Gabe
I spent the next two days almost
entirely alone. Peter came back to the shop twice: once to drop off some
provisions, and once to sleep for a total of one hour. He didn’t talk much even
when he was there, though I didn’t
blame him, since doubted that he enjoyed coming home to check in on me. Hersch
radioed once or twice to make sure I was still there, and to remind me not to
move until he gave the word. I knew he was trying to drive me out, he and Peter
both, to make me feel so useless and alone and trapped that I would leave. But
I didn’t care.
Because every night, Erich’s voice
came crackling over the radio. He would say my name, just my name, until I ran
to the radio and answered him. He would ask if I was all right and if I was
safe, and I would tell him I was. Then he would stay there, at the other end of
the airwaves, just waiting quietly until I fell asleep. I spent three nights
like that, listening to Erich’s quiet breath until I couldn’t keep my eyes
open. I never pushed it, never tried to tell him how much I missed him or asked
him how he felt. I had to be happy just knowing he was there.
He was always gone when I woke up,
though. So I was surprised, on the third day, to wake to the sound of someone
saying my name. “Gabriel,” the voice hissed from the stairs. I started awake;
no one ever came up the stairs. “Gabriel, wake up. You are coming with me.”
Before I was even entirely awake, Rebecca was at the foot of my bed.
“Why?” I asked anxiously, jumping
out of bed. “What’s wrong?” Hersch wouldn’t have sent her to find me if
something hadn’t gone wrong.
Rebecca smiled. God, it was so good
to see someone smile. “Relax,” she said, patting me on the shoulder as she went
to my bedside, picking up the radio. “I just want to get you out of here for a
few hours. F**k Peter and Herschel. They cannot tell us what to do, yes?” They
could sure tell me what to do, but Rebecca was much more capable than I was. I
was so happy at the prospect of a few hours of freedom, I couldn’t even think
about Hersch’s warning not to leave the butcher shop. “Will you come with me? I
have something for you back in my rooms.”
I nodded happily, pulling on the
sweater I had been wearing for weeks. “Yeah, I’m coming. Thank you so much.” I
really could not convey the depths of my gratitude.
Rebecca grabbed my wrist and pulled
me towards the stairs, smiling. “Wonderful! I will take you through the
tunnels.” I did not relish going back underground, but anywhere sounded better
than the room above the butcher shop. “Have you been speaking to someone on
this?” Rebecca asked suspiciously as we reached the main floor, rapping on the
radio with her knuckles.
I clammed up. How did she know everything? Erich would never want her
to know that he radioed me at night, but I didn’t want to lie to Rebecca.
“Yes,” I answered absently.
“Who?” Something told me that she could
already guess.
“It’s not important,” I insisted.
“Erich calls in sometimes to make sure I’m safe. You know he doesn’t trust
Peter.”
She glanced sideways at me,
suspicious. “The radio was on your pillow.” It wasn’t even a question. Why did
anyone ever bother trying to keep things from her?
I decided I didn’t have to tell her
anything else, since she apparently already knew everything. “Yes it was,” I
responded, trying to indicate that she should drop it. She stopped asking
questions, but only because we were descending into the tunnels.
The grates to the streets above us
made the tunnels lighter in the daytime, but it was still too dark for me to
see very well. Rebecca, on the other hand, travelled effortlessly through the
labyrinth with me in tow, keeping a quick pace, and soon we were climbing the
ladder back to the basement rooms she shared with Hersch.
The space seemed considerably
smaller after having a room to myself in Peter’s shop, but I still envied Jim
that he was staying there. I wondered when Hersch’s attempts to drive us out
would end, and if I could eventually at least bunk with Jim.
Rebecca went to the table, picking
up the small canvas pack that was slung over one of the chairs. “Here,” she
said, tossing it at me. “Your bag came through the underground last night. Sorry,
Peter went through it. He still thinks you all might be spying on us.”
