breast. Now he glared at her, not bothering to mask his disdain. Ruth hunched her shoulders slightly to avoid making eye contact. Once she had loved the walk into town, soaking up the approving looks like sunshine warm on her face. She could almost hear him thinking: What would become of the Nowaks? It was a question that Ruth herself did not like to ask.
Closer to town, she focused on the familiar things—the way the houses, set close to the road, slatted at exactly the same angle, the birds seeming to dart from rafter to rafter in identical patterns, as though performing a dance. Twigs and roots poked out persistently between the paving stones. Biekowice was not a place that one ever left. Children grew up and married and raised their families in the same house, or maybe their husband’s house if it had more room. Sons worked at the same jobs their fathers had before them. Marriage just above one’s original station was the best to be hoped for a daughter. Every ten years or so, some headstrong young person would head off to the city never to be heard of again. Rumors of doom and destruction always followed. There had been a story once of a girl who had left and found her fortune, but Ruth didn’t know her personally.
She passed the school, now closed by German decree. A group of girls, twelve or thirteen years old, played around the wide base of a tree. Ruth envied the easy way they laughed and joked. She and Helena had gone to school for a few years when they were younger, before Mama decided to teach them at home. But the village schoolgirls regarded the identical twin sisters, who sat in the back of the classroom together holding hands, as an oddity. Helena had never seemed to mind much, deeming the other girls “silly.” Ruth would have liked to have been included in their secrets and games, though. She had never quite fit in here, felt an outlier from the others. But that couldn’t be right, for she had never been anywhere else. Was it possible simply to belong nowhere?
She approached the main square. Market was a modest affair, a dozen or so canvas-covered tables smelling of carp in stale water and odd bits of too-old meat. Beside the stalls, Gorale women who had come from the sharp mountain peaks to the south sat on the ground, selling crude wool sweaters and salty sheep cheese from burlap sacks, their weather-hardened faces turned upward.
At the dairyman’s stall, Ruth gave her most appreciative smile, hoping that he might move the wire over a bit to make the cut of cheese more generous. But he simply looked down at his work. She turned away, feeling foolish. Once her smiles seemed to buy everything. Now it was as if her prettiness had faded, making her a tarnished coin. It wasn’t just that, of course—the war had taken the men to the front. There were so many more women that even a tired old merchant failed to notice.
She passed the dairyman the ration cards and moved on. Behind the vegetable stall, Pani Kowalska sorted potatoes and did not look up. She had been a contemporary of Mama’s and could not be more than forty-five, but the hair tucked beneath her kerchief was white and she had many chins, making her look much older. What was it about the women in the village who seemed to age overnight? One day they were young and beautiful, with the promise of a future before them, and the next they were crones. Mama had never made the transition—she had not had the chance before taking ill. But Ruth knew that one day she would wake up looking exactly as Pani Kowalska, and then any remaining hope for a future would be gone for good.
She appraised the selection of fruits and vegetables. Even before the war it had not been good, the cool climate and short growing season inhospitable for vegetables like tomatoes and peppers. Now all that remained were a few mottled onions and potatoes already sprouting roots.
“Three apples,” Ruth requested. An unfamiliar police car sat at the edge of the market, engine idling despite the lack of a driver. Ruth shivered uneasily. The fact that the provincial police had come to town had nothing to do with her, but it was different, and change seldom meant anything good.
“Did you hear about the Garzels?” Pani Kowalska asked as she weighed the fruit on the scale. The mole on her nose, which seemed to have doubled in size since Ruth had last visited the stall, bobbed as she spoke.
Ruth shook her head as though the woman were watching. Life in a small village reminded Ruth of what a zoo might be like, though she had only read about such places. Homes transparent, lives exposed to one another. Everyone knew everyone else’s business, almost before it had happened. “Nie.” Ruth suspected that she did not want to hear the answer. She inspected the apples the woman handed her, which were mottled and bruised. She did not protest, knowing the rest in the barrel would be no better.
Pani Kowalska wiped her hands on her skirt. “Gone.”
“Perhaps they went to find Leopold,” Ruth suggested. The elderly couple’s son, just a few years older than Michal, had disappeared ahead of a transport of conscripted men to the front. The call-ups had taken place with alarming frequency of late, young men ordered to report for either military service or other forced labor for the Reich.
“Not if he went to forest they didn’t.” Ruth did not want to admit that she was unfamiliar with the term. “To the woods to fight,” Pani Kowalska clarified unbidden. Ruth had heard the rumors of soldiers from the decimated Polish army who had gone underground to wage war against the Germans.
Ruth searched for another plausible explanation. “Without him to work the farm, they must have decided to go to relatives.”
Pani Kowalska shook her head, chins jiggling. “They left with the door open, all of their belongings still inside. Who on earth does that?”
Who indeed? One would board up the house if truly going for a while and planning it—unless one did not want anyone to know or to attract too much attention.
“And then there are the goings-on in Nowy S˛acz,” Pani Kowalska added, gaining steam even as she returned to sorting potatoes. “They arrested all of the Jews.” How had the woman heard such things? The news on the radio would not have spoken of them. But gossip, even about those they did not know, seemed to travel with the wind like pollen. “Good riddance, I say,” the old woman spat with more bile than Ruth might have thought she could muster. Ruth did not respond, but sadness tugged at her. Why did Pani Kowalska sound so angry about a handful of Jews in another town? Ruth did not have any particular affinity for the Jews, but it was the ugliness of it all that bothered her.
“Christ killing heathens. Always driving down my prices,” Pani Kowalska added, as if answering the unspoken question. So that was the real reason. Her hatred of the Jews stemmed less from purported drinking of baby’s blood than the price of turnips.
The Jews weren’t all hard-charging vegetable merchants, Ruth wanted to point out. “Surely just the men have been taken,” she offered instead.
Pani Kowalska shook her head. “All of them.” What would the Germans want with the women and children? And what could they possibly do with so many people? Ruth’s arms suddenly ached for her brother and sisters. But before she could ask, the old woman looked past Ruth’s shoulder at another customer. “Tak?”
Ruth stepped aside and surveyed the rest of the market. Taking in the flies that swarmed above the meat stand as though it were August, she decided to save the rest of their ration coupons for her next visit.
At the corner, she spied a familiar figure approaching, a sallow, fiftyish women who stared vacantly ahead and carried her empty basket as though it bore rocks. Ruth started quickly in the opposite direction. Her foot caught on the curb and she stumbled, catching herself before she fell to the ground. Piotr’s mother turned toward her, then looked away quickly, no more wanting the encounter than Ruth did. But it was unavoidable. Ruth brushed her hands on her skirt and took a step toward the woman.
A moment of silence passed between them. It was your fault, Ruth wanted to yell, seized with the urge to slap her sagging cheek. Piotr’s
