The Light in Hidden Places Read online

  Izio would come to me at the windowsill, sprawling in a chair or hands behind his head on the rug. He whispered about his new university classes, the parts of the world he most wanted to see (Palestine and Turkey), the parts of the world I most wanted to see (America). And he wanted to know my opinion on things, like if I thought Hitler would invade Poland. But wars were not the first, second, or even third thoughts in my mind on those nights. Izio had turned eighteen. He’d filled in. Grown up. And his eyelashes curled like soot smudged against his lids.

  Max came to the windowsill, too, sometimes, that very last summer. He was smaller and quieter than his brother, but when he did talk, he made you think long, serious thoughts about your life. Or told jokes so terrible it made your ribs hurt. Izio wrapped his arms around his middle, trying to hold in the laughter so he wouldn’t wake his mother.

  I loved it when Max made Izio laugh.

  But after a while, Max didn’t come to the window anymore. It was just Izio and me while the rest of the world slept.

  I think Max knew before I did.

  Summer cooled to the final autumn, and when the leaves blew yellow past the windowsill and the air smelled like coal smoke, Izio reached out and held my hand in the dark. We promised not to tell a soul. And two weeks after that, the first German bombs fell on Przemyśl.

  I thought the planes were Russian at first, flying so low that Marysia’s dishes rattled. It was the first day of school, and the sidewalks were full of children with books and satchels, on their way home from a half day. I was leaning out the window of my sister’s new apartment, on the far side of the river San, waiting for her to come and have lunch with me. I shielded my eyes from the sun. The planes were leaving long black streaks across the sky. And then the hotel on the corner exploded in a cloud of mortar dust and fire.

  I screamed. Everyone screamed. The children in the streets ran, and the apartment building shook. I slammed the window shut against the noise and heard more explosions in the distance, a billow of smoke rising up over the city. Something whistled and boomed, and the building quaked, knocking me to my knees. Marysia’s picture of the Virgin fell off the wall. I crawled across the floor of the apartment, and when I threw open the door, the smoke was so thick I had to shut it again. The stairs were on fire. And I was on the third floor.

  For the first time in years, I wanted my mother.

  And then I thought of our farmhouse, and the long banister to one side of the stairs. Of Olga and Angia squealing as they slid down it, racing each other’s time to the bottom with Tata’s old pocket watch. I snatched a wool blanket from Marysia’s bed, wrapped it around me so that it doubled across my front, took a deep breath, and ran straight into the heat of the burning stairs.

  I slid down the flaming banister, holding tight with my blanketed elbows and legs, the wool clenched together with my teeth. Third floor to second floor, second floor to first, heat scorching my eyes and my throat, then the first floor to the cool damp of the basement, where I coughed and choked and stomped out the blanket edges that had caught on fire.

  A group of people sat huddled in the dim corner. They seemed surprised to see me. I peered at them with streaming eyes.

  “Don’t you know the building is on fire?” I yelled.

  We scattered like rats into the debris-filled street, and I could barely recognize where I was. The air was full of dust, smoke, and panic. People were crying out. For help. From pain. Not just one but dozens of them, from all directions. The building across the street from Marysia’s had been sheared down the middle like someone had cut a cake, a bed hanging from one layer, perfectly balanced, and at the very top, a man dangling from a beam, his legs kicking this way and that. A plane rumbled past him, whining overhead, explosions and an ambulance bell ringing in the distance.

  And then a hand moved inside the rubble at my feet.

  I dug the man out, a gray and bloody ghost beneath fallen bricks. Before I could even ask his name, he staggered away, murmuring something about his wife and the Germans. I ran home. Not to the farm, but to the next best thing, sprinting over the bridge across the river, thinking halfway what a good target a bridge would be for a bomb. I darted through the tunnel alley that ran between the buildings at Mickiewicza 7, into the courtyard, and as soon as my feet crossed the threshold of the Diamants’ apartment building, Izio was there, half pulling, half carrying me to the cellar.

