1st September 1939 07:01. Warsaw
The Alfa kept moving.
It had to. Every other consideration in Elias’s body had been demoted to that single function — keep the wheels turning, keep the engine alive, keep the car forward — because the moment it stopped was the moment Anna stopped, and Anna stopping was a thing he could not allow to happen, not now, not yet, not ever.
In the back seat she was bleeding through Margaret’s coat.
Margaret had pulled it off without being asked, two minutes after they left the Fiat behind them, and pressed it down hard over Anna’s right thigh. The cardigan underneath was already saturated. The coat was beginning to follow.
“Stay with me,” Margaret was saying. Her voice had the particular evenness of someone who had decided panic would not be allowed in this car. “Anna. Stay with me. Listen. I am going to tell you a story. Do you remember the story about the bee that found the honey jar—”
“I’m tired,” Anna said.
“I know you are, sweetheart. That’s why I’m telling you the story. Eyes open. There you are. The bee was in the kitchen, and Mama had not put the lid on properly—”
“Margaret.”
“I know, Eli. I know. Drive.”
Behind them another bomb went down, two streets back, and the Alfa rocked once on its axles. Elias did not look in the mirror. There was nothing in the mirror that would help him. He watched the road. The road was less of a road every minute. People in it. Carts in it. Half a horse in it that he had to swing the wheel hard around. Margaret made a sound in the back. He did not look.
“What’s the bee doing,” Anna said, faintly.
“He’s stuck. His feet are stuck in the honey. He’s making a fuss. You know how bees fuss.”
“Bees don’t fuss.”
“This one does. He’s complaining loudly. He’s saying — Anna, eyes — he’s saying, this is not what I came for, I came for a flower, I did not sign up for this, this is not in my contract—”
A faint sound. Not a laugh. The shape of one.
“There she is,” Margaret said. “There’s my girl.”
Elias did not look at the speedometer. The speedometer would tell him things he did not want to know. He looked at the road, and he looked at the next obstacle, and he looked at the road, and he said quietly, without turning his head:
“How is the bleeding.”
“It’s slowing. I think.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not. The pressure is helping. It’s slowing.”
He took her at her word because he had to.
A pharmacy.
Even the words felt obscene in his mouth. There would not be a pharmacy. There would not be a doctor. There would not be a hospital. There was the city, on fire, and there was Anna, and there was him, and there was the engineering course in New York where he had spent six months on a medical paper because the engineering professor had told him it would help him understand load tolerance in the human spine. Six months of papers. He had cleaned a wound on a cadaver once. He had set a fracture on a mannequin. He was twenty-two years old and his sister was bleeding into Margaret’s coat in the back seat and he had six months of papers and a pair of hands.
“Eli.”
“I’m thinking, Margaret.”
“Marszałkowska is gone. We can’t go back that way.”
“I know.”
“There was an apteka two streets up. Before — before the corner.”
“I know.”
He had been holding the location in his head since they passed it twenty minutes ago in the other direction. He had not thought he would need it then. He had been wrong about a great many things in the last hour.
He turned hard right at the next intersection. The Alfa skidded, found grip, kept going. He thought: the tyres are good, the engine is sound, the carburettor is exactly as my father said. He thought it because he did not want to think the other thing.
The other thing was that his father had said it.
He stopped thinking.
The street narrowed. A handcart had been abandoned in the middle of it, one wheel broken, suitcases spilled across the cobbles, a child’s shoe on top of the pile. Elias swerved. The Alfa clipped the kerb. Margaret grunted in the back. Anna did not make a sound.
“Margaret.”
“She’s still here.”
“Tell me she’s still here.”
“She’s still here, Eli. She’s still here.”
The next bomb came down close enough to feel.
It was a building behind them — he could not see which one, only the pressure wave rolling forward through the street, lifting dust off the road in a sheet. The Alfa shuddered. The windscreen cracked further across the top. A piece of something — slate, he thought, roof slate — bounced off the bonnet and skittered away.
“Eli.”
“I see it.”
The pharmacy.
The green lamp was dark. The sign was cracked. The window had blown in — not from this bomb, from one earlier. Glass was on the pavement in a wide crystalline scatter. The door was open. Two women were coming out of it, carrying things in their arms — gauze, a brown bottle, a roll of something white. One of them was crying. The other one was not.
Elias stopped the Alfa half on the pavement. He did not bother with the brake fully. He pulled up the handbrake and got out and the door of the Alfa was still open behind him.
