We Were the Lucky Ones



It’s dark in the bedroom, but from the sound of Jakob’s breathing next to her, Bella can tell that he is awake, too. She’d nearly forgotten how lovely it felt to lie down for a night’s sleep on a mattress; it was heaven compared to the wooden floorboards of Tomek’s wagon. Rolling to face Jakob, she loops a bare calf over his knee. “What should we do?” she asks. Jakob sandwiches her leg between his. She can feel him looking at her. He finds her hand, kisses it, and brings her palm to his chest.

“We should get married.”

Bella laughs.

“I missed that sound,” Jakob says, and Bella can tell that he’s smiling.

Of course, she’d meant what should they do next—as in, should they stay in Lvov or return to Radom? They haven’t discussed yet which option is safest. She presses her nose and then her lips to his, holding the kiss for a few seconds before pulling away.

“Are you serious?” she breathes. “You can’t be serious.” Jakob. She wasn’t expecting the subject of marriage to come up. Not on their first night together again, at least. The war, it seems, has emboldened him.

“Of course I’m serious.”

Bella closes her eyes, her bones sinking heavily into the mattress beneath her. They can talk about their plan tomorrow, she decides. “Was that a proposal?” she asks.

Jakob kisses her chin, her cheeks, her forehead. “I guess that depends on what your answer is,” he says finally.

Bella smiles. “You know what my answer is, love.” She rolls over and he pushes his knees into the backs of hers, wraps his arms around her, cocooning her in his warmth. They fit perfectly together.

“Then it’s a deal,” Jakob says.

Bella smiles. “It’s a deal.”

“I still can’t believe you’re really here,” Jakob whispers. “I was so scared you wouldn’t make it.”

“I was so scared I wouldn’t find you.”

“Let’s not do that again.”

“What again?”

“I mean . . . let’s not ever be apart, ever again. It was—” His voice fades to a whisper. “It was awful.”

“Awful,” Bella agrees.

“Together from now on, all right? No matter what.”

“Yes. No matter what.”





CHAPTER EIGHT


    Halina


   Radom, German-Occupied Poland ~ October 10, 1939




Gripping a knife in her free hand, Halina blows a wisp of blonde hair from her eyes and rocks forward onto her knees. Pressing a clump of pink beet stems against the earth, she flexes her jaw, raises her blade, and brings it down with as much force as she can muster. Thwack. Earlier in the day, she learned that if she put enough muscle into it, she could slice off the stems in one motion instead of having to go at each plant twice. But that was hours ago. Now she’s spent. Her arms feel as if they are hewn from oak, as if they may split at any moment from her shoulders. Now it takes two, sometimes three attempts. Thwack.

Her brothers had written recently from Lvov, where they reported that the Soviets have assigned them desk jobs. Desk jobs! The news has begun to irk her. How is it that she, of all people, has ended up in the fields? Before the war, Halina worked as an assistant to her brother-in-law Selim at his medical lab, where she wore a white coat and latex gloves; her hands, most certainly, were never dirty. She thinks back to her first day at the lab, to how sure she had been that she would find the work tedious, and how, after a week, she discovered that the research—the minutiae of it all, the daily potential for new discoveries—was surprisingly gratifying. She would do anything to return to her old job. But the lab, like her parents’ shop, has been confiscated, and if you were a Jew out of a job, the Germans were quick to appoint you with a new one. Her parents have been dipatched to a German cafeteria, her sister Mila to a garment workshop, mending uniforms in from the German front. Halina has no idea why she was given this particular assignment; she’d assumed it was a joke, laughed even, when the clerk at the city’s makeshift employment agency handed her a slip of paper with the words BEET FARM written across the top. She hasn’t a lick of experience harvesting vegetables. But clearly it doesn’t matter. The Germans are hungry, and the plants are ready to come out of the ground.

Glancing down at her hands, Halina frowns, disgusted. She can barely recognize them; the beets have stained them dark fuchsia, and in every crevice there is dirt—beneath her fingernails, in the small folds of skin around her knuckles, stuck between flesh in the open blisters pockmarking her palms. Even worse, though, are her clothes. They’re as good as ruined. She doesn’t mind as much about the trousers (thank goodness she’d decided to wear slacks, and not a skirt), but she was particularly fond of her chiffon blouse, and her shoes are another story entirely. They are her newest pair, brogue lace-ups with a slightly squared-off toe and a small, flat heel. She’d purchased them over the summer at Fogelman’s and worn them today assuming she’d be assigned a task at the farm’s business office, perhaps in accounting, and that it wouldn’t hurt to look put together to impress her new bosses. Once a beautiful, polished cordovan brown, the toes are now scuffed and discolored, and she can barely see the intricate decorative perforation on the sides. It’s tragic. She’ll have to spend hours with a sewing needle later, picking them clean. Tomorrow, she’s decided, she’ll dress in her shabbiest clothes, maybe borrow some things Jakob left behind.

She sits back on her heels, wipes the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, and pokes out her bottom lip as she blows again at the stubborn lock of hair tickling her face. How long, she wonders, before she’s able to get a trim? Radom has been occupied for thirty-three days. Her salon is closed now to Jews, which is a problem as she’s desperate for a haircut. Halina sighs. It’s her first day at the farm, and already she’s sick of it. Thwack.

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