The Things We Cannot Say Read online

  I dropped to my knees and began to scoop the berries up. My hands were shaking so hard that I couldn’t coordinate the movements and each time I lifted a handful of berries toward the basket, I’d drop as many as I rescued. I didn’t need to look up to know his eyes were still on me. I could feel the intensity of his attention as if he could somehow stare all the way through my clothes. If I ran, they would shoot me, and I was too terrified to think clearly enough to find some work I could legitimately do that might take me away from his view. I was stuck naked under his stare, exposed to his gaze in the light summer dress I had chosen with such innocent optimism and the hopes of a pleasant afternoon in the sun.

  At the house, I could hear the older soldier and Father attempting a conversation in German, but it was stilted and awkward because Father knew only a little more German than I did. There was a quiet discussion, then Father said something about Os´wie˛cim, a town not far from ours.

  And all the while, the young soldier stared at me.

  The older soldier barked at Father, and then spun on his heel in the dust and turned back toward his car. That’s when the younger soldier spoke for the first time. He turned lazily toward Father, cast a disdainful look toward my parents, and then looked right at me again as he spoke just loud enough for me to hear a rapid-fire sentence that I couldn’t translate. The older soldier called to him, and the two piled into the car, and then they left.

  I collapsed into the dirt, confused by how tense that moment had been, and confused as to why even now that they were gone, my stomach was still rolling violently. I pressed my hands to my belly, so focused on the discomfort within my body that I barely noticed Mama approaching.

  “You are okay,” she said abruptly. “We are okay.”

  “I didn’t have my papers on me,” I choked. Mama groaned impatiently.

  “Alina, if they had checked...”

  “I know,” I said, my voice breaking. “I know, Mama. I keep forgetting but... I’ll try to be more careful next time.”

  “No,” Mama snapped, shaking her head. “You forget all the damned time, Alina. We won’t risk it again. I’ll hold your papers for you, and we’ll make sure if you are outside in the field, I am close beside you.”

  The cage around me was shrinking, but after the five minutes that had just passed, I didn’t mind that one bit.

  “What did they want?” I asked Mama.

  “They were lost—they needed directions to the barracks. Father thinks they were looking for Os´wie˛cim,” she said, then she looked toward the hill, her gaze distant for a moment. When she looked at me again, her eyebrows knit. “I...you must wear a scarf in the fields, or one of Father’s hats. You should...always now you must hide your hair. And you must...” She looked down at my body, and she ran her hand through her own hair. “Perhaps you must wear your brothers’ clothes...” She trailed off again, then gave me a searching, somewhat-helpless look. “Do you understand what I am telling you, Alina?”

  “Did I do something wrong, Mama? What did that soldier say to me?”

  “He was speaking to Father,” Mama said, then she sighed. “He told Father that he has a pretty daughter.” She met my gaze, and she raised her eyebrows. “We must do everything we can to ensure that the next passing soldier does not see a pretty daughter. We cannot hide you away altogether, so you must try to hide yourself in other ways. Yes?”

  I never, ever wanted to feel so exposed ever again. I wanted to burn that summer dress and wear a coat everywhere I went for the rest of my life. I’d never really thought about my appearance too much before—but that day, I hated the way I looked. I hated my thick, chestnut hair and my wide blue eyes and I loathed the curve of my breasts and hips. If there had been a way to make myself invisible, I’d happily have taken it. I was tempted to rush inside and change into my brothers’ large, boring clothes right that second.

  Mama dropped to her knees beside me and helped me collect the last of the berries I’d dropped.

  “If they ever approach you,” she said suddenly, “do not struggle. Do you understand me, Alina? You let them do what they...” It was so rare for her to search for words. I squeezed my eyes shut, and she reached across and gripped my forearm until I opened them again. “There is no need for them to kill you if they can get what they want from you. Just remember that.”

  I shook my head, and Mama’s grip on my arm became painfully tight.

  “Rape is a weapon, Alina,” she said. “Just as killing our leaders was a weapon, and taking our boys was a weapon, and starving us half to death is a weapon. They see you are strong in the face of all of their other tactics so they will try to control you in other ways—they will try to take your strength from the inside. If they come for you, be smart and brave enough to overcome the instinct to try to flee or resist. Then, even if they hurt your body, you will survive.”

  I sobbed once, but she held my gaze until I nodded through my tears. Only then did her gaze soften.

  “Alina,” she sighed. “Now do you understand why we do not want you to go into the town? We are all vulnerable. We are all powerless. But you, my daughter...you are naive and you are beautiful...that leaves you at risk in ways you are only beginning to understand.”

  “Yes, Mama,” I choked. Frankly, I never wanted to leave the house again, let alone the farm. Any thought of visiting the town was forgotten for a long while after that day.

