off. She had surmised that some Jews from the villages were to live there. But it seemed odd to relocate the Kazimierz Jews, who already had a neighborhood of their own. And if the Jews were going, what future could the hospital have here? “Will they all go?”
“I doubt it. There are still a good number of Jews living in Kazimierz.”
Mama coughed once, then again. “Is Dr. Ackerman here today?” Helena asked. “I need to speak with him about my mother’s medicine.”
Wanda frowned. “He’s been called away.” Helena sensed that it was better not to ask when he would return. At first the war had seemed a boon to the hospital—the Jewish doctors, forbidden from treating Gentile Poles, had flocked eagerly to work here. But their numbers had diminished ominously in the preceding weeks. “And I’m sorry about the medicine. We haven’t been able to get any new shipments of the laudanum and so we’ve had to dilute what we have left in order to make it last.”
They had decreased Mama’s dosage, Helena reflected, and yet she was no more lucid—further proof that wherever her mind had gone with the illness, it wasn’t coming back. “Then perhaps another medicine,” she suggested. “Something that doesn’t make her so drowsy.”
“I’ll ask.” But Wanda’s tone made clear that there were no other drugs to be had.
“The medicine supply,” Helena persisted, “is there truly nothing to be done?”
Wanda’s forehead crinkled. “I’ve tried the other hospitals, even gone to the Mariacki Cathedral to see if any could be bought.”
She was talking about the black market, Helena realized, caught off guard by the casual way in which the nurse mentioned procuring illegal goods, in a church no less. Helena considered the nurse: Wanda did not wear the yellow star of a Jew. Yet she had chosen to remain working here. Helena was touched by the nurse’s effort, risking her personal safety to help her patients. “Here.” Helena fished in her pocket for a coin. She could ill-afford to give away money now, but in addition to expressing her gratitude, it might buy Mama an extra moment’s care. She watched the conflict that washed over Wanda’s face, wanting to refuse the offering because taking care of Helena’s mother was her job.
But no one could afford to be that proud in times like this. Wanda took the coin and shoved it into her pocket. “Dzi˛eki.” She shuffled past, continuing on her rounds.
Helena settled into the chair beside the bed. Mama had suffered silently for months with what she presumed were just the normal aches and tugs of a body that had borne five children trying to pull itself back into place. But the pain grew worse and her appetite waned and by the time the village’s lone doctor came he could feel the lump in her belly, larger than an apple. She might have stayed at home until the end of her days, had fought for it. But then her mind started to slip, as though the cancer had spread there, or perhaps the fate she was going to face was simply too much to contemplate. One night they’d found her over the baby’s crib holding a pot of hot water and they knew the time had come for her to go.
Helena pulled out the bread wrapped in paper. She tore it into small pieces and held it out. “Look, Mama,” she offered, bringing the dry, flat bread close to her mother’s nose. “Ruth baked this for you yesterday.” Even Ruth’s best efforts could not come close to the bread Mama had once made, but it was hardly a fair comparison, given the lack of good flour these days.
When Mama did not respond, Helena leaned forward and dipped the bread into the glass of tepid water that sat on the table beside the bed. Then she lifted her mother’s head and put a small piece in her mouth, willing her to eat it. But the bread lay between her slack lips. Finally, Helena removed it again, fearful that she would choke. A sour smell came from between her lips, the teeth Mama had maintained with such care beginning to rot. Helena stared at the remaining fistful of bread uncertainly. No one would take the time to feed it to her once Helena was gone; it would just be taken by one of the nurses or other patients. She tucked it back in her bag.
Helena gazed out the window, grateful yet again that the ward in which her mother was located looked into the interior courtyard. From here, Mama could not see the military vehicles that rumbled by or the German soldiers in the streets. A different room would have made the pretense of normalcy impossible.
“You aren’t going to tell her about the war, are you?” Ruth had asked their father the first time he prepared to set out for the city after the invasion. Overhearing, Helena had been surprised. It was a war, for goodness’ sake, and their mother was at the heart of it. But Tata hadn’t said anything. Looking around the sanatorium now, Helena was struck by how little had changed—the machines still hummed and the patients still moaned, trapped in their own private battles. So the fiction had persisted.
Beside Helena, her mother stirred. “Mama?” Helena leaned forward, hope rising in her as she kissed her mother on her papery cheek.
But her mother only looked at her blankly. Did she wonder why her beloved husband no longer came to visit, or had she not noticed? “Ruti?” she asked, using her pet name for Helena’s sister.
Helena blanched. No, it wasn’t Ruth who was sturdy enough to make the journey, or brave enough to try. But if thinking it was so brought their mother comfort, Helena would play along. “Yes, Mama, it’s me.” It should have been Ruth here, Helena reflected. She had always been closer to Mama, sitting at their mother’s side, learning with rapt attention how to cook and sew while thick-fingered Helena followed Tata into the woods, gathering kindling and roots. Sometimes it seemed as though she and Ruth had been cast into those roles at birth. “The pretty one,” she’d heard people remark more than once about Ruth—but how was that possible when they were twins and meant to look just the same? She herself had been deemed sturdy and capable for so long she could not fathom where the idea had first arisen. Had their parents noted these differences in them from the start and nurtured them, or had they grown to play the parts they had been given?
“Jealous, even as a baby,” their mother had remarked of Helena more than once over the years. “You would give me such a look when I held your sister instead of you.” I wasn’t jealous, Helena had wanted to respond later, when she was old enough to understand. I just wanted to be held, too, to be a part of things before you had to set us down and move on to the next task or chore. But it was always that way with twins, never enough time or arms to go around, and the extra always seemed to go to sweet, helpful Ruth.
The sisters had always been a great source of curiosity in the town, the first set of twins seen there in more than a generation. “And after, when the midwife put you both in the cradle, the first thing you did was hold hands,” Mama was fond of recalling. “She’d said she’d never heard of such a thing.”
Whenever they went out, people made sport of trying to guess which one was which. “No, no, don’t tell me!” In fact, the sisters had subtle differences: Ruth had a rounder face and large blue eyes while Helena’s own features were plainer, her skin more ruddy than luminescent. And there was the birthmark, too, heart-shaped just below Ruth’s right ear, which Ruth desperately tried to conceal, that made them impossible to confuse if one looked closely. But to the casual observer, they were indistinguishable.
Helena sat in silence for several minutes. There were things she wanted to ask her mother now, about how to make a good poultice for the goat’s wounded leg, and the way to get the cabinet above the stove to stop sticking. She wanted to tell her mother that Dorie had lost another tooth, how Karolina was starting to speak a bit. But she was never sure if hearing about the children would make Mama happy or more forlorn, or even if she remembered them at all.
She searched her mother’s face, looking for some words that would