It wasn’t an unreasonable suspicion. The three
of us showing up at the same time must have seemed like the dodgiest thing in
the world to him. Hell, it still seemed impossible to me. But there was hardly
anything to even go through in the bag I had brought from France: a change of
pants, socks, and shirt, a hard heel of bread and some dried meat strips.
Still, mildly fresh clothes looked like a miracle to me. I looked at Rebecca
with wide-eyed gratefulness. “Thank you,” I breathed, rummaging through the
bag. “Here, add the food to the rations.” I tossed her the bread and meat.
“Take it to the underground or leave it for Hersch and the others, whatever you
want.” It was all I could do to even begin to pull my weight around here.
At the bottom of the bag, I
discovered, was the prize: half a pack of army-issue cigarettes. They were
cheap, and they stained my fingers, but I didn’t care at all. The withdrawal
had dulled after a day or two, but faced with ten fresh cigs, my hands started
shaking. With trembling fingers, I pulled two from the pack. “Want one?” I
offered, somewhat reluctantly.
Rebecca shook her head. “No. I
stopped when we could no longer smuggle them. I am afraid if I had one now it
will be too hard to quit again.”
“Oh,” I sighed, feeling guilty while
trying to ignore the fact that my jaw was suddenly aching. “Should I not…?”
She shrugged. “I think you will die
if you don’t. I can handle it.” For the hundredth time, I was overwhelmed by
her compassion. “Do not waste matches,” she added, handing me the candle from
the table. I lit the cig and brought it to my mouth, trying not to look too
much like I was suddenly in paradise. Heaven, I thought, could not possibly be
better than this cigarette.
Rebecca rolled her eyes at me,
turning to the pot on the stove. “If you want to change, I can wash those
clothes you have been wearing for so long.” She stirred the boiling pot, which
I realized was full of clothing, with a large wooded spoon. I complied quickly,
slipping out of my sweater, pants, and socks. I was freezing in my boxers and
undershirt, and hurried to pull on my fresher clothes.
“You’re amazing, Rebecca,” I said,
exhaling a cloud of smoke. “Really, the rest of us would be dead without you.”
“I know,” Rebecca said dismissively,
turning away from the stove. This was nothing to her, I realized. She took care
of people like this every day. “Sit, I am going to deal with your hair,” she motioned
to the chair. I complied, though I wasn’t sure why my hair mattered in a place
like this. Rebecca threw a quilt around my shoulders, produced a pair of
scissors, and started sawing away at my hair.
“Why are you doing all this,
Rebecca?” I asked finally. It seemed so odd that, after being cooped up with no
contact from the outside for days, she would suddenly choose to make my world a
decidedly better place.
Rebecca didn’t answer me at first. I
waited for a long minute, listening to the snips of the scissors as the hair
that had grown past my ears fell away. “I feel terrible for having asked you to
come. You are in so much danger here. I should have known there was nothing you
could do. All I wanted was for you to know where we were, and that we were
alive. I should not have asked anything of you.”
She
was holding tight to a fistful of my hair, so I couldn’t turn to look her in
the eyes. “Then why bother writing me? You wanted us to find you, I know you
did.” I remembered the letter exactly: Erich
is coming. Piekło ghetto. Tell James. Help us.
Rebecca snorted. “Of course I did not expect you to really
come. I thought I might be dead before the letter reached you. It could have
been intercepted at any time. It could have been lost or confiscated. You might
have left Heathshire or England altogether.”
“Or
I could have met someone other than Erich.” It almost made me angry, that she
had mentioned Erich in the limited space that she had to write. I suspected
Rebecca believed I wouldn’t have come to her aid without the promise that I
would see him again.
Rebecca
gave an angry snip. “But you did not,” she responded shortly. “I knew it was
the right time to write you when we learned Erich was coming, but as I said, I
did not believe you would really make it here.”
