“Tell me I’m not good at missions,” I told Pietrik one afternoon at our apartment. “Look what a good job I did with Nadia’s house.”
Pietrik helped me wash the few paintbrushes Matka had not buried. She’d placed them under a floorboard so she could still paint at night. They were not just any brushes, but Kolinsky sable-hair watercolor brushes, and washing them was a task of honor Matka trusted me with. She inherited those Stradivariuses of the brush world from her mother, and each was worth a fortune. They came tucked in a red-flannel roll, each one with its own narrow sleeve to live in, each made of Russian weasel hair, from the male weasels only, three times more precious per pound than gold.
“I have nothing for you, Kasia,” Pietrik said. “Things are quiet now.”
For a boy with such large hands, he was gentle with the brushes. He dipped one in the soapsuds and ran his fingers gently over the nickel ferrule and down the sable tip.
“If I spend another day in this house, I’ll go mad.”
Pietrik set his brush next to mine on the dishrag. “You know the rules. You’re not old enough. Read a book.”
“I’m capable of more—”
“No, Kasia.”
“Nothing feels better than fighting them, Pietrik. Send me anywhere. It doesn’t have to be big.”
“If you were ever caught, being a beautiful young girl is no defense against them. They’ll shoot a pretty one as soon as any other.”
Beautiful? Me? Pretty?
“If you don’t assign me, I’ll go work for the Free Press. I heard they need runners.”
“You are safer with me.”
“There you go.”
Finally, progress!
Pietrik turned to me, serious.
“Well, there is one thing. A complicated assignment, so you have to listen.”
“In the ghetto?” I asked.
He nodded.
Right away I was afraid but didn’t dare show it. One frightened look, and that would be the end of my assignments.
“You need to go to Z’s Pharmacy.” He paused. “No, on second thought, you’re not doing this.”
“Who is better? I used to have chocolate ice cream at Zaufanym’s with Nadia. Mr. Z goes to our church.”
Though it was in the ghetto, there was no rule against Christians buying at Z’s. All sorts of people shopped there, even the SS, since the pharmacist and owner, known as Mr. Z to most, was practically a doctor and somehow stocked every remedy, even with the war on.
“Can you be there at exactly two tomorrow?”
“Have I ever been late?”
“The patrol shift changes then, so you’ll have exactly five minutes when there will be no guards who will stop you. Avoid the blackshirts as best you can. They’ve added patrols.”
“Got it,” I said with a smile, though all the blood in my body seemed to stop running. I had the feeling in my stomach that said, “Think twice about this,” but I shooed it away.
“Enter, and go straight to the door at the back of the shop,” Pietrik said.
“To the basement?”
“Yes. Take the stairs down.” Pietrik took my hand and looked into my eyes. “Once you make contact, stay five minutes only. You’ll be accepting an important package, Kasia. Do you understand?”
I nodded. Doing my best to keep a calm voice, I asked, “Might anything explode?”
“No, but speak to no one as you leave. Come back to your regular shift at the theater. Your cover story is you are buying aspirin.”
Pietrik was so serious as he gave me my instructions. A cover story. It was a real mission, and though my hands shook, I would execute it perfectly. Five minutes was a world of time just to pick up some things.
—
I BARELY SLEPT THAT NIGHT, a running loop of all that could go wrong playing in my head. The ghetto. Just being in the wrong place could get one arrested. Every day one heard of neighbors and friends taken to Gestapo headquarters, “Under the Clock,” the innocent-looking office building with cells in the basement, or worse, to Lublin Castle, where prisoners were shot in the courtyard.
I set out for Z’s Pharmacy the next afternoon with shaky legs. It was a gray day, the wind pushing heavy clouds about the sky. No need to be afraid. That was what got you caught. Nazis could smell the fear.
I was halfway to Grodzka Gate, the official entrance to the ghetto, when I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. It was Matka coming out of Deutsche Haus, the restaurant where every German in town ate. The one with the extra big FüR POLEN VERBOTEN! sign on the door. The SS men especially loved the place, since they knew the food was safe to eat and practically free, and they knew they didn’t have to eat sitting next to any Polish person. Rumor was the place was full of cigarette smoke and the portions were so large much went uneaten, but no one I knew had been inside, or so I thought. At least not to live to tell of it, for this was the rule. No Poles allowed. Just the week before, our greengrocer had been caught in the kitchen, there to deliver potatoes, and was arrested. He never came back.
These arrests were becoming common events. That morning I’d read in Zuzanna’s underground newspaper that in just three months of war, fifty thousand Polish citizens had been rounded up and murdered, about seven thousand of them Jews. Most were town leaders—lawyers, professors, and religious leaders, anyone who broke rules or opposed the occupying forces. The Nazis saw the Catholic Church as a dangerous enemy, and there was a long list of priests arrested. Citizens were often wrongly accused of crimes and sent away or executed in public squares, the shots waking us at night.
So once I saw Matka come out of Deutsche Haus clutching a brown package no bigger than a small loaf of bread at her chest, I had to know what she was doing there. It was lunchtime, and people packed the sidewalks, heads down against the wind. She walked in the opposite direction from me, toward home.
I pushed through the crowd to reach her. “Matka!” I called.
Matka turned and, once she saw me, looked like the icy hand of a spirit had touched her. “Kasia. You’re not at the theater? I’m bringing your sandwich later.”
“I took late shift today.” I had worked as ticket girl at the movie theater near our flat since Zuzanna bequeathed the job to me.
We sidestepped a water-ration line that wound down the block.
“You were at Deutsche Haus? No Poles are allowed in there.”
“They consider me German.”
I felt a little sick just thinking about her in that place. It was true about the cigarettes! I could smell them on her.
“How could you?”
“Don’t be hysterical, Kasia. I was just dropping—”
We both stepped off the sidewalk and let a German couple promenade by us, per regulations.
“Dropping what?”
She clenched the paper bag tighter and squeezed out a fragrant scent—dark and exotic—of palm trees and sunburned Brazil. Coffee.
“You can tell me, Matka.” I breathed deep to dispel the panic. “Is that a new eau de toilette?”
She stepped back up onto the sidewalk and picked up her pace. “Leave it alone, Kasia.”
I’d seen the new silk stockings in her bottom drawer, puddled under folded shirts, limp as shedded snakeskins. The realization wound around me. “You can’t just ignore it. You must go to confession.”
She stopped again and drew me close, voice low.
“Bless me, Father, for I have had coffee with an SS man? Lennart is—”
I laughed. “Lennart? The name Lennart means brave, Matka. Lennart the Brave killed our Psina with a shovel.”
The sun broke through the clouds, and the barest smudge of black in the hollow of her cheek caught the light, iridescent. Charcoal.
“You’ve been sketching them.” Deep breath in…
She pulled me to her. “Quiet, Kasia. They like my work, and it gets me close—”
“It’s dangerous.”
“You think I like it? It’s all for Papa. They would have shot him, Kasia.”
“If I had a husband like Papa I’d rather die than be unfaithful to him.”
She walked on, pushing through the crowd, and I followed, knocked about by people rushing in every direction.
“How could you understand?” she said.
I pulled at her jacket sleeve.
She brushed my hand away.
“They call it race defilement, Matka. A Pole and a German. Together.”