“Margaret. With me. Now.”
She was already moving.
He opened the rear door. Anna was very pale. Her eyes were open but her eyes were not looking at anything he could see. He slid his arms under her shoulders and her knees and lifted her, and the coat came with her, pressed against the wound, and Margaret kept the pressure as he moved, walking sideways, her hand flat on Anna’s thigh, the two of them carrying his sister between them like something liturgical.
“Hold on, Anna,” he said. “Hold on for me.”
“Eli.”
“I’ve got you. I’ve got you. Margaret has you. Don’t close your eyes.”
“Is this what your vision said,” he said to Margaret as they reached the pharmacy door, low, sharp, before he had decided to say it. “Is this it. Is this the thing you saw.”
Margaret did not look at him. Her hand stayed on Anna’s thigh.
“Don’t,” she said.
“Margaret—”
“Don’t. Not now. Not while she’s bleeding. Don’t, Eli.”
He did not push.
He hated himself for asking.
He pushed the pharmacy door open with his shoulder.
The inside of the apteka had been a small room once. Wooden cabinets. Glass jars on shelves. A long counter with a brass scale. A mortar and pestle, in fact, at the end of the counter, where the pharmacist had been working on something this morning that he had not finished.
The pharmacist was not there.
Six or seven people were. None of them looked up. A man was pulling open a drawer behind the counter, taking what was in it, putting it in his coat pocket. A woman was filling a cloth bag with whatever she could reach — small brown bottles, a roll of bandage, a packet that Elias could not read at this distance.
The shelves were almost empty.
Iodine — gone. Bandages — gone. The locked cabinet at the back had been forced open and emptied. Somebody had taken the morphine because of course they had. The brown bottles that remained on the shelf were liniments, ointments, things that would not save a child bleeding out from a leg wound. Salve for a horse’s hock. Tincture for a cough.
Elias’s chest did something he did not have time for.
“On the floor,” Margaret said. “Quickly.”
He went down on one knee and lowered Anna to the wooden floorboards. They were dirty. There was glass dust in the boards from the broken window. He did not have time to care.
Margaret was already moving.
She tore open a cabinet that had been left untouched because what was in it was unfashionable — old folded sheets, a small bolt of cotton, a rolled blanket that smelled of mothballs. She pulled the blanket free. She came back and wedged it under Anna’s head. She took the cotton and tore it down the middle with her teeth.
“Pressure,” she said. “Eli, pressure.”
He put his hands on the wound and pressed.
It was worse than he had thought.
The cut was long — eight or nine inches, running diagonally across the front of her thigh. Glass had gone in deep at the centre. There was a fragment still in there, he could see the edge of it, dull green from the side window of the Fiat. The blood was not pulsing — small mercy — but it was steady, the slow seepage of a wound that had been bleeding for thirty minutes and would not stop on its own.
He had no iodine.
He had no sutures.
He had nothing to close the wound with.
He had his hands.
“Anna,” he said. “Anna, look at me.”
Her eyes drifted toward the sound of his voice. They did not quite focus. Her lips moved and did not produce sound.
“Mama,” she said.
It was not even a word fully. It was the breath of one.
“I know, sweetheart. I know.”
Her eyes closed.
“Anna.” He pressed harder. “Anna, open your eyes.”
She did not.
Margaret’s hand went to Anna’s neck. Her fingers stayed there for two seconds. Three. Four.
Margaret’s face did something Elias had never seen Margaret’s face do.
“Eli.” Her voice had gone strange. “Eli, she’s not breathing.”
The room emptied of sound.
Elias’s hands were still on the wound. His hands were still pressing. His hands were doing the only thing they could do.
“No,” he said. “No. No, no, no, no, no—”
“Help us,” Margaret screamed.
It came out of her without warning. The first time Elias had heard Margaret raise her voice in three years.
“Someone help us. Please. Please. She’s not—”
“Step aside.”
The voice came from the doorway.
Margaret did not move. She had been about to scream again. The scream stopped in her throat before it could leave it. Her hand stayed on Anna’s neck.
Elias did not look up. Whoever the voice belonged to was already moving across the pharmacy floor toward them, footsteps measured, unhurried, and the unhurried quality was the thing Elias would remember afterwards, the thing that did not fit, the thing that meant nothing in the moment but everything in retrospect.
A man.
