“We can sit outside.” He followed her through the door. She took a seat at one end of the bench, and he settled down at the other end.
For a while they sat in silence. Martha thought how peaceful it was. No sounds apart from the occasional rustle of a bird in the branches and the low hum of the kettle as it heated up. But the tension in the space between them was palpable. She had to find a way in, some topic of conversation that would encourage him to reveal what was really on his mind. The safest subject, she thought, was the children.
“Lubya and Halina are settling in really well,” she began. “Have they told you about their new friends?”
“The girls from blockhouse five?”
“They were all playing a game of baseball when I left the camp.”
“It’s good that they play with other children.” He nodded. “And they told me about the game you play in the car—what do you call it? My little eye?”
“I Spy.” She smiled. “It’s what we do after we drop you off: they see something out the window, and I have to guess what it is. They teach me the Polish word, and I tell them how to say it in English.”
“They like you very much,” he said.
“Well, I like them, too. They’re lovely girls.” She stopped herself from saying what she would have said to Delphine or Kitty: that they were remarkably happy and well adjusted considering what they had endured in their short lives. “Do you know anything about Halina’s parents—what happened to them?” She held her breath. She hoped she wasn’t jumping in too quickly.
“They are ?ydami.”
“Jewish?”
“The nuns said they died in Auschwitz. They gave Halina to a neighbor to hide.”
Martha felt as though an icy hand had squeezed her insides. “Does she know that the Nazis killed them?”
He shook his head. “She doesn’t ask. I will tell her one day. She knows many people died in the war—the nuns told her that.”
“They never talk about the past when they’re with me.” Martha was looking straight ahead, her eyes fixed on a tree stump beyond the porch. “And I try not to say anything that might upset them. That’s why I started playing that game with them: it makes it easier to avoid difficult conversations.”
“It is hard when they ask me questions,” he said. “When we came to the camp, they saw children with a mama and papa. They wanted to know why. Then Lubya asked me where her mama had gone.”
“What did you say?” Martha whispered.
“I told her she has gone to be an angel.” She could hear the tremor in his voice. In one swift movement she slid across the bench and wrapped her arms around him. She felt the thud of a stifled sob rising from his chest.
“Sorry, sorry.” He mumbled the words into the side of her face.
“Don’t be,” she murmured. “It’s good for you to let it out.”
“I want to tell you all of it. But . . .”
“It’s okay.”
The shrill whistle of the kettle took him away from her. It was a few minutes before he came back with the coffee. He set the cups down on the planks in front of the bench, then pulled something from his pocket.
“This is the photo Lubya had by her bed when she lived with the nuns.”
Martha took the black-and-white snapshot from his outstretched hand. It was a wedding photograph. Stefan and his bride were wearing the type of traditional embroidered clothes she had seen at the camp weddings. A circlet of flowers framed the pretty smiling face of a girl who looked about the same age as Kitty.
“Her name is Krystyna.”
Martha wondered if he was using the present tense because his wife still felt like a part of his life. Looking at the picture, she couldn’t help being reminded of the image that had been on her bedside table throughout her childhood. Like Lubya, it had been her only link with her parents. But unlike Stefan’s daughter, Martha had always known that there was no chance of either of them coming back.
“She’s beautiful,” Martha said, handing the photo back. “How old were you when you got married?”
“I was twenty-four. She was twenty.” He sat down beside her and bent to pick up his coffee. “I didn’t see her face for four years—until Lubya showed me this picture.”
“You’ve been through so much. These past few months must have been agony.”
He was staring across his cup. A curl of steam clouded his chin. “First, when I got back to Warsaw, I thought they had both gone to Auschwitz, like so many Polish people. Then I found out what happened at the Zaluski Library. I asked myself, where was Lubya when this happened? I tried to find people who lived where we lived. I thought maybe she went to some house nearby. But no one knew. Then I remembered the plan of the box. I went back in the night, so nobody would see me, and I dug in the ground.”