  It wasn’t the only time the soldiers came to our gate—spot checks for our papers and random visits to unnerve us soon became a way of life. Those moments were always terrifying, but never again did I feel so exposed, because that was the last time a soldier came to our gate and found me working alone in a field. Mama was always near me after that day, with our identity papers nestled safely in the pockets of her undergarments. That day was also the very last time a soldier visited to find me wearing my own clothes, and the last time anyone ever came to our gate and found me with my long hair down around my shoulders.

  That fall day, a young Nazi soldier had taken my innocence without ever coming within a hundred feet of me.

  * * *

  On Sunday, Truda and Mateusz would walk Emilia up the hill on the town side, and then down the hill to our house to join us for lunch. We’d see them coming down from the hill—Emilia was inevitably hand in hand with my sister, a scrap of paper or a little bunch of wildflowers held tightly in her other hand. Mateusz always walked close behind them, and I understood that this was a protective gesture, but I also knew it was ultimately a pointless one. If a soldier wished to do any of us harm, there was nothing to be done about it, not even for my tall, strong brother-in-law.

  Emilia had adjusted quickly to life with her new family, and Truda and Mateusz clearly adored Emilia in return. That little girl loved two things in life most—talking at a million miles an hour, and flowers of every kind. In preparation for that weekly visit, she’d collect a little posy from the park at the end of their street, or she’d draw Mama and I flowers of some sort with some crayons that Truda had procured for her. Most weeks, the flowers were brightly colored, clumsy and cartoonish and the end result was generally a cheery piece of artwork that warmed my heart to see. Other weeks, she drew with heavy strokes and used only a black crayon. It didn’t matter what she drew—I always reacted with surprise and delight to her gift, and in return, I’d be rewarded with her smile. Most Sundays, Emilia’s radiant smile was the highlight of my week.

  Every week, she’d hand me her little gift, then ask me breathlessly if I’d heard news about Tomasz. Every week, I’d pretend I was still sure he was fine, and it was only a matter of time before he came home.

  “Of course he is. He’s alive and he’s well and he’s doing everything he can to get back to us.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “He promised me, silly. And Tomasz would never lie to me.”

  “Thank you, big sister,” sh
e’d sigh, and she’d hug me tightly.

  Life on the farm was hard, but for the most part in the first few years, it was quiet. Mama’s theory seemed correct—we kept our heads down and we worked hard, and other than those sporadic spot checks, the occupation raged on around us. We were starved of food and missing our boys, but life was almost tolerable.

  On Sunday, I was always reminded that life in the town was not nearly so simple. At those Sunday lunches, Truda and Mateusz were stoic, but Emilia was still far too young to hide her trauma. It would spill out of her without prelude or warning, randomly disturbing sentences that none of us really knew how to react to.

  “And then the Jews were fixing the building but the soldier said ‘filthy Jew’ and he hit the old man in the face with the shovel and...”

  “Enough of that talk at lunch, Emilia.” Truda always spoke to her with the prefect blend of firm and soft. Emilia would glance around the table, clear her throat and then go back to eating her food in silence. Another week, we were having a quiet conversation about the chickens when Emilia looked at me and said without preamble, “The woman was dead in the pond at the park, Alina. She was floating with her face in the water and her skin was all puffy and the water turned pink.”

  “Emilia!” Truda winced, but she was flustered. “I told you—I told you not to look at that—I told you—”

  Emilia looked between us all, her brow creasing.

  “Have some more lunch, child,” Mama said hastily, and she scooped Emilia’s plate up to slide an extra potato pancake onto it. “Don’t think about such things.”

  After lunch, the adults would sip at watered-down coffee, and I’d often take Emilia to sit on the steps beside the barn so that she could talk freely for a few minutes. I hated that this sweet, innocent child was surrounded by death and ugliness, but I could also see that she needed to talk about those things, even if the rest of our family couldn’t bear to hear it.

  “I like Truda and Mateusz, but I miss Tomasz and my father,” she told me one Sunday.

  “I miss them too.”

  “I don’t like the mean soldiers in our town. And I don’t like dead people everywhere. And I don’t like it when the guns shoot in the night and I don’t know if the bullet is coming for me.”

  “I know.”

  “Everything scares me too much and I want it to stop now,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  “No one ever wants to talk about it. Everyone is so angry with me when I talk about it. Why do they want to pretend it’s not happening? Why can’t we talk about it?”

  “It’s just our way, Emilia.” I smiled at her sadly, then pulled her close for a hug. “Sometimes, talking about things makes them seem more real. Do you understand that?”

  Emilia sighed heavily as she nodded.

  “I do. But I feel better when I talk about it. I want to understand.”

  “You can talk to me. I don’t understand, either, but I’ll always listen to you.”

  “I know, big sister,” she said, and then at last, her little smile returned.

  CHAPTER 9

  Alina

  We owned an unusually large allotment of chickens for a family in our region, because in the dry years when the crops did not perform well in our poor soil, our family had always survived on a steady diet of eggs. Now those eggs had to be carefully collected and counted, and I didn’t dare drop a single one because the Nazis had set us a quota of exactly twenty eggs per day.

