare drop a single one because the Nazis had set us a quota of exactly twenty eggs per day.

Sometimes the chickens laid only eighteen or nineteen eggs. The first few times we were short, I was in a cold-blooded panic as I searched for the others. and then sick to my stomach when I finally conceded defeat and gave my parents the news. The next day, there was always an extra egg or two—and given Father only took the eggs into town twice a week, it always equalized before the soldiers even knew we were short.

We always met the quota. Very occasionally, we produced an egg or two above, but never a single egg less. For a while I thought Mother Mary was hearing my prayers and we were being blessed, but over time, I became a little more cynical.

Another summer harvest came and went, and I assumed we’d handed over every single morsel of produce as we’d been instructed to. This was usually a busy period for Mama and me, because after the harvest we would preserve as much as we could to cover the winter months, but now there was no excess to preserve, and our evenings were instead free. It felt strange to me, and I was surprised to find I missed the endless hours of pickling and preserving with Mama that we’d always shared in previous years.

But then I woke up late one night and was confused by the heavy sugar scent in the air. I stared up at the ceiling for a long while, wondering if I was imagining things or perhaps even dreaming, but the smell persisted and I became increasingly confused. I slipped out of bed to open my door, and found Mama standing over the stove. The smell of sugar and strawberries was unmistakably strong in the living area. The oil light was off—the room was illuminated only by the dull flicker of the fire through the grill on the stove. Mama was staring into the pot, her gaze distant and thoughtful.

“What are you doing?” I asked. She startled out of her daze and looked at me sharply.

“Cleaning the pot,” she said abruptly. “Back to bed!”

“I... Mama,” I said, my throat suddenly dry. I stared down at the pot over the fire, breathed in the heavy scent again and forced myself to state the obvious. “That’s jam, Mama. I can see you’re making jam.”

Mama looked back to the pot for a moment. She stirred some more, and then she turned back to me, a challenge in her gaze.

“Of course it’s not jam,” she said. She lifted the spoon so I could see the syrup dripping off it. A drop formed then fell, and then another, but Mama remained completely silent even as long moments dragged past us while I watched the spoon, and she watched me. My sleepiness cleared, and I swallowed a sudden lump in my throat, then forced my eyes back to Mama. The look in her eyes was so intense that it became very hard to look at her, so I flicked my gaze between Mama and the spoon. In the semidark room, the thick red jam looked exactly like blood. It was quite hot in the house because of the fire, but a shiver ran through me from my head to my toes.

Mama lowered the spoon back down into the mix and resumed her stirring, and she stared into the pot as she murmured, “If it was jam, I’d be withholding produce, and if I was caught doing that, I’d be executed. They’d shoot me or hang me or beat me to death.” She left another long pause, and for me, that silence was loaded with the sheer terror of the truth of her statement. “Now, would I ever take such a foolish risk?”

There was an open challenge in her eyes, as if Mama was daring me to say otherwise, and as if me stating the blatantly obvious would be the thing that caused her death. I was shaking now—confronted with the reality of our circumstances in a way that I had easily avoided until that moment.

I dropped my chin and shook my head.

“No, Mama. Of course you wouldn’t,” I croaked out.

“Good. Go back to bed.”

I did. I turned quickly and ran into my room and even though it was uncomfortably warm, I climbed under my blankets and I pulled them up over my head. Eventually, I fell into a fitful sleep, but when I woke the next morning to watch the sunrise through my window, there was no way I could avoid facing the truth.

My mother was hiding food from the Nazis. And now that I knew for sure, I wanted to know exactly how extensive her deceit was.

The chickens were hard to count when they were outside during the day—especially because our flock had free rein of the house yard and the large barn during the day. But at night I would chase them into the barn and lock them away to keep them safe from foxes. The next night, I decided to confirm my suspicions. I locked the chickens in the barn, left them to settle, and then went back to count them once they were still.

“We have twenty-three chickens, plus the roosters,” I said to Mama when I went inside. She looked at me, then frowned.

“No. Exactly twenty, plus the three roosters,” she said abruptly.

“Maybe we have some strays then, because I just counted—”