• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 12320 0

outside the cell there was a constant jabber and hubbub, a shuffling of feet and a jostling of bodies as the jail continued to fill up with the victims of the day’s roundup. Once through the grilled aperture of the door above her she caught a quick glimpse of a familiar face, and her heart turned to lead. The face was streaming with blood. It belonged to a young man whom she had known only by his first name, Wladyslaw; the editor of an underground newspaper, he had spoken to her several times briefly at Wanda and Jozef’s apartment on the floor beneath her own. She did not know why, but she was at that moment certain that this meant that Wanda had been arrested too. Then something else occurred to her. Mother of God, she breathed in an instinctive prayer, and felt herself go limp as a wet leaf with this realization: that the ham (quite aside from the fact of its having been devoured by the Gestapo) had doubtless been forgotten, and that her own fate—whatever it might be—was tied up with the fate of these members of the Resistance. And such a fate swooped down on her with a black foreboding overwhelming enough to make stale the word “terror.”

Sophie spent the night without sleep. It was cold and tomb-dark in the cell and she could only distinguish the fact that the human form—hurled in next to her during the early hours of the morning—was female. And as dawn seeped in through the grating she was shocked though not really surprised to see that the dozing woman beside her was Wanda. In the pale light she could slowly make out the huge bruise on Wanda’s cheek; it was repulsive, reminding Sophie of mashed purple grapes. She started to wake her, thought better of it, hesitated, withdrew her hand; just then Wanda awoke and groaned, blinked, staring Sophie in the eye. She would never forget the look of astonishment on Wanda’s battered face. “Zosia!” she exclaimed, embracing her. “Zosia! What in God’s name are you doing here?”

Sophie burst into tears, weeping with such desperation and wretchedness against Wanda’s shoulder that it was long minutes before she could even begin to mumble a word. Wanda’s patient strength was consoling, as usual; her soothing whispers and pats between the shoulder blades were at once sisterly, maternal and like the attentions of a nurse; Sophie could have fallen fast asleep in her arms. But she was tortured with too much anxiety, and after taking hold of herself she blurted out the tale of her arrest on the train. It took her only seconds. She heard her words spilling over one another in a rush, conscious of the haste and abbreviation and her consuming need to arrive at the answer to the question which had been literally twisting her intestines for twelve hours: “The children, Wanda! Jan and Eva. Are they safe?”

“Yes, they’re safe. They’re here somewhere, in this place. The Nazis didn’t hurt them. They arrested everyone in our building—everyone, including your kids. They made a clean sweep of it.” A tormented look passed over her wide strong features, ravaged now by the appalling bruise. “Oh God, they picked up so many people in the movement today. I knew we wouldn’t have long after they killed Jozef. It’s a catastrophe!”

At least the children had not been harmed. She blessed Wanda, feeling exquisite relief. Then she could not restrain the impulse; she let her fingers hover over the disfigured cheek, the empurpled spongy outraged flesh, but did not touch it, finally drew her hand away. As she did so she found herself weeping again. “What did they do to you, Wanda darling?” she whispered.

“A Gestapo ape threw me down the stairs, then stomped on me. Oh, these...” She raised her eyes upward, but the imprecation she was plainly about to utter faded on her lips. The Germans had been cursed without cessation and for so long that the dirtiest anathema, no matter how novel, sounded vapid; better to let the tongue fall dumb. “It’s not so bad, I don’t think he broke anything. I’ll bet it looks worse than it feels.” She put her arms around Sophie again, making little tut-tut sounds. “Poor Zosia. Imagine you falling