The Things We Cannot Say(65)

“That stops today.” When he didn’t react, she rested her hands on his shoulders again, this time to shake him a little. “Do you hear me, young man? You will be no help to them if you do not eat yourself first. From now, you let me fatten you up a little. I’ll show you the cellar shortly and you can see the rich bounty we have to share.”

Tomasz shot me a glance, and I stifled a giggle at the mixture of joy and bewilderment on his face. Sometime later, once he had a belly full of soup and egg and bread and even a few shots of vodka that my father furnished him, Tomasz climbed down into the cellar to take a look around. I sat at the edge of the dark space. He looked up at me, amused.

“You blackmailed me into coming here, now you won’t come down to visit my palace?”

“I will,” I admitted, then I shuddered. “But the darkness scares me. I don’t know how you will bear it all day.”

“Darkness is just like sleep,” he shrugged. “And anything has to be better than sleeping in a tree like a squirrel.”

“Are you very upset that I forced you to come?” I asked him hesitantly. He sighed, and ran his hands through his hair.

“It is hard for me to answer that right now. I’m compromised because it’s warm in here and I’m a little drunk and the mattress is so comfortable and my belly is so full...” he said with a reluctant smile, but the smile quickly cleared and concern took its place. “I am grateful to you and your parents, but I will never forgive myself if this turns out to be a mistake.”

“Will you stay in tonight?” Mama called to him, from the other side of the living room where she was making up her own bed. “You could do with one good night’s rest.”

“It would be better if I didn’t,” he called back. “Most of my friends would be okay for a day or two—but not Saul and Eva. The farmer hiding them does nothing more than required to collect his gold and Eva so badly needs the food.”

“I made a loaf of bread yesterday—you can take everything that is left, and a whole jar of jam from last season, and I’ll boil you some eggs...but only if you sleep. We will set the alarm, and you can go and be back before the sun comes up.”

Tomasz took a few steps up the ladder, until he was standing beside me. He seemed almost overcome with emotion—his eyes wide and his jaw set hard.

“Thank you, Mrs. Dziak,” he said roughly, then his gaze shifted to my father, who was warming his back by the fire. “Thank you, Mr. Dziak. For your courage. Your generosity. Your kindness toward me.”

“But for the damned war, you’d be our son by now,” Father said stiffly. Tomasz reached for my hand, and he squeezed it.

“One day,” he whispered to me, then he smiled and my heart skipped a beat. “One day soon, my love.”

“Sleep while you can, Tomasz,” I whispered back. “We can talk tomorrow.”

We had to maintain a militant schedule now that Tomasz was in the cellar. He’d leave the house just before my parents went to bed—taking with him whatever food Mama offered him, and he’d return in the morning, usually just before dawn. As he came back to the house, he or Mama would wake me, and I’d spend some time talking with him in the cellar. While I was down there, Mama would make breakfast and, because she was there to keep watch, we’d leave the latch open.

Even with the light from the windows in the upstairs, I never got used to the darkness of the cellar. Every single time I climbed down the ladder, I’d feel sick to my stomach at the darkness and the musty, dusty scent. We would sit on the makeshift bed and Tomasz would wrap his arms around me to help me through the panic of it—then we’d leap away from one another guiltily whenever we heard Mama walk near to the opening.

We talked about so many things in those weeks. We talked about the agony of the separation we’d survived, and we daydreamed about our future. Now that there were no secrets between us, Tomasz told me all about the work he was doing and his fears for his friends.

“Some farmers do this only for the money, and I wish we were not so desperate as to use those people,” Tomasz told me. “The man hosting Saul’s family makes me very nervous indeed. We want to move them from that house as soon as I can, but it’s just so difficult to find suitable places.”

“And the others you are helping?”

“It is just a handful of people, Alina. I can’t travel far because I have to go on foot each night, so I just take food to those on farms I can reach from here. We wouldn’t use the empty farmhouses at first because we assumed the farmers had been moved to make way for German settlers, but there has been no sign of that so far in this district and the shelter was too good to waste. It’s perplexing, though, why the Nazis would clear the farms and not use the houses.”

“Maybe the farmers are fleeing into the cities? I’ve always wondered if life in the cities is easier.”

Tomasz gave a bitter laugh.

“Not from what I saw in Warsaw. Not by a mile.”

I had no solutions and no insight, but I loved partnering with him in bearing the burden of the problem.

Sundays had once been the best day of the week for me, but now, they were almost the worst. We had decided that it was too dangerous to tell Emilia or even Truda and Mateusz the truth about Tomasz. The fewer people who knew our secret, Father had sighed, the better our chances of keeping it, and it was too much to ask of an eight-year-old to keep a secret as big as this one.