  Max was already belowground. Mr. and Mrs. Diamant, Henek, as well as Chaim, who was only a month back from Italy, sat beside him in the dirt along with every neighbor we’d ever known. Mrs. Diamant opened her arms, and I went to them, Izio settling in on my other side.

  “You’re burned,” he said, pointing at my wrist. I hadn’t noticed. He held my blistered hand in the shadows, where his mother couldn’t see.

  Tanks shook the streets above our heads, but I felt safe anyway.

  Someone had brought a battery-powered radio, and we listened to President Mościcki tell the young men of Poland to rally in Lwów. To never become soldiers of Germany. To go to Russia if they had to. The Diamant men had a whispered conversation. It might have been a conversation they’d had before. Within fifteen minutes, the four boys had kissed their mother and were on the road to Lwów with the clothes on their backs and a little bread in their pockets.

  My burned hand still felt warm from Izio’s.

  Mrs. Diamant put her head in her hands and cried, and I hugged her and stroked her hair. She was mine now. My old lady. My babcia.

  Mr. Diamant shook his head. “Di velt iz sheyn nor di mentshn makhn zi mies,” he said. “The world is beautiful, but people make it ugly.”

  It was a long time before I realized that the Diamant brothers had not run because President Mościcki told them to. They’d run because they were Jews.

  We sat in the cellar for a week, listening to the Russians arrive and to the babies cry and to gunfire that went from the rooftops to the streets. Once a day someone risked their life to run upstairs for food and water and kerosene for the lamp. And when the guns fell silent and the tanks went quiet and we dared to come creeping out of our hole, Przemyśl was a divided city. My sister’s side of the San was German. Our side was Russian.

  Hitler’s war had crawled right to our riverbank.

  And stopped.

  So we buried the dead, shoveled the rubble, replaced the glass, and I scrubbed the dust from the shop. There were holes in the streets now, places where buildings had been, empty like pulled teeth. Russian soldiers patrolled the main roads and the train station, and the Jews of German-held West Przemyśl were expelled across the river. The bridge had been bombed after all, so we watched them come in line after line over the railroad bridge, the smoke of the burning synagogue still rising black behind them.

  The Jewish neighborhoods became crowded, and the room that had once belonged to Chaim and Max was assigned by the housing department to Regina and Rosa, two German Jewish women who had already fled Hitler once and were not made sweeter by their second experience. They looked at their new room—a little apartment in itself with a small sink and stove—shut the door, and didn’t speak to us. And since our part of Przemyśl was practically in Russia anyway, the Diamant brothers came back from Lwów.

  “Have you seen your sister?” asked Mrs. Diamant. “How is my Ernestyna?”

  “No one has seen her, Mame,” said Chaim. “Not since the bombs.”

  I watched my babcia’s round face carefully, but it only fell for a moment. “She has gone somewhere safe then,” said Mrs. Diamant. “To my cousins, or your tate’s sister in Vienna. We will get a letter when the mail begins to come again.” And she went back to stirring a huge pot of soup. Max caught my eye and shook his head. Their sister could not be in Vienna.

  I’d heard rumors in the street. Whispers that while we were in the cellar a hundred Jews, old men and little boys, had been run all over Przemyśl, right up Mickiewicza Street, German soldiers beating them if they fell. And when no one could run anymore,
they’d been taken to the cemetery and shot.

  But I didn’t listen to rumors. I didn’t believe them. No one would do that. And the bombs had left plenty of fresh graves in the cemetery.

  I didn’t want to believe, and that made the lying easy.

  I worked with Mrs. Diamant in the shop. Mr. Diamant’s health improved, and he baked bread two days a week in a cafeteria. Chaim got a job in the city hospital, and during the week, Max traveled four kilometers south to be a dental assistant in the village of Nizankowice. Henek and Izio went back to school.

  Izio was the same as he’d always been. Only he was different, too. He came by the shop in the mornings. I sang him questionable songs. He taught me insults in German as well as Yiddish, in case Hitler’s armies crossed the river, and at night we danced in front of the open window to the orchestra playing in the restaurant across the street. He told me most things. But not everything. He started smoking. I asked Max once what they had seen on the road to Lwów, and he only said, “Blood.” I didn’t ask any more after that.

