The Things We Cannot Say(33)

On cloudless days, I could sometimes trick myself into believing that we had gone back in time, back to the years before Tomasz left Trzebinia. One such day, I’d been working with my hands but my thoughts had strayed elsewhere. I’d imagined that Tomasz might wander down the hill, whistling, to join us for lunch and make my father laugh with some outrageous tale from his high school life, or that Filipe might bound in from the far field to beg Mama to let him go to Justyna’s for a visit. I stared up at the sky and ignored for a moment the way that I’d been tired for so long, I’d forgotten what “refreshed” felt like.

Mama and I had been weeding in the morning, but when we emerged from the house after lunch, my hopeful, wistful mood deflated in an instant when I saw that the smoke had started. By afternoon, as we planted on the other side of the vegetable field, the black-gray line had risen so high that it seemed to stretch all the way across the sky.

“Stop looking,” Mama snapped at me suddenly. “Looking at it won’t make it go away.”

I flushed, then glanced at her and saw the scowl on her face. I could tell she didn’t like its presence any more than I did, so I dared to ask for the first time, “What do you think it is?”

“I know what it is. It’s from a work camp for prisoners,” Mama said abruptly. “Just a furnace.”

“A furnace?” I repeated, glancing at the tower of smoke again and frowning. “That must be a very big furnace.”

“It’s to heat the water,” she told me. “There are many prisoners in the camp—mostly prisoners of war. They are just warming water for the showers and the laundry.”

This seemed to make sense—so I told myself there was nothing at all to fear in that tower of smoke, that my visceral reaction to it was in fact an overreaction; that I had been right in trying to ignore it altogether.

But when I saw it again the next day, and the day after that, and then soon it was there day and night, some deep part of me knew that my mother was wrong.

I still didn’t know what the smoke represented, but I was increasingly certain that it was yet another sign that the noose around the neck of my nation was being tightened.

We heard of Filipe’s death only by chance. The twins had been placed together on an immense work farm hundreds of miles away from us, working with young people from all over Poland, one of which was assigned to camp administration. This man was later “promoted” by the Nazis to a more senior post in Krakow. On his way to the new position, he came through Trzebinia and sought us out.

Just a few months after they arrived at the camp, Filipe had been outraged by some happening in the camp and had tried to intervene—unsuccessfully, because of course the camp was heavily guarded and several soldiers turned their weapons on him in an instant. His death didn’t feel at all like an inevitability to me, although in hindsight, maybe it should have.

There was nothing to bury, no body to conduct a service over. Instead, we heard that he was gone, and that was that. There was no verification, no official notification—just silence where there had been silence for many months anyway. Nothing had changed, except that nothing was the same anymore, because once I had two brothers, and now I had one.

This was what the occupation did to families; it shattered them into pieces without closure or explanation. Occasionally, as with Emilia and Truda, random pieces got stuck back together in a whole new way. But mostly? Our oppression was loss without reason, and pain without a purpose.

My parents seemed to retreat into themselves after this, and we all just lived and worked in that tiny little house without ever directly discussing the agony of it all, each of us carrying the burden of our grief alone. I kept moving forward only because I clung to a thread of optimism that just wouldn’t die. Perhaps the resistance would make an impact. Perhaps Stanislaw would come home. Perhaps Tomasz would find his way home. Every time Father went into the town, I’d wait breathlessly by the door.

“Any new of Tomasz or Stani?” I’d ask, and he’d shake his head and often give me a soft kiss against my head or a hug.

“Sorry, Alina. Not today.”

“Did you ask?”

“Everyone I could, child. I promise.”

And then just when the worst of my grief for Filipe was easing, Father came home from a trip to pick up our rations. It was winter by then, and there was snow all around, so I’d finished tending the animals by midmorning and was hiding inside by the fire, darning socks with Mama. I heard the creak of the gate opening and I ran to the door to greet Father as I always did—but the slump of his shoulders and his red-rimmed eyes said it all.

“Tomasz or Stani?” I asked numbly. I saw Father look beyond me into the house and I followed his gaze. Mama had risen from her seat and the color was gone in an instant from her face, and then I knew that she’d read the truth in Father’s eyes, communicating with him without a word in that way they had perfected after thirty years of marriage. She let out a wail as she sank to her knees and covered her face with her hands. I looked back to Father and shook my head.

“No,” I whispered. He gave a heavy, shuddering sigh.

“Stani,” he choked, as his eyes filled with tears. “Dysentery.”

Almost overnight, it was as if my brothers had never existed at all. It was one thing for the Nazis to have the power of life or death over us, but this preternatural ability to entirely erase two young men who had meant so much to us? Just like that, my parents had gone from a family of four children to a family of two daughters. Any parent would struggle with the loss—but for a long time, Father was caught in an overwhelming depression. I’d catch him standing in the fields, staring into space, and Mama sometimes had to force him to eat his sparse ration. When Truda, Mateusz and Emilia visited with us on Sunday, Father would sit apart from the rest of the family, staring into space. It was as if he’d given up. I feared that war had taken his sons and his name would no longer continue after he was gone, so he no longer saw the point of carrying on at all. Mama herself was courageous during the day, but I’d wake sometimes at night to hear the quiet sobs she could no longer contain.