I
knew that couldn’t be entirely true. Rebecca would never have written a letter
she believed to be completely futile. Maybe she thought I was her last chance,
but she must have at least hoped that Jim and I would come through for her. Something
was crushing Rebecca’s spirit, the spirit she must have had when she dared to
write to me. “You said ‘help us,” I said quietly, turning my head once she had
loosened her grip on my hair. “Of course I came.” I hadn’t had much faith in
myself to make it this far, but the day I got that letter I swore I would try
and reach Piekło if it was the last
thing I ever did.
Rebecca
leaned wearily against the table, supporting herself on my shoulder. “I know. I
am sorry. Of course you came,” she sighed. “I only hope you have the chance to
make a difference.”
We
stayed for a while like that, Rebecca bracing herself on the table and me
holding her up. She was exhausted, and she was weak and scared, and I hated
seeing her like that. Rebecca had been a figure of strength for me at
Wellington’s, a figure of bravery and kindness in the face of unspeakable
tragedy. I couldn’t stand to see how she was slowly breaking down in this
horrible place. I wanted to tell her so, but instead I put my hand over hers on
my shoulder, feeling somehow that would make her feel better than anything I
could say. Rebecca squeezed my hand.
I
waited a long time before changing the subject. “So, where’s Jim today?” I had
been in the hideout for a long time now, and he hadn’t come through yet.
Rebecca
snorted, picking up the scissors again. “With Peter.”
“With
Peter?” I echoed disbelievingly.
She
nodded. “James asked to join the Underground. Peter was not pleased, but he is
in no position to turn men away. We are too few already.” I couldn’t believe
it. I imagined Peter and Jim moving through the tunnels together, but somehow I
couldn’t picture a scenario that didn’t end with Jim’s being beaten up. “We lost a very good man this week.
Bartholomew, a good agent for the Underground, was shot by the soldiers. Right
across the street there.” She pointed with the scissors. “I let James outside
and he saw it happen. Now he wants very much to help us, so he went in with the
Underground.”
I
felt the blood drain from my face; Jim had seen a man killed already. We had
barely been inside for three days. Jim had been with the Underground on the
outside, but I hadn’t. I hadn’t seen the brutality firsthand, like he had. Not
yet, anyway. “You ought to send me along next time,” I offered tentatively, not
sure at all that I was the right man for the job.
Rebecca
nodded, brushing away the long locks of hair that had fallen onto my shoulders.
“I would not expect Peter to let you in just yet, but yes, eventually you will
be able to help.” The way she said it, she sounded like she wasn’t sure how
much time we had left. “He only agreed to take James to the Underground because
I convinced him James would stand for the Resistance, and that his opinion
matters to Herschel.” I wasn’t certain that any of that was true, and Rebecca
caught me eyeing her suspiciously. “I know, I am an excellent liar,” she said
with a smile. “You know Herschel loves him, but he could not give a damn what
James thinks about anything inside the ghetto.”
“What
about you and Jim?” I asked, trying to sound casual though I was burning up
with curiosity. I would be surprised if Jim had managed to keep his hands off
her this long; we had all observed how his brain stopped working when she was
around.
With
a sigh, Rebecca put the scissors down again and sat in the chair next to me.
“James does not understand. We cannot be like we were at Wellington’s. Not
here, where we are trapped and afraid and we do not ever have enough food. Tell
me, how can we be in love when a soldier could burst through that door right
now and shoot us dead?” It didn’t seem like a question she actually expected me
to answer. “No one should be in love here.”
A
knot twisted up in my stomach, because I knew she was right. My nights spent on
the radio with Erich felt selfish and wrong now. There was too much horror in
this place for me to be justified in feeling as warm and good as I did when I
heard his voice on the airwaves. “Does he… Did he tell you he still loves you?”
I almost asked just if he still loved her, but the answer to that question
seemed fairly obvious.
She
rubbed her eyes, smiling wearily. “He did. James would not know what to do with
himself if he stopped loving me.” Her smile disappeared, and she looked me hard
in the eyes. “I did not say I loved him, though. I am afraid I hurt him, but I
am more afraid of what will happen if he lets himself be carried away by love
in a place like this.”