  I got a letter from my mother when the mail started running again. She was safe at the farm with my younger brother and sister, while my older siblings were scattered over Poland. Mrs. Diamant did not get a letter, though she looked every day. I bought a pair of heels, went to the cinema, and sat with Izio at night, breathing his smoke while German lights twinkled on the other side of the river.

  The spring I turned sixteen, Mrs. Diamant began sending me to the monthly shop owners’ meetings. The walk across town was tiring for her, the Russian requirements silly, and I only had to sit near the back, reply “here” when Leah Diamant’s name was called, and report anything I heard that might be important. The third time I went to the meeting, I was late. It’s possible that I had been stopped in the market by a box of cheap stockings. I was trying not to let the door bang shut behind me when I heard the man on the stage say, “Leah Diamant?”

  “Here!” I called, and an auditorium of middle-aged men and one or two women turned as one in their seats. A little titter of conversation began. What a young girl to be running her own business. So ambitious! This Miss Diamant is just what our city needs. Someone clapped, others joined, and the whole room echoed. I sat in the first empty seat I came to, red-faced, determined to look only at the man on the stage, hear what he had to say, and run back home to my little lair behind the curtain.

  “Good for you!” whispered a voice in my ear.

  I glanced sideways. Beside me was a young man with spots on his chin that must have been difficult to shave around.

  “Have you been running your shop for long?”

  “No,” I muttered. His breath was hot on my cheek.

  “Did you inherit from your parents?”

  I didn’t answer. I stared at the man on the stage like he was the only interesting thing in the world.

  “My parents have a butcher shop,” the boy breathed. “But it’s mine now. Just to run, of course. I employ the butchers. Three of them. No dirty hands here, angel. What’s your address?”

  I turned my head. “Is your mouth always open, or are you able to shut it?”

  He wasn’t able. And it didn’t take him long to find my address, either, because he was in the shop the next day. So were many people from the meeting, to see the young businesswoman, and we sold half our inventory in an afternoon. Mrs. Diamant nodded and smiled when asked if I was her daughter, elbowed me to do the same, and whispered that she wished I could go to a shop owners’ meeting twice a week. The spotty young man bought half a kilo of apples and some soda water, said his name was Zbyszek Kurowski, and asked me to eat with him in a restaurant.

  I said no. He came back the next day and asked again. I gave him more of the same with extra vinegar. He said he had a row of girls waiting for him, that all he had to do was snap his fingers. I told him that was good, to go snap them and hurry up about it. He left with a storm on his face, and I was glad to be done with him.

  But three days later, when the shop was so full that Izio had come to help after classes, I saw Izio grinning at me, eyes crinkled, pointing over a Russian soldier’s head toward the door. And there was Zbyszek, this time with an older-looking man and a lady. The lady wore gloves, an orange fur collar turned high around her ears. I finished tying the string on a parcel, and she approached my counter, introduced herself as Mrs. Kurowski, and asked for a dozen cream pastries. I got them, and she requested a bar of chocolate with almonds and two kilos of apples. And while I weighed out the apples and wrapped her packages, she asked me questions. How many hours did I work? How often was I sick? Did I keep a bank account? Where did I buy my clothes?

  Zbyszek stood next to his father, hands behind his back, studying the ceiling, and I could see that Mrs. Diamant and Izio had both sidled nearer, listening while pretending not to. I handed the woman her parcels and felt my face growing hot.

  “Miss Podgórska,” Mrs. Kurowski pronounced. “You seem a good and agile worker and very pleasant to talk to. I think you would make a very nice addition to our home.”

  For two seconds, I thought the woman was trying to hire me as her maid. But one look at the male Kurowskis corrected my thinking. Most of the store was listening now, and Izio was biting his lip, trying to hide his smile.

  “Thank you,” I said stiffly, “but I don’t think I—”

  “And such a good family,” she went on, raising her voice. “Catholic farmers. From Bircza. Not too high, and not too low.” She leaned in. “What doctor did you see there, Miss Podgórska?”

