breaking all the rules. In any case, you reached out your hand to me, as though you were inviting me to dance. That terrified me more than anything. I closed my eyes and turned away. But you didn’t move. You were showing me I could count on you. After maybe twenty seconds, I opened my eyes and took your hand. You’ll find this hard to believe, but I think that was the first time I’d really touched anyone – the first time I was sure that another person was real. That moment changed everything. And you… You kissed my cheek – to acknowledge my bravery, I think. And then you went back to your seat. After lighting your pipe, you said in that professional voice of yours, “Now, where were we…?”’
Tears dripped down Jasmin’s cheeks and she gripped the steering wheel tightly.
Jasmin waved away my effort to find adequate words of reply and smiled. ‘I’ve already figured this out, Dr Cohen. We’ll go to my sister’s farm. No one will be able to find you there. We’ll have some time to think of what to do next.’
‘Thank you,’ I told her, astonished that the small
‘So where’s your sister’s farm?’ Izzy asked.
‘Between Warsaw and Lublin, just east of Pulawy.’
‘Pulawy, great!’ exclaimed Izzy like a boy eager for adventure, leaning over the front seat. ‘I wonder if anything is left of the art collection in Czartoryski Palace.’
From the wild exuberance in his eyes, I realized he was running on nervous energy.
‘I’m afraid we won’t be able to visit the palace,’ Jasmin told him. ‘The Nazis have sent most of the Jews of Pulawy to labour camps, but there’s still a small ghetto, and the Germans are everywhere. We’ll have to avoid the city.’ She put her hat down on the seat. ‘I don’t suppose you two have any false identity papers.’
‘No.’
‘Then we’d better steer clear of the main route.’
We drove on wretched backroads over the next hour and a half and twice had to push and curse our way out of mud – all to no avail it soon seemed, because after detouring around Zelachow, we came around a sharp turn only to meet up with two German soldiers conversing by their motorcycles at a railroad crossing. They were less than a hundred yards away and spotted us immediately, so it was too late to turn round. One of them flagged us down.
‘Be a dear,’ Jasmin said to me as she eased the car towards them, ‘and give me my hat.’
I handed it to her and she put it on.
‘Eccentricity tends to startle our Aryan rulers,’ she explained.
As soon as we’d come to a halt, Jasmin rolled down her window. The soldier who’d signalled for us to stop opened his eyes wide with curiosity on seeing such a grand lady behind the wheel.
In faulty but charming German, Jasmin told him, ‘I don’t suppose you know if we’re on the right road to Pulawy, dear boy?’
‘I’m not sure. Wait a minute.’
He conferred with his colleague and then gave her directions to the main road.
‘Thank you – you’re a sweetheart,’ she told him, waving coquettishly, and then, giving him no time to reply, she started off.
I counted the seconds before the soldiers would begin firing, but they never did. Had they intended to ask for our papers? On reaching a count of thirty, I turned around, but the Germans were already facing away from us and talking together – probably about what a peculiar people they’d conquered.
Jasmin was glancing in the rear-view mirror to confirm we weren’t being followed.
‘Who knew Sarah Bernhardt was driving us to safety!’ Izzy told her.
‘Brilliant!’ I seconded.
‘Thank you both, but I seem to have peed in my knickers,’ she confessed.
We pulled over after a mile and gave her a chance to dry herself and regain her composure. ‘Was I really good?’ she asked hesitantly, hidden behind the car, and when we nodded, she began to laugh, so that we did too.
The sun was peeking through a cavern of dark clouds. On both sides of the road were apple orchards. This valley would be a sea of pink blossoms in a month.
‘Poland is a beautiful country,’ I remarked to Izzy.
‘Yeah, just don’t get attached to it,’ he replied. ‘We’re not staying long.’
It was four in the afternoon by the time we entered the gravel driveway of Liza’s farm. I was asleep in the back.
I awoke to a woman with friendly brown eyes peering at me. She was so close that I could smell the wet wool in her blue and red tartan tam.
Had I died and gone to Scotland?
‘Dr Cohen – time to get up,’ the woman told me in a sing-song voice.
I sat up, still half asleep. Behind my Scottish fairy godmother stood Izzy and Jasmin, talking together. A big black dog was jumping between them and barking.
‘I’m Liza, Jasmin’s sister,’ the woman told me sweetly. ‘Welcome to my home.’
Liza’s farm rose up a small slope from the grassy bank of the River Wieprz, across a thick wood from the village of Niecierz. An eighteenth-century stone house with two tiny upstairs bedrooms, it had originally been a second barn for a large manor house that lay a half-mile east and which wasn’t visible because of a low hill topped by a copse of spruce trees. Liza lived alone; her husband had died a few years earlier and her son and daughter, now adults, lived in Krakow.
The floors were hexagonal terracotta tiles – darkly lustrous with age – and the furniture was all heavy wood. The whitewash on the walls shone with grey-blue tonalities in the slanting afternoon light. The ceiling upstairs was so low that I could touch it by standing on my toes.
There was no electricity and no phone. We were in the Poland of our ancestors.
Izzy and I moved our things into the spare bedroom. It was freezing, but Liza soon got a coal fire going in the iron parlour stove, then opened her husband’s wardrobe and said, ‘Take whatever you want.’
We found thick woollen coats and scarves.
Liza was a potter. Her workshop was in the apple cellar, which was empty at this time of year but still smelled like cider. We drank good coffee for the first time in months and gorged on her while sitting around a stone table in her kitchen. I kept anxious thoughts away by watching the two sisters closely – Jasmin so stylish and regal, and Liza in men’s trousers and a moth-eaten yellow sweater. I could see they adored each other in the way they laughed over nothing and gave each other complicitous, sideways glances. Over the next few months, they would often seem telepathic. In the end, I came to the conclusion that each one was living out the life the other might have had.
Liza told us that first afternoon that she would teach us how to use a potter’s wheel. We would be her assistants for as long as we lived with her. She assured us she was happy to have company.
When I pointed out that we were putting her life in danger, she shrugged as if the risk were of no importance.
Jasmin told us she would stay the night, but would have to leave at dawn.
‘I have to get back to Warsaw. Tomorrow’s Friday, and if I’m not at the gallery on time, the owner will think it’s suspicious. I’ll come back on Saturday afternoon.’
That evening, over our early supper, I told the sisters about Irene and how she had heard Jasmin speak about the ghetto, though I omitted that the girl had led me to Jesion and Lanik. I believed then that I held that information back because I didn’t dare speak of Adam’s murder in my fragile state. Now, I realize I was also protecting Irene; if Liza or Jasmin were ever arrested, the less they could reveal about the girl the better.
CHAPTER 29
