The Things We Cannot Say(56)

I believed him when he said he would find a way, but I worried about how far he was going to take this quest to help his friends. I now understood that the guilt he bore from his decisions in Warsaw drove his every thought, and I was scared how far that would take him. He’d already taken on one suicide mission and survived; how long would it be before he did so again?

I was thinking about that one morning as I walked to meet with him, so lost in thought that I was carelessly unaware of my surroundings. I heard movement ahead of me and raised my gaze. I was looking straight into the eyes of a soldier who was standing just a few feet away. I was so startled, I screamed without a single thought. The high-pitched, piercing sound echoed all through the woods and the soldier swung his rifle from his shoulder to raise it toward my face.

“Please,” I croaked, shaking my head. “Please, no.”

He flung rapid-fire German at me, but I couldn’t make sense of it, and I stared at him blankly. I raised my hands over my head in case that’s what he’d asked, but he gave me an impatient look and, to my surprise, said in Polish, “What are you doing here?”

“Alina,” Mama called from behind me, sounding oddly exasperated. “Would you slow down, child?”

“Mama...” I croaked. I tried to turn to face her to warn her not to approach but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the soldier, and in the end it didn’t matter—it was far too late to warn her anyway. I felt her draw near to me and she greeted the soldier.

“Good morning,” she said. Her tone was casual and warm, as if there was nothing at all out of the ordinary about the scene she’d just come across. I shot her an incredulous glance.

“What are you doing in these woods, old lady?” the soldier demanded, swinging the rifle from me, to Mama, then back.

“We are walking the path, going to visit my daughter’s home in the town,” Mama said easily, then she added with convincing concern, “Are you looking for someone?”

From farther up the hill, I saw another soldier approaching, and behind him, another. As I scanned the hill around me, I saw six of them, arranged in formation, all eyes fixed on me and Mama in that moment. My stomach dropped into my toes, and it took everything within me to stop myself from looking up. What if Tomasz was right above us? What if he’d fallen asleep in the open again? I had to assume he was without identification, and besides, they would take one look at him and know he was hiding from something. He was nothing more than a bag of skin and bones, held together by rags.

“There are Jews hiding in this district,” the soldier announced. “We are sweeping the woods looking for fugitives.”

“Here?” Mama said, sounding slightly incredulous. She laughed, freely and quite loudly. “Who would hide in this tiny patch of woods? You’ll find them in a heartbeat if there’s anyone here.” She pointed back, vaguely toward our house. “We live just a few hundred feet away. Trust me when I say there is no one in these woods. I would know if there was.”

“Documents?” the soldier demanded, and just when I thought I’d die from the fear, Mama calmly reached into her shirt, then stepped forward and handed him our identity papers. He scanned these, then nodded curtly, tossed the papers vaguely back in Mama’s direction and motioned with his rifle that we should continue along the path.

Mama returned the paperwork to her undershirt, slipped her hand through my elbow, and led me past the soldiers toward the top of the hill. I tried to turn my head back toward them to see what was happening, but she shook me, hard, and muttered a fierce, “Eyes forward, Alina.”

Several Nazi trucks were parked at the bottom of the hill on the Trzebinia side, in the space where the grass grew long but the trees had been cleared to make way for houses. Mama and I walked right past those empty trucks, my arm still caught in the death grip of her elbow. We walked the remaining blocks to Truda’s house in a stiff and horrible silence. When Truda swung the door open, I finally burst into tears.

“Get her some tea,” Mama sighed, then she pinned me with a stare. “Alina, my girl, I have been more than patient with you but it’s high time you told me the truth.”

Emilia came bounding down the hallway, delight in her voice as she called, “Alina! You have come to my house for a change—” Her little face fell as she saw my tears. “Oh no...what is it?”

“Everything is fine,” I told her. I tried to fix a smile on my face but I couldn’t hold back the sobs, and Truda glared at me and hastily sent Emilia outside to play.

Mama and I sat side by side at Truda’s kitchen table. Truda made us tea, then went outside to Emilia and, all the while, I sobbed and avoided my Mama’s gaze. I was in such a panic I couldn’t untangle my thoughts. If I’d gone to the hill two minutes earlier, we might have been sitting together when the soldiers came, and I knew we could never risk such encounters again, even if the soldiers hadn’t found Tomasz in their sweep. After a minute or two, when my sobs weren’t even beginning to slow down, Mama sighed heavily.

“Stop fussing, Alina. There is no need for such drama.”

“It was the fright...” I said, unconvincingly. Mama rolled her eyes at me.

“I have figured out your secret,” she said.

Her announcement made an already-awful situation unexpectedly complicated. Because did she really know my secret, or did she just think she knew? What if she thought my “secret” was something else? I also didn’t want to anger her, because my mother was a formidable woman, and not someone I wanted to cross. I pondered all of this as quickly as I could, and then I looked back to my tea.