“I think I might already be drunk,” Anna chimes in from the far end of the table.
As the others laugh, Jakob turns, rests his hand on Bella’s knee beneath the table. “Your ring is waiting for you in Radom,” he whispers. “I’m sorry I didn’t give it to you sooner. I was waiting for the perfect moment.”
Bella shakes her head. “Please,” she says. “I don’t need a ring.”
“I know this isn’t—”
“Shush, Jakob,” Bella whispers. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“I’m going to make it up to you, love. I promise.”
“Don’t.” Bella smiles. “Honestly, it’s perfect.”
Jakob’s heart swells. He leans closer, his lips brushing her ear. “It’s not how we imagined it, but I want you to know—I’ve never been happier than I am right now,” he whispers.
Bella is blushing again. “Me either.”
CHAPTER TEN
Nechuma
Radom, German-Occupied Poland ~ October 27, 1939
Nechuma has stockpiled the family’s valuables and laid them out into neat rows across the dining room table. Together, she and Mila take inventory.
“We should bring as much as we can,” Mila says.
“Yes,” Nechuma agrees. “I’ll leave a few things as well with Liliana.” Nechuma’s boys grew up playing kapela in the building’s courtyard with Liliana’s children; the Kurcs and the Sobczaks are close.
“I can’t believe we’re leaving,” Mila whispers.
Nechuma rests her hands on the carved mahogany back of a dining chair. No one has actually said the words yet, not out loud at least.
“I can’t either.”
A pair of Wehrmacht soldiers had rapped on their door early that morning with the news. “You have until the end of the day to collect your personal belongings and get out,” one of them said, thrusting a slip of paper in Sol’s direction with their new address stamped across the top. “You will return to work tomorrow.” Nechuma had glared at the man from beside her husband and he’d glared back, looking at her with his face pinched, as if he’d ingested something rotten. “The furniture stays,” he added, before turning to leave. Nechuma had thrown a fist in the air and whispered a string of profanities once the door was closed, then huffed down the hall to the kitchen to wrap a cold cloth around her neck.
The soldiers’ visit was no surprise, of course. Nechuma had sensed it was only a matter of time before the Nazis came around. There was an influx of Germans in Radom; they needed homes, and the Kurcs’ five-bedroom apartment was spacious, their street one of Radom’s most desirable. When two Jewish families in the building were evicted the week before, she and Sol had begun to prepare. They’d counted and polished their silver, tucked a few bolts of fabric behind a false wall in the living room, even contacted the committee that allocated new addresses for evicted Jews in order to request a space that was clean and large enough to fit them all, Halina, Mila, and Felicia included. Still, nothing could truly prepare Nechuma for how it would feel to leave her home of over thirty years at 14 Warszawska.
“Let’s pack quickly and get it over with,” she declared, once she’d calmed. While Nechuma and Mila arranged their most precious possessions into piles, Sol and Halina made trips back and forth to their assigned two-bedroom flat on Lubelska Street in the Old Quarter, lugging copper pots and bedside lamps, a Persian rug, a favorite oil on canvas purchased years ago in Paris, a sack full of linens, a sewing kit, a small tin of kitchen spices. With no indication as to when they’d be able to return to their home, they stuffed their suitcases full of clothes for all seasons.
By noon, Sol declared the flat nearly full. “Once we bring the valuables,” he said, “we won’t have room for much else.” It came as no shock, but still, Nechuma’s heart dropped. She knew that the bathtub, her writing table, and the piano would have to stay, as would the antique vanity bench that she’d upholstered in French silk brocade; the brass headboard with its beautiful scalloped castings and rounded posts, a surprise gift from Sol on their tenth anniversary; the mirrored china cabinet that once belonged to her great-grandmother; the wrought-iron basket on the balcony that she filled each spring with geraniums and crocuses—she would miss them, too. But how could they leave behind the portrait of Sol’s father, Gerszon, that hung in the living room? The indigo tablecloths and ivory statuettes she’d collected over the years from her travels? The crystal serving bowl filled with blown-glass grapes that she’d placed on the parlor windowsill to catch the morning light?
The afternoon had slipped away as Nechuma wandered around the apartment, running her fingers along the spines of her favorite books and picking through boxes of drawings and assignments she’d saved from her children’s school days. Though they wouldn’t do them any good in the new flat, these were the things that mattered, Nechuma realized as she turned them over in her hands. These were the things that defined them. In the end, she allowed herself one suitcase of keepsakes with which she simply couldn’t part: a collection of Chopin waltzes for the pianoforte, a stack of family photos, a book of Peretz’s poetry. She packed the sheet music for a piece Addy learned when he was five—a Brahms lullaby, with his piano teacher’s note scrawled in the margin: Very good, Addy, keep up the hard work. A gold-plated picture frame engraved with the year 1911, and inside, a photo of Mila, bald and big-eyed, no bigger than Felicia is now. The tiny red leather shoes that were laced first to Genek’s, then Addy’s, then Jakob’s feet, when they took their first steps. The faded pink hair clip Halina had insisted on wearing every day for years. The rest of her children’s things she placed carefully in boxes, which she then pushed to the very back of her deepest closet, praying she would return to them soon.
Now, at the dining room table, Nechuma sets a silver bowl and ladle aside for the Sobczaks. The rest, she decides, will come with them. “Let’s start with the porcelain,” she says. She lifts a teacup from the table, gold-trimmed, with delicate pink peonies painted beneath its rim. They wrap the cups and saucers individually in linen napkins, nestle them into a box, then move on to the silver—two sets, one passed down from Sol’s mother, the other from Nechuma’s.
“These I thought I’d cover with fabric and sew onto a shirt, to look like buttons,” Nechuma says, pointing to the two gold coins she’d set atop a substantial pile of zloty bills—the fraction of their savings they were able to withdraw before their bank accounts were frozen.
“Good idea,” Mila says. She picks up a sterling hand mirror and peers at her reflection for a moment, wrinkling her nose at the sight of the dark circles under her eyes. “This was your mother’s, yes?” she asks.
“It was.”
Mila sets the mirror gently into the box, folding a few meters of ivory Italian silk and white French lace into squares on top of it.
Nechuma stacks the zloty and rolls them, along with the gold coins, into a napkin, which she slips into her purse.
The table is bare now, save for a small black velvet pouch. Mila picks it up. “What’s this?” she asks. “It’s heavy.”
Nechuma smiles. “Here,” she says. “I’ll show you.” Mila hands her the pouch and Nechuma loosens the string cinching the top of it closed. “Open your hand,” she says, emptying its contents into Mila’s palm.
“Oh,” Mila breathes. “Oh, my.”
Nechuma peers down at the necklace glittering in her daughter’s palm. “It’s an amethyst,” she whispers. “I found it a few years ago, in Vienna. There was something about it. . . . I couldn’t resist.”
Mila turns the purple stone over, her eyes wide as it catches the light from the chandelier overhead.
“It’s beautiful,” she says.
“Isn’t it?”