“But
you still love him?” Rebecca looked at me confusedly, like I had missed the
whole point.
“Of
course I do,” she said softly. “I told him, one time, that he was the only boy
I would ever love. But now is not the time. Do you understand, Gabriel?” She
wanted me to take her advice to heart, to know how dangerous it would be to try
getting any closer to Erich. I understood, of course, but I didn’t want to
listen. I gave her an absent nod. “Good. Hold still, I missed a spot.” Rebecca
stood, going back to work on my hair. She was quiet for another minute, just
the sound of her scissors.
“Erich
still loves you.”
It
wasn’t even a question. She said it like it was the most obvious thing in the
world, but I didn’t believe her for a second. I felt my heart crumble, not only
because she was so wrong, but because I wanted so desperately for her to be
right.
I
remembered sitting on the roof with him, when he told me about Brigitte. I don’t think I can do that, he had
said. I never will. Whatever part of
people that makes them love… I don’t know, I guess it’s broken in me. Erich
had never loved anything in his life, and he certainly wouldn’t start with me. Rebecca
didn’t understand how damaged he was. “Erich never loved me.”
Rebecca
gave one more angry snip, smacking me on the back of the head and tossing her
scissors to the table. “You are a goddamn fool, Gabriel Moretti.”
I
shoved my chair back and stood, rubbing my head. “Look, you don’t know Erich,”
I insisted, following her to the oven, where she stood stirring the pot of
laundry.
“Then
tell me about him, because really, Gabriel, you two make no goddamn sense to
me.”
I
froze for a second, trying to find the words for the way Erich was. “He hates
himself,” I said simply, wishing it wasn’t true. “He doesn’t know how to love
because everything good gets smothered by the hatred he has for who he is. He can’t
feel things like most people do. He’s too broken. He has no idea how to express
emotions. You know the one night we were actually together, he didn’t say a
single word, the whole time.” I could feel the color rising in my cheeks. Even
with Rebecca, talking about this made me uncomfortable. Rebecca looked
skeptically at me, and I wondered if she could tell I was lying. He had said one word that night. It was
what he always said, when he couldn’t find the words for what he felt. It was
all I ever needed to hear him say. Gabe.
“You seem to understand him very well,” Rebecca said cynically,
frowning, “for someone who does not love him.”
I
rubbed my forehead, suddenly feeling exhausted by this conversation. “How could
I, if he can’t love me back?” The words felt sour and cruel coming out of my
mouth, and I wished I could take it back. But I had loved Leo, only to discover
that he never loved me, and I never wanted to feel that kind of disappointment
and humiliation again.
Rebecca’s
lip curled, and I could tell she was getting irritated with me. Didn’t she just
say that no one should be concerned with love in a place like this? Why was it
acceptable for her to keep Jim at a distance, but not for me to explain that
Erich and I never loved each other in the first place? I wanted to end this. Rebecca
was being unfathomably kind to me, and I didn’t want to make her angry. “Can we
talk about something else?”
She
wouldn’t let it go, though. “You are hurt, because he left you behind in
England.”
“Of
course I am.” I felt like she had twisted a knife in my heart, just talking
about it.
“Do
you know why he did it?”
“No.”
“Ask
him,” she said bluntly. “It hurts him to know he hurt you.”
Her
perception was sharp, but even she couldn’t know that. “How do you know?”
“Because
I left James behind too.”
“Rebecca…”
I started to protest, to say that wasn’t the same, but she was right. She had
done to Jim what Erich had done to me, and I could see in her face that it
destroyed her to do it. She would never have left him behind if she had another
choice. “I’ll ask him,” I conceded, not knowing if I would ever really get the
chance.