  Sometimes the chickens laid only eighteen or nineteen eggs. The first few times we were short, I was in a cold-blooded panic as I searched for the others. and then sick to my stomach when I finally conceded defeat and gave my parents the news. The next day, there was always an extra egg or two—and given Father only took the eggs into town twice a week, it always equalized before the soldiers even knew we were short.

  We always met the quota. Very occasionally, we produced an egg or two above, but never a single egg less. For a while I thought Mother Mary was hearing my prayers and we were being blessed, but over time, I became a little more cynical.

  Another summer harvest came and went, and I assumed we’d handed over every single morsel of produce as we’d been instructed to. This was usually a busy period for Mama and me, because after the harvest we would preserve as much as we could to cover the winter months, but now there was no excess to preserve, and our evenings were instead free. It felt strange to me, and I was surprised to find I missed the endless hours of pickling and preserving with Mama that we’d always shared in previous years.

  But then I woke up late one night and was confused by the heavy sugar scent in the air. I stared up at the ceiling for a long while, wondering if I was imagining things or perhaps even dreaming, but the smell persisted and I became increasingly confused. I slipped out of bed to open my door, and found Mama standing over the stove. The smell of sugar and strawberries was unmistakably strong in the living area. The oil light was off—the room was illuminated only by the dull flicker of the fire through the grill on the stove. Mama was staring into the pot, her gaze distant and thoughtful.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. She startled out of her daze and looked at me sharply.

  “Cleaning the pot,” she said abruptly. “Back to bed!”

  “I... Mama,” I said, my throat suddenly dry. I stared down at the pot over the fire, breathed in the heavy scent again and forced myself to state the obvious. “That’s jam, Mama. I can see you’re making jam.”

  Mama looked back to the pot for a moment. She stirred some more, and then she turned back to me, a challenge in her gaze.

  “Of course it’s not jam,” she said. She lifted the spoon so I could see the syrup dripping off it. A drop formed then fell, and then another, but Mama remained completely silent even as long moments dragged past us while I watched the spoon, and she watched me. My sleepiness cleared, and I swallowed a sudden lump in my throat, then forced my eyes back to Mama. The look in her eyes was so intense that it became very hard to look at her, so I flicked my gaze between Mama and the spoon. In the semidark room, the thick red jam looked exactly like blood. It was quite hot in the house because of the fire, but a shiver ran through me from my head to my toes.

  Mama lowered the spoon back down into the mix and resumed her stirring, and she stared into the pot as she murmured, “If it was jam, I’d be withholding produce, and if I was caught doing that, I’d be executed. They’d shoot me or hang me or beat me to death.” She left another long pause, and for me, that silence was loaded with the sheer terror of the truth of her statement. “Now, would I ever take such a foolish risk?”

  There was an open challenge in her eyes, as if Mama was daring me to say otherwise, and as if me stating the blatantly obvious would be the thing that caused her death. I was shaking now—confronted with the reality of our circumstances in a way that I had easily avoided until that moment.

  I dropped my chin and shook my head.

  “No, Mama. Of course you wouldn’t,” I croaked out.

  “Good. Go back to bed.”

  I did. I turned quickly and ran into my room and even though it was uncomfortably warm, I climbed under my blankets and I pulled them up over my head. Eventually, I fell into a fitful sleep, but when I woke the next morning to watch the sunrise through my window, there was no way I could avoid facing the truth.

  My mother was hiding food from the Nazis. And now that I knew for sure, I wanted to know exactly how extensive her deceit was.

  The chickens were hard to count when they were outside during the day—especially because our flock had free rein of the house yard and the large barn during the day. But at night I would chase them into the barn and lock them away to keep them safe from foxes. The next night, I decided to confirm my suspicions. I locked the chickens in the barn, left them to settle, and then went back to count them once they were still.

 
; “We have twenty-three chickens, plus the roosters,” I said to Mama when I went inside. She looked at me, then frowned.

  “No. Exactly twenty, plus the three roosters,” she said abruptly.

  “Maybe we have some strays then, because I just counted—”

  “We have exactly twenty, Alina,” Father said flatly. The words bounced around the walls of our small house, and then I knew.

  “We have twenty chickens,” I echoed dully.

  Jam, eggs... Where did it end? I started watching the supplies Father would return with when he went to get our rations, and I compared it to the food we were eating. We were hardly living a lavish lifestyle—but we all ate eggs most days, despite Father only bringing a half-dozen back from the town each week. We’d always had jam with our bread, and I had assumed it was left over from the season before the war, but now I looked closely at the jar we were eating from.

  That very same jar had lasted for months. The jam never seemed to go down.

  I wondered what my diet would look like if it wasn’t for the contraband jam and the extra eggs. I wondered what else my parents were doing that they didn’t want me to know about. Soon, I’d stare at the strawberry jam on my biscuit and feel somehow equally panicked that my mother had risked her life to give it to me, and that perhaps it might be the last serving.