Mid-fifties. Weathered face. Heavy coat over working clothes, the coat dusted with the same plaster dust that was on everyone in Warsaw this morning, the working clothes underneath clean. A canvas bag in his right hand. A second bag over his shoulder. He was not carrying a child. He was not running. He was walking into the pharmacy as if he had been walking somewhere else and had simply been redirected by the sound of a girl screaming.
He went down on one knee on Anna’s other side.
His face went to Anna’s face and stayed there for a half-second longer than it should have, before his eyes moved to the wound.
“How long,” he said.
“What?”
“How long has she not been breathing, son. Quickly.”
“I — I don’t know. Ten seconds. Less.”
“Then we have time.”
He set the canvas bag down on the floorboards beside Anna. He opened it. The bag was full. Bandages. A glass bottle of iodine. A roll of catgut. Two pre-threaded surgical needles. A small flask of something Elias did not recognise. Sulphonamide powder in a paper twist.
Elias looked at the bag and his mind did not have time for the question. The question was where did you get all of this. The question went on a list of things to think about later, if there was a later.
The man’s hands were moving.
He put two fingers under Anna’s jaw, tilted her chin up, opened her mouth with his thumb. He looked inside it. He cleared something — Elias could not see what — with his finger.
“You,” he said, and his eyes went to Margaret. “What’s your name.”
“Margaret.”
“Margaret. You’re going to breathe for her. Two breaths. Slow. Cover her nose with your hand. Seal your mouth over hers. Do it now. I will tell you when to stop.”
Margaret did it.
She bent down. She covered Anna’s nose with her hand. She put her mouth over Anna’s mouth and she breathed out, slow, and Anna’s chest rose. She breathed out again. Anna’s chest rose again.
“Good,” the man said. “Now wait. Watch her chest.”
Margaret waited.
Anna’s chest rose.
By itself.
A small movement, ragged, but it was hers.
“Again,” the man said. “Once more. To be sure.”
Margaret breathed for her once more. The chest rose. The chest fell. The chest rose again. On its own.
“There,” the man said. “There she is. Good girl, Margaret. Keep her flat, but turn her head. To the side. Like that. Yes.”
He turned to Elias.
“You,” he said. “What’s your name, son.”
“Elias.”
“Elias. You’ve done some medical work.”
“Some. How did you—”
“Your hands. They’re the right hands. Listen to me carefully.”
He pulled the iodine from his bag. He pulled a bandage. He put a small folded square of something into Elias’s palm — gauze, thick, sterile.
“There is glass in the wound. Do you see it.”
“Yes.”
“You are going to take it out. Do not pull. Lift. With your fingers. Slowly. Glass that has gone in clean comes out clean. If you yank it, you will tear what it has not torn already. Do you understand me.”
“Yes.”
“Then do it now. While she is unconscious. It will hurt less.”
Elias did it.
His fingers were shaking. His hands were not. They were calm, for the first time in an hour — the hands of someone who had spent six months on a medical paper because the engineering professor had told him it would help him understand load tolerance in the human spine. They lifted the fragment of glass out of Anna’s thigh. It came out clean. There was a spurt of blood after it, but it was venous, not arterial, and the man had already pressed the gauze to it before Elias could think to.
“Iodine,” the man said. “Pour it. All of it. Don’t be precious about it.”
Elias poured.
The iodine ran into the wound and into the floorboards and Anna’s body twitched once, faintly, and the man’s hand was on her shoulder, steady, holding her still.
“Sulpha powder,” the man said. He opened the paper twist himself and tipped it into the wound. “Now. Catgut. Can you do a running suture, son.”
“Yes.”
“Then do it.”
Elias did it.
He did not think about it. His hands threaded the needle. His hands made the first stitch. His hands made the second. The hands had decided to know how to do this because the alternative was Anna dying on the floor of an apteka in Warsaw, and the hands had decided that was not what was going to happen today.
The man watched him.
Not interfering. Just watching. The way a master watched an apprentice who had already proven he did not need supervising.
“Good,” he said quietly, as Elias finished the third stitch. “Steady. Don’t pull tight. The skin will swell. Yes. Like that.”
Margaret was watching too. She was holding Anna’s hand. Anna’s eyes were still closed. The chest was still rising.
“Margaret,” the man said, without looking up.
“Yes.”
“What’s her name.”
“Anna.”
His hand stilled, for half a second, on Anna’s shoulder.