Her
eyes were red, but she quickly pulled herself together. Rebecca wasn’t one for
shows of weakness. With a little nod, she turned away from me and went to the
corner of the room. “Right. I have something else for you,” she said briskly,
finally changing the subject. I couldn’t imagine what else she could possibly
give me, but I followed her to the corner. Rebecca crouched down, uprooting a
loose floorboard. Inside, something was wrapped in a threadbare cloth. Though I
recognized the shape, the object seemed so out of place I didn’t immediately
realize what it was. Rebecca unwrapped the cloth and extended it towards me.
A
violin.
I
felt the tears spilling from my eyes before I even held the instrument in my
hands. Tears of joy and disbelief, tears of a gratitude I could not even begin
to express. It was a similar model to my own, the one I had left at Heathshire.
The weight of it, the strings, the neck, all of it felt familiar in my hands.
Like I was far away from this awful place, like I was home.
I
collapsed back into my chair, wordlessly weeping. Rebecca sat next to me,
placing the bow in my other hand. She kept her hand on top of mine, offering
her silent consolation. “How?”
Rebecca
kept her hand on mine. “We had an orchestra here, once. It existed before the
war, and for the first year some of the musicians kept up playing in the
Underground. They brought so much joy to this place, Gabriel. But the soldiers
heard of it, and they killed ten members in a firing squad as a warning,” she
said sorrowfully. “Aleksander, our first violinist, was killed. When his wife took
sick and died a month ago, and their possessions came through the Underground,
I took the violin. It seemed like the only way I would be able to thank you, if
you made it here.”
What
could I say? How could I tell her that this murdered man’s violin was the most
beautiful thing I had ever seen, that no one had ever given me anything so
extraordinary? How could I tell her that I knew, right then, that this
Resistance was what I stood for now, that I would die helping the people in
that ghetto, like Aleksander had? I felt the bow between my fingers, its
impossible lightness and strength.
“Thank
you.”
Rebecca
put an arm around me. “My nigdy się nie
poddają,” Rebecca said in Polish. “We never give up.”
We
stayed like that for a minute or two, while I pulled myself together. When I
finally finished crying, Rebecca got up and went back to the pot on the stove.
“Herschel asks me to tell you not to play loudly, and he says Peter will take
it from you if you play in the butcher shop. Come here for playing. We are
underground, where no one can hear.”
“He
let you give it to me?” Hersch hadn’t seemed to want to do me any favors
lately.
Rebecca
snorted. “Herschel is not a monster, Gabriel. You think he would not give you a
violin, when he knows how you love it?” I felt guilty for thinking he wouldn’t.
Hersch seemed so different here, I almost forgot he was the same person from
Wellington’s. I opened my mouth to answer, but just then a door slammed down
the hall: the door to the outside.
Someone
was thundering down the corridor towards the room. Rebecca turned towards the
door, eyes steely. “Hand me the shotgun, Gabriel,” she said quietly. I
retrieved the gun from under the table, sure that she was better equipped to
handle it than I was. There was no time to think about what would happen,
either if we were caught or if Rebecca shot someone. She pointed the gun at the
door, just as Erich barreled into the room.
Rebecca
jerked the gun up, alarmed. Erich’s eyes were wild, but he focused confusedly
on me. He obviously hadn’t expected me to be here. I stood up, trying to read
his expression. Something was wrong. “Don’t you have locks?” he asked, out of
breath.
“The building was blown up, Erich. We are
lucky it still has doors.” Rebecca regarded him suspiciously, but she put down
the gun. “What are you doing here?”
Erich
scowled. “Keep your radio on.” Had I been crying over the sound of the radio? I
hoped not. “There’s trouble. Hersch is on his way.”
“I’m
here.” He emerged from the tunnels, looking disheveled and tired. “I brought
Jim. What’s going on?” Jim followed him in, confused and concerned. I hurried
to dry my eyes, hoping they would be too preoccupied to see I was crying again.
Erich’s
face twisted with uncertainty and fear. He was betraying his battalion by
coming back here; he was breaking his own promise not to be involved. But
whatever he had found out was too big to be contained.
“Liquidation,” he said quietly. “They are planning for
liquidation.”
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