Mila follows the news in Lvov obsessively. The city, from what the papers report, is under siege. And as if the Germans weren’t enough of a threat, two days ago radios blared news of the Soviet Union allying with Nazi Germany. What peace pacts they’d established with Poland have been broken and now Stalin’s Red Army is said to be approaching Lvov from the east. Surely the Poles will soon be forced to surrender. Secretly, she hopes they do; then, perhaps, her husband will come home.
When Selim first left Radom, Mila fought sleep, for when she succumbed to it, she awoke in a cold sweat, shaking with fear, convinced that her bloody nightmares were real. One night it was Selim, the next it was one of her brothers—their bodies mangled, their uniforms soaked in gore. Mila was on the brink of unraveling when Dorota, whose son had also been called up, rescued her from her downward spiral. “You mustn’t think like that,” she scolded one morning as Mila picked at her breakfast after another fitful night. “Your husband is a medic; he won’t be at the front. And your brothers are smart. They’ll take care of one another. Be positive. For your sake, and for hers,” she said, nodding toward the nursery.
“Dorota?” Mila calls a third time, switching on the light to the kitchen, noticing the kettle resting cold on the stove top. She knocks softly on Dorota’s door. But the tap-tap of her knuckles against wood is met with silence. She rattles the knob and nudges the door open, peers inside.
The room is empty. Dorota’s sheets and blanket are folded and stacked into a neat pile at the foot of her bed. A lone nail protrudes from the far wall where a beveled crucifix once hung, and the small shelves Selim had installed are bare, except for one, which holds a slip of paper folded in half and propped up in the shape of a tent. Mila rests a hand on the doorway, her legs suddenly weak. After a minute, she forces herself to pick up the note and unfold it. Dorota has left her with two words: Przykro mi. I’m sorry.
Mila claps a hand to her mouth. “What have you done?” she whispers, as if Dorota were beside her, wrapped in her food-stained apron, her silver-streaked hair pulled tight into a pincushion bun. Mila has heard rumors of other maids leaving—some to flee the country before it fell into the hands of the Germans, some simply because the families they worked for were Jewish—but she hadn’t considered the possibility that Dorota would abandon her. Selim paid her well, and she seemed genuinely happy in her job. There has never been a cross word between them. And she adores Felicia. More than all of that, though, was the fact that in the past ten months, as Mila struggled with new motherhood, Dorota had become not simply a maid to her; she’d become a friend.
As Mila lowers herself slowly to sit, Dorota’s mattress coils moan beneath her. But what will I do without you? she wonders, her eyes filling slowly with tears. Radom is in shambles; she needs an ally now more than ever. She rests her palms on her knees and drops her chin, feeling the weight of her head tugging at the muscles between her shoulder blades. First Selim, her brothers, Adam, now Dorota. Gone. A seed of panic sprouts somewhere deep in her gut, and her pulse quickens. How will she manage, fending for herself? The Wehrmacht’s men have proved to be brutes, and they’ve shown no sign of leaving anytime soon. They’ve desecrated the beautiful brick synagogue on Podwalna Street, robbed it clean, and converted it to stables; they’ve closed each of the Jewish schools; they’ve frozen Jewish bank accounts and forbidden Poles from conducting business with Jews. Every day another shop is boycotted—first it was Friedman’s bakery, then Bergman’s toy store, then Fogelman’s shoe repair. Everywhere she looks, there are massive red swastika banners; JUDAISM IS CRIMINALITY billboards depicting hideous caricatures of hook-nosed Jews; windows painted over with the same four-letter word, as if Jude were some kind of curse rather than part of a person’s identity. Part of her identity. Before, she would have called herself a mother, a wife, an accomplished pianist. But now she is nothing more than, simply, Jude. She can’t go out anymore without seeing someone being harassed on the street, or pulled from their home and robbed and beaten, for no apparent reason. Things she had taken for granted, like walking to the park with Felicia in tow—leaving the apartment at all for that matter—are unsafe. It has been Dorota lately who has ventured out for food and supplies, Dorota who has retrieved her mail from the post office, Dorota who has delivered notes to and from her parents’ house on Warszawska Street.
Mila stares at the floor, listening to the faint tick of the clock in the hallway, the sound of seconds passing. In three days it will be Yom Kippur. Not that it matters—the Germans have dropped leaflets throughout the city with a statement forbidding the Jews from holding services. They’d done the same at Rosh Hashanah, although Mila had ignored the mandate and snuck after dark to her parents’ home; she regretted it later when she heard stories of others who’d done the same and been discovered: one man her father’s age was made to run through the city center carrying a heavy stone over his head; others were forced to haul metal bed frames from one end of town to the other while being flogged with meter-long clubs; one young man was trampled to death. This Yom Kippur, Mila had decided, she and Felicia would atone in the safety of their apartment, alone.
What now? Tears spill down her cheeks. She sobs silently, too paralyzed to wipe her eyes, her nose. Looking around the empty room, she knows she should be furious—Dorota has left her. But she isn’t angry. She’s terrified. She’s lost the one person under her roof she can trust, confide in, rely upon. A person who seemed to understand far better than she how to care for her child. Mila wishes she could ask Selim what to do. It was Selim, after all, who insisted that they hire Dorota when Felicia was a newborn and Mila was at her wits’ end. Mila had resisted at first, her pride too great to submit to relying on a stranger to help parent her child, but in the end Selim had been right—Dorota was her savior. And now Mila is once again in crisis, but without her husband’s steady hand to guide her. The reality of her situation washes over her swiftly and Mila shivers: her safety, and with it, Felicia’s, now rests entirely in her own hands.
Bile rises up in her throat and she can taste it, sharp and acrid. Her stomach constricts as a pair of images flashes before her—the first, a photo she’d seen in the Tribune taken shortly after Czechoslovakia fell, of a Moravian woman weeping, one arm dutifully raised in a Nazi salute; the second, a scene from one of her nightmares—a soldier in green, tearing Felicia from her arms. Oh, dear God, please don’t let them take her away from me. Mila gags. Her vomit lands on the linoleum between her feet with a wet slap. Pinching her eyes shut, she coughs, fighting another wave of nausea, and with it, a pang of regret. What were you thinking, being in such a hurry to start a family? She and Selim were married for less than three months when they discovered that she was pregnant. She was so confident at the time—there was nothing she wanted more than to raise a child. Multiple children. An orchestra of children, she used to joke. And then Felicia was such a fussy baby, and motherhood took so much more out of her than she was expecting. And now there is war. Had she known that before Felicia’s first birthday Poland might no longer exist . . . she gags again, and in that awful, noxious moment she knows what she has to do. Her parents had asked her to move back to Warszawska Street when Selim left for Lvov. But Mila had opted to stay put. This apartment was her home now. And besides, she didn’t want to be a burden. The war would be over soon, she said. Selim would return, and they’d pick up where they left off. She and Felicia could manage on their own, she’d argued, and besides, she had Dorota. But now . . .