Then it moved again.
“That’s a nice name,” he said. “I had a daughter named Anya.”
Margaret looked at him.
“Had?”
He did not answer for a moment.
He was watching Elias’s needle. He was making sure Elias’s needle was going where it should be going. His face had not changed. His voice had not changed.
When he spoke again it was low and even.
“A long time ago,” he said. “It’s not for now.”
He moved the conversation on with the efficiency of someone who had buried something a long time ago and had no intention of opening the grave in front of a thirteen-year-old he had just met.
Margaret did not press.
She would later. Not today.
A bomb went off two streets south.
The pharmacy shook. A jar fell from a shelf and broke on the floor. The man did not flinch.
That was the second thing Elias would remember afterwards. The first was the unhurried walk. The second was that the man did not flinch when the bomb went off two streets south, even though everyone else in the pharmacy did.
“Last stitch, son,” the man said. “Tie it off. Yes. Like that. Good.”
Elias tied it off.
The wound was closed. It was not a good closure. It would scar badly. It would need to be opened and cleaned and re-stitched properly when there was a doctor and clean water and a table to do it on. But the wound was closed.
Anna was breathing.
Anna was alive.
The man bandaged the leg quickly, professionally, with a tightness Elias had not been taught and recognised anyway as correct. He tied the bandage off. He sat back on his heels.
“She’s not out of it,” he said. “She’s lost a great deal of blood. She’ll need fluids. Warmth. A bed. Something to eat when she wakes, if she wakes today. She needs somewhere safe and she needs it within the hour.”
“We have a car,” Elias said.
“Where.”
“Outside. The Alfa Romeo. On the pavement.”
“You drove that here?”
“Yes.”
The man looked at him for a moment. Something flickered across his face that Elias would only later identify as the look of a man receiving confirmation he had already had.
“Bring it round,” the man said. “I have a farm an hour outside the city. My wife is there. We have beds. We have food. We have a doctor — not a doctor, but a man who knows what to do. He is on the next farm. He will come. We can get her there.”
“Why.”
The man looked at him.
“What?”
“Why are you doing this.”
The man did not answer immediately.
When he did, his voice was very quiet.
“Because somebody has to,” he said. “And I am here. And I have a truck. And you have nowhere else to go, do you, son.”
Elias did not answer.
The man looked at Anna.
His face did the thing again. The half-second too long. The look of someone confirming.
“Bring the car,” he said. “Quickly.”
Elias went.
He left Margaret with the man and Anna on the floor of the apteka and he ran. The pavement outside was glass and dust and a woman sitting on the kerb staring at her hands. He ran past her. The Alfa was where he had left it.
The Alfa was not where he had left it.
The Alfa was where it had been parked, but the building beside it was no longer a building. The upper floor had come down — recent, the last bomb, the one that had shaken the pharmacy — and a section of masonry was lying across the bonnet of the Alfa, and the bonnet of the Alfa was no longer a flat plane. It was a folded shape. The windscreen was gone. The driver’s side tyre was flat. The engine block, when Elias bent and looked, was crushed inward.
He stood in the street and looked at his father’s last gift to him.
He thought about the carburettor.
He did not allow himself to think about it for long.
He went back into the pharmacy.
“It’s gone,” he said.
The man did not look surprised.
“Then there’s no choice,” he said, evenly. “You come with me. Both of you. I have a truck. It’s a block down on Leszno. It has not been hit. We can be there in two minutes.”
“How do we know—” Margaret started.
The man looked at her.
He did not say anything.
“You don’t,” he said, after a moment. “You have to decide. I would understand if you said no. I would not understand if you stayed.”
Margaret looked at Elias.
Elias looked at Anna.
Anna was breathing.
“We come with you,” Elias said.
“Good. Quickly, then.”
The man lifted Anna himself.
Elias started to protest — I can carry her — but the man had already done it, with the easy strength of someone who had carried many small bodies in his life, and his arms were under her shoulders and her knees the way Elias’s had been ten minutes ago. Margaret kept her hand on the bandage. The three of them moved.
At the door of the pharmacy Anna stirred.
Her eyes opened. Just barely. Slits.
She was looking up at the face above her. Her eyes did not focus. Her lips moved.
“Ta…”
The man’s face went very still.
”…ta,” she said.
The man looked down at her. His face did something that, in any other man, in any other moment, Elias would have called grief. He did not call it grief in this moment because he did not have the time and because he did not yet know what the man was. He simply registered it and filed it.