  “Magda,” Mr. Kurowski said, tugging on his wife’s sleeve. She waved him off.

  “Go and be quiet somewhere, Gustov. This is women’s talk. You—”

  “Excuse me,” I interrupted. “But how do you know my family? I have never spoken to your son about—”

  “Ah!” Mrs. Kurowski looked around, pleased with her audience. “As soon as my Zbyszek told me he had found a girl he liked, I hired a detective. You should do the same, Miss Podgórska. It’s best to have everything honest, don’t you agree? But I can tell you right away that my son is a good boy. He does not smoke. He does not drink. He has good prospects and no illnesses. Everything that is good for a marriage. And you should marry soon, Miss Podgórska, before someone unworthy comes along and corrupts you.”

  I really didn’t know what to say.

  “But we can discuss everything more over dinner.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “When do you finish your work?”

  “No!”

  Mrs. Kurowski looked confused.

  “I am not interested in marriage, and I am especially not interested in marriage to your son! Goodbye and … thank you for coming.”

  The woman stepped back with her parcels, a hand to her fur collar, and Zbyszek took her place at the counter. He winked.

  “No need to be rude,” he said. “It’s a good offer. Everything my mother said is true. My parents just want to look you over, you know, just in case you—”

  “I am not a piece of cloth to be examined before you buy it!” I snapped.

  Every customer in the shop had stopped to watch by now. Even the Russian soldier, and he couldn’t speak Polish.

  “You …” My gaze took in the three Kurowskis. “You can all just … geyn in drerd!”

  Half the shop sucked in a breath. I’d just told the Kurowskis to go to the devil. In Yiddish. A skill that was 100 percent Izio’s fault.

  Mrs. Kurowski turned on a heel and thrust open the door, her husband close behind her, but Zbyszek only grinned.

  “You’re so arrogant,” he said. “I like it. I’ll see you soon, angel.” And he blew me a kiss before the door shut behind him.

  The shop was as silent as I’d ever heard it. Then my babcia laughed so hard she nearly fell out of her chair. The whole shop laughed, and after a few minutes, I was laughing with them. Izio laughed, too, but he was thoughtful.

  And he was still thoughtful that night at the windowsill, hi
s head on a cushion, feet propped up on his mother’s sofa, smoking in the dark. We’d been talking about my dislike of chickens, other than on a plate, the difference between the German “Nichnut” and Yiddish “nudnik” (there wasn’t one), and whether the Russians would ever get that statue put up in the square, or just keep letting children climb on Lenin’s head. But it was late now, and Izio was quiet. Thinking. He was like that sometimes. I was thinking the glow of his cigarette made him look mysterious.

  Then he said, “Fusia, I have three more years of medical school. And when that’s done, Chaim thinks he will be able to get me a job at the hospital. Unless …”

  He meant unless the Germans came. But the Germans weren’t coming. Hitler had an agreement with Stalin. “The Germans have lost one war,” Mr. Diamant liked saying. “And Russia, she is a big country …”

  “But if the Germans do come,” Izio said, blowing smoke, “Chaim and Max and Henek and me, we will have to run again.”

  “But why?” Running hadn’t worked the last time.

  Izio sat up. “Haven’t you been listening? Or have you closed up your ears? You know what the Nazis are doing to the Jews.”

  “But those are only stories …”

  “They are true stories, Stefania.”

  I frowned and looked out the window, stung by the use of my full name. The sharp clap of Russian boots passed and faded on the sidewalk.

  Izio went on. “So it could be a long time before I’m able to get my diploma and then a job good enough to support a wife. Three or four years. Maybe five. But I’ve been wondering, Fusia, if maybe you would wait for that.”

  I squinted into the darkened living room, but Izio had put out his cigarette and I couldn’t see his face. “You want me to wait for your wife?”

  “No, you Dummkopf. ” He sighed. “I’m asking you to marry me.”

  I swung my feet from the sill to the fringes of the rug.

  “You’re not going to tell me to go to the devil, are you?” he asked. “Or sing me a tango?”

  I couldn’t even think what a tango sounded like.