The Things We Cannot Say(32)

“We have exactly twenty, Alina,” Father said flatly. The words bounced around the walls of our small house, and then I knew.

“We have twenty chickens,” I echoed dully.

Jam, eggs... Where did it end? I started watching the supplies Father would return with when he went to get our rations, and I compared it to the food we were eating. We were hardly living a lavish lifestyle—but we all ate eggs most days, despite Father only bringing a half-dozen back from the town each week. We’d always had jam with our bread, and I had assumed it was left over from the season before the war, but now I looked closely at the jar we were eating from.

That very same jar had lasted for months. The jam never seemed to go down.

I wondered what my diet would look like if it wasn’t for the contraband jam and the extra eggs. I wondered what else my parents were doing that they didn’t want me to know about. Soon, I’d stare at the strawberry jam on my biscuit and feel somehow equally panicked that my mother had risked her life to give it to me, and that perhaps it might be the last serving.

One morning, when Mama and I were collecting the eggs, I waited until she’d rounded the corner of the barn to check the house yard. I ran back inside for the oil lamp, then I forced myself to go down into the dark cavity of the cellar. It had been hard enough to force myself into that space with my whole family around me, even when the threat of bombing was looming. My heart was racing as I climbed inside, but it nearly stopped altogether when I found only a single, dusty jar of jam and two bolted potatoes.

That’s when I realized that even worse than the thought of Mama keeping a secret supply of food was the possibility that we’d already exhausted what she had. I clambered out of the cellar and back toward Mama.

“Mama,” I choked. “We have run out of food, haven’t we?”

“No,” she said, and she continued her work as if I hadn’t spoken. I stared at her in disbelief, then grabbed her upper arm to force her to look at me.

“But I went into the cellar.”

She silenced me with a single, incredulous look, and then she barked a laugh.

“Alina,” she said, “since when do you go into the cellar?”

“I was just so worried...”

“When you need to be concerned, I will tell you. Until then, work hard and don’t ask so many questions.”

“But, Mama,” I said uneasily, “I need to understand.”

“Sometimes, not understanding something is the wise thing to do,” Mama sighed, and she glanced up at me. “We are nothing to the invaders, Alina. We were already poor, so there is not much more for them to take from us and if they think they are getting all of our produce, they leave us alone...for the most part. But if they suddenly start paying attention, then you and I will discuss this matter. Until that day, you have to trust Father and I to take care of you.”

The jam kept coming long after it should have run out, and the potato cakes kept coming on Sundays, and most mornings Mama would silently serve me a heaping mound of eggs with my ration portion of oatmeal. I saw her slipping potatoes and eggs and sometimes even a small bag of grain or sugar into Truda’s coat after lunch every Sunday. I saw that all of us looked drawn and too slim, but Emilia somehow kept color in the apples on her cheeks. I saw the large sacks of wheat and sugar my Father uncovered in the back of the cart after a “spontaneous” trip to the town to “visit with Truda.”

We were surviving only because my parents were covertly skimming from our harvests and making the occasional dip into the black market. It was thriving in those days, because every single Polish citizen was in exactly the same position.

I didn’t question Mama again after that morning. I wanted to protest more, and I always planned to—I just didn’t know how I’d survive once the food dried up. Even with those scant added calories, every now and again I’d find myself light-headed in a field, or so exhausted I’d have to sit and rest midtask. Without that little bit of extra sustenance, I knew I could never keep up with the work my parents needed me to manage in order to keep the farm going.

So instead of digging for the truth from my parents, I quietly added yet another stream of terror to the river of it that ran beneath each hour of my life.

Sometimes, when I was planting or weeding or harvesting in the vegetable field, I’d stand to stretch my aching back, and when I looked to the sky, I’d notice a rising tower of black smoke. At first, this barely caught my attention because there had been smoke on the horizon all the time when the occupation first began. But I gradually noticed that this was different from the smoke that rose when the Nazis destroyed our buildings with fire—because that came and went and moved around, and this odd smoke was always in the exact same place.

It was initially an occasional landmark, but as one year under Nazi rule became two, the smoke became visible almost every day. Gradually, I made the reluctant connection between that odd tower of smoke and an awful smell that hung heavily in the air some days, like a sickly blanket across the whole district. When the smoke was billowing and there was no wind, that god-awful stench was never far behind. This was a scent unlike any other—not something I could identify, but something that made me feel physically ill and sometimes inexplicably scared. Soon, I didn’t want to so much as look at the black line of smoke against the deep blue of our skies, as if the very sight of the smoke was a threat to me.