“Just rest, sweetheart,” the man said. His voice had gone quiet. “Just close your eyes. Everything will be alright soon. I promise you. Everything will be alright.”
Anna closed her eyes.
The man’s hand tightened, just slightly, on her shoulder.
He looked up.
His eyes met Elias’s for the briefest moment.
Whatever was in them was gone before Elias could read it.
“Come,” he said. “Quickly.”
The truck was where he had said it would be.
A flatbed, dust-covered, the engine cold but the keys still in the ignition. The man set Anna down across the bench seat carefully and went round to the driver’s side.
Elias caught up to him at the door.
“I haven’t asked your name.”
The man looked at him over the bonnet.
“Lucjan,” he said. “Lucjan Wieliczka.”
“Thank you, Mr Wieliczka.”
“Lucjan is fine. We’re past surnames, I think.” The faintest flicker of something that was almost a smile. “Get in, son. We’ve stayed in the city long enough.”
He helped them lay Anna across the bench seat with her head in Margaret’s lap.
He climbed into the driver’s seat himself.
Elias got in beside Margaret. The cab was cramped. The four of them did not properly fit. None of them mentioned it.
The engine caught on the first try. Lucjan did not look surprised by this. He put the truck into gear.
“How far,” Elias asked.
“An hour,” Lucjan said. “Less if the roads hold. I know a way that the planes have not bothered with. They want the bridges. They want the city. They do not want a road through farmland.”
“And your wife—”
“Will be expecting us,” Lucjan said. “She will be ready. There will be a bed. There will be soup. Your sister will sleep, and tomorrow she will be weak, and the day after she will be less weak, and by the end of the week she will be cross with you for not letting her out of bed.”
Elias did not answer.
He looked at the man’s profile as the truck pulled away from the kerb.
The face was kind. The hands on the wheel were calm. The man had not flinched when the bomb went off two streets south. He had walked across the pharmacy floor the way a doctor walked across a hospital floor — like it was where he belonged. He had been in the right place at the right time with the right supplies and the right knowledge and the right truck. He was driving them to a farm outside the city through a route the planes had not bothered with.
He was twenty-two years old. The morning was an hour old. His parents were dead.
The thought arrived without permission. Not a thought, even. A weight. The specific weight of being the person at the front of the family now. His mother had said Protect Anna at all costs, and his father had said Save Anna, and his father had said it in three separate words because he had not had the breath for a sentence, and he had said it to him, Elias, because there was no one else left to say it to.
He had no idea how to do it.
He had no idea how to be a father to a thirteen-year-old who had spent the last year teaching herself to live ahead of events because the adults had not believed her. He had no idea how to be a father to a nine-year-old whose actual father had died forty minutes ago and whose actual mother had died forty minutes ago and who would wake up tomorrow and ask him, at some point in the next week, where they had gone. He had no idea how to put a child to bed. He had no idea what to do when a child cried in the night. He had been a son for twenty-two years and he had been a brother for thirteen and now somebody had stopped the music and left him standing where the parents had been standing and he did not know any of the steps.
He thought about his father in the hallway at six in the morning, already dressed, telling his mother to pack quickly.
He thought about his mother saying Sit down. Eat.
He thought about how neither of them had ever made it look hard, and how he had assumed, the way children assumed, that it was not hard.
He understood, in the cab of Lucjan Wieliczka’s truck on the morning of the first of September, that it was very hard, and that he was going to have to do it anyway, and that he was going to have to start now.
His sister was bleeding in his cousin’s lap.
He was the one in charge.
He was not yet capable of the thought that would come to him, much later, on a different continent, at a different distance, when he had had time to hold the morning up to the light and turn it.
For now he simply registered Lucjan Wieliczka — the steady hands, the quiet voice, the bag of supplies that had been exactly what they needed — as the kindest man he had ever met.
The truck pulled out of the side street.
Behind them, Warsaw was on fire.
Ahead of them, the road went west, and for the first time since six o’clock that morning, Elias allowed himself to believe — briefly, dangerously, the way a drowning man allowed himself to believe in air — that they might live through the day.
Margaret did not look at him.
She was looking at the back of Lucjan Wieliczka’s head, and her hand was on Anna’s chest, and her face was very still.
She did not say anything for the rest of the drive.
The morning was not yet eight o’clock.6Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡyHZpL0puxb
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