For a while, after he’d sat down beside her, he didn’t speak. He was close enough for her to feel the warmth of his skin through the thin cotton of his shirtsleeve. This was something she had conjured a hundred times, the memory of them sitting side by side like this last summer. She had been in turmoil then, too—torturing herself about breaking the boundary between professional duty and personal feelings. Now the torture was of a different kind. The devastation of Stefan’s loss was tangible. She felt like someone blindfolded, about to blunder into a wall or trip over some unseen obstacle. She didn’t know how to begin the conversation they had to have.
“Are they okay?” she whispered. “Not frightened of sleeping in there?”
“They don’t worry when they are together.” His voice was soft and low.
“Halina is an orphan?”
“Yes. She and Lubya, they were hiding with ladies of the church . . .” He paused. “What word is it in English? For a lady with a long dress, white hat, no husband?”
“A nun?” Martha glanced sideways. She could see the silhouette of his chin against the indigo sky.
“Yes. I found a letter in a box in the ground—where I lived before the Nazis smashed the house down. It said Lubya was with nuns downriver, in P?ock.” He let out a long breath. “She was five years old when she went there. I thought she wouldn’t remember me, but she had a photograph. The nuns said that when her mama . . .” His voice splintered. He swallowed and tried again. “My wife took Lubya there when the killing started. They said the library burnt down one month after. Everyone who didn’t die, they shot.”
“Oh, Stefan,” Martha whispered.
“Lubya started to cry when I said I was taking her away. She didn’t want to leave her friend. So, I told her we can take Halina, too.”
“How did you get back to Germany?”
“In the same box with the letter was a watch and some rings. We made a plan, before the Nazis took me, that she would hide them in the garden. I sold those things to get money for the train.”
“You didn’t want to stay there? In Poland?” She was thinking about the relatives he had told her about—the nephew and niece he was godfather to.
“There is nothing there for me now. No family.” She heard the catch in his voice as he struggled to stop it from breaking again. “My brother, he lived in Grodno. When the Russians came at the start of the war, they took all of them to Siberia. They . . . did not come back.”
She reached for his hand, wanting desperately to take him in her arms and kiss away his pain. But that would feel so wrong. Somewhere in the trees behind them, she heard the call of an owl. The melancholy sound echoed Stefan’s words. He had chosen to return to this no-man’s-land, this place of zero opportunity. What she longed to know was why he had come back. Was it because of her, or simply because there was nowhere else to go?
Kitty and Delphine were waiting up for Martha when she got back to the cabin. They listened, grim-faced, as she described what Stefan had been through in Poland.
“Poor man,” Delphine murmured. “It’s so unfair that he’s not allowed to live here—especially with those little girls to look after. Where will he go? How is he going to feed the children?”
“He talked about getting a job on one of the farms,” Martha said. “But I don’t see how that would work. The girls are too young to be left alone.”
“He speaks quite good German, doesn’t he?” Kitty was staring at something invisible on the wall above Martha’s head.
“Yes, he does.” Martha’s eyes narrowed. “What are you thinking?”
“Charlie told me the army needs translators. Now things are winding down, they’re having to put more resources into making sure things don’t collapse when they pull out.”
“You think they’d give Stefan a job at the base?”
“I don’t see why not,” Kitty said. “He proved himself when he was living here before. You could vouch for that.”
Martha nodded. “But where would he live? And what about Lubya and Halina?”
“He built the chapel,” Delphine said. “What if he built himself a cabin in the woods, beyond the boundary of the camp? The girls could come here when he was working. We could feed them, and they could have lessons with the other children.”
“I’m sure he could build a cabin. But . . .” Martha hesitated, thinking aloud. “Would he be allowed to? I don’t even know who owns that land.”