But I hadn’t actually realised that this flight was going to give both me and Ró?a our first sight of the Alps.
The first part of the trip was mostly just snowy fields and forest, gleaming swathes of white and increasingly huge tracts of black-green pine. Then, as we made our way further south, the landscape grew rockier and steeper and we could see the crags of the Austrian Alps climbing ahead of us. They don’t pressurise the C-47s and they didn’t have oxygen hooked up in the back, so the highest we flew was about 10,000 feet. That meant that there were moments when we were flying between mountain peaks. Grossglockner, Austria’s highest mountain, was blinding in the midwinter’s day sunlight, glittering white and gold and rising 2,000 feet higher than we were flying. It was like flying over another planet – over another world, Oz or Wonderland or the moon.
Honestly – there were moments, many of them, when we were between peaks, with snowbound crags and rock all around us, when Ró?a really was so enchanted that she forgot to be scared. We were surrounded, as far as we could see, by our world’s sheer unspoiled majesty. It was unspeakably, indescribably beautiful. It wasn’t even barren. We could see glimpses of valleys and farms; there far below a touch of green where it hadn’t snowed yet; there a river; there a fairy-tale village.
We were both pressed to the windows on opposite sides of the empty cargo plane.
‘Did you know?’ Ró?a gasped. ‘Did you know it would look like this?’
‘I didn’t even think about it! We just got lucky!’
‘Even without the beach it is worth it. I won’t mind so much getting work sewing on laundry tags if I remind myself about this.’
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that driblet of self-pity.
I asked cautiously, ‘Ró?a, what are you doing for Christmas?’
‘There’s a party at the Institute. It was fun last year – Poles and Swedes all mixed up. I don’t know how much fun it’ll be this year though, since the funding is finished and nobody has work in 1947.’
‘Do you actually have a real possibility of spending the next few years sewing on laundry tags?’
‘No. I haven’t looked for that job yet.’
‘For the love of Pete.’
No wonder she seemed so beaten.
‘What are you doing for Christmas, Rose?’ she asked. ‘Are you going to Pennsylvania?’
‘How could I? It takes a week. I’d be on the boat on Christmas Day!’
Ró?a gave one of her raucous hoots of laughter. ‘Fly. Did you go last year?’
‘No, I had an awful Christmas with my Aunt Edie and Uncle Roger in England. I did nothing but cry all Christmas Day. It was worse than the year before. All of you were gone. And the next day, the 26th, they have this big annual party and there were about a hundred people in the house and I just felt like a freak. So this year –’
Throughout this entire conversation we’d had our backs turned to each other, standing on opposite sides of the bowels of the plane, glued to the small windows. There was frost on the rivets and the grey ribs of the plane’s interior walls. But outside it was fairyland.
I said, ‘Ró?a, come back to Scotland with me on Monday. I’m going to stay with my friend Maddie for a week with her husband’s family. Maddie told me to bring my friends. I know I promised you the Hotel Hershey, but I swear that Craig Castle will be just as nice.’
‘Oh, how could I!’
‘Easy! The place is always full of orphans and soldiers with missing arms – they won’t notice you. I mean –’
She giggled evilly. ‘The soldiers will, I bet.’
‘Yes, they definitely will, but I meant that one more –’
‘– One more crippled orphan.’
‘Oh, STOP. You know what I mean.’ I drew a shaking breath. ‘And anyway, we are in the same family. That won’t change.’
Ahead of us, the mountains dropped away and the black-green forest gave way to duller and brighter green ahead. The Italian fields were tiny and patchwork – you could tell you were in another country. Far, far away on the horizon was an astonishing stripe of sapphire that we knew, but couldn’t quite believe, must be the Adriatic Sea.
‘There is a medical school at the University in Edinburgh which they teach entirely in Polish,’ I said. ‘They started it in the middle of the war. I could take you to meet my tutor and we could ask about it. You could do your high school exams in Edinburgh and maybe try the university course next fall –’
‘We could share an apartment?’
‘Of course! And Ró?a –’ I choked a little, because it felt like we were making up another rescue fantasy. It felt like we couldn’t possibly be planning something that would really happen. ‘Ró?a, we can write our book.’
And honestly, why not?
Why not? We were free and independent. We were grown-ups. Even if she wasn’t working to begin with, little Ró?yczka wouldn’t be very expensive to feed. We might need more space than my bed-sitting room offered. But not much. We wouldn’t need much. We’d shared a lot less.
Now she didn’t even say anything. She just came over to share my window with me and took my hand and squeezed it hard. And I knew it wasn’t just another Nick Story, another impossible rescue fantasy. We were really going to do it. She’d come with me to Scotland on Monday.
She’d probably come with me to Hamburg in January.
We could see the coast as we landed, green flat fields arching lazily towards Yugoslavia, the docks of Monfalcone crowded with US Navy ships, the narrow strip of sand at the edge of the marsh across the bay. That was where we were going. It wasn’t a resort – it wasn’t the Lido. But it was a beach on the Adriatic. It really was.
Ró?a let go of my hand as we landed. She watched out the window, unflinching, the whole way down. She’d made up her mind she wasn’t scared. I could believe she’d delivered plastic explosive for the Polish Resistance on her bicycle when she was in ninth grade. I could believe she’d told the SS camp commander she’d rather be executed than be experimented on again.
She climbed out of the plane without letting anybody help her.
Ronchi dei Legionari wasn’t exactly tropical. That part of the Adriatic Sea is actually the most northern coast of anything connected to the Mediterranean. You can still see the Alps, blue in the near distance. The sun was shining, but the stiff breeze was chilly. It smelled like the ocean. It felt like spring.
I caught my breath in panic all of a sudden. If only we had something to do, I thought. I don’t want to stand on a strange beach feeling blue about Karolina. We need sand pails and shovels to distract us. Something to collect shells in. Fishing nets – Ró?a turned to me and said, ‘Remember Irina’s paper planes? Remember the glider? My sister and I used to make kites out of newspaper. You think they’d let us have some paper and string?’
*
They did better than that. They gave us silk maps. The airfield had been a materiel supply depot since Italy’s surrender to the Allies in 1943 and, among other things, they still had a big box of unused aircrew escape maps of all of southern Europe sitting in a corner of their radio room. Everybody on the airfield got involved – actually, I think everyone fell a little in love with Ró?a, swamped in her enormous flight suit with its rolled-up cuffs, with her fluffy caramel hair shining in the dusty sunlight streaming through windows still crossed with peeling tape so they wouldn’t shatter in an air raid. Someone found a reel of fishing line and balsam strips to make a frame with. The gum-cracking receptionist cut us a strip of the silver tinsel Christmas garland she’d draped round the door for us to use as a tail. She made us pose with her for a snapshot.