“Are you quite certain you don’t want any of Vati’s things? He has so many beautiful shirts there and trousers…”
“I know. I’m sure.” He hoped she wouldn’t take offense.
She didn’t, just nodded her understanding.
The noise of a vehicle approaching the intersection before them cut into their agreeable silence.
“A Sanka!” Gerlinde announced excitedly but by the time Tadek finally stuffed his jacket into the backpack that was already bursting at the seams and turned around, the Red Cross truck had already disappeared. “We must be heading in the right direction then! Come, make it snappy before they close for the day!”
Tadek hurried alongside her, smiling in spite of himself at the return of her commanding tone. It used to annoy and frighten him to no end but now he found it almost endearing.
The local headquarters of the Red Cross indeed still stood, spared by the bombers by some lucky chance. The same Sanka was still parked outside and nurses were unloading the clothes from its back to distribute them later among Berliners in need. But all of a sudden, Tadek couldn’t get his breath. He stopped in his tracks with his blood pulsing wildly in his ears and stared at the innocent vehicle with such horror that Gerlinde began shaking his shoulder to snap him out of it, her face creased with genuine concern.
“What’s the matter with you? You’re white as a sheet! Are you thirsty? Faint? What? Tadeusz, talk to me, don’t just stand like that…”
But, with the best will in the world, he couldn’t get a single word out of himself and he just kept backing away from the truck until he bumped into a telegraph pole, with its wires missing and slid along it, to the dusty ground. Gerlinde was already running toward the nurses, shouting to them for water.
Everything turned into a black-spotted haze. The air was thick like tar; it refused to enter his lungs and got stuck somewhere in his throat, drowning him. Sweat poured down his face, collecting in the creases of his lips. Tadek tasted its salt on his tongue along with blood. Moving, as though in a dream, he brought his hand to his face and regarded it in stupefaction. His nose was bleeding.
Suddenly, a pair of cool hands tipped his head back in one precise move and a rag soaked with water wiped the film of horror off of his skin. “Breathe through your mouth.”
Tadek closed his eyes and tried not to think of the blood in the back of his throat.
Gerlinde’s voice, still shaky from worry. “It’s all right. Just a regular nosebleed.”
“Are you sure?” Another voice, female. A stranger.
“Yes. I’m a nurse too. He’s been warm for some time. It must be the heat’s doing. It’s all my fault. I made him rush here when he wasn’t feeling well.”
“You can bring him in for the doctor to check—”
“No!” Tadek heard his own voice come as though from under the water. “I’m not going inside. I’m all right. Let me just sit here for a while…” He dug his heels into the ground and made himself turn in the opposite direction, away from the offending vehicle.
“I shall go then—”
“Wait! Schwester!” Gerlinde again. “Take these clothes, please. Everything that is in these two backpacks.” Tadek felt himself being relieved of the weight on his shoulders. “We were bringing them all to you anyway. They’re all clean, so don’t worry about disinfecting them. Some aren’t even worn yet.”
“Where did you get such things? You haven’t stolen them, have you?”
“No.” A pause, a long one. Then, a barely audible, “my father’s.”
Another moment of silence. “I see.”
“He doesn’t need them anymore.”
Another I see. Such things were understood, without further clarification, these days. Tadek was almost relieved when the steps dissolved somewhere in the distance. Through the cloth on his face, he apologized softly.
“It’s the truck. That idiotic Sanka.”
“Do you have some aversion to trucks?” Gerlinde sounded mildly amused, happy with the change of subject, with the nurse gone.
“Only Red Cross ones.”
“What’s wrong with Red Cross trucks? They save lives, you know.”
He considered for a moment whether to tell her or not. “In Auschwitz, they were used for transporting the condemned to the gas chambers. They also delivered the gas to the crematoriums. And when everyone was already dead, we would collect their clothes and put them away into those trucks. Mountains and mountains of clothes, mountains of corpses… I thought I had forgotten it all by now. And now I saw this damned thing and it all came back to me again.” He took a shaky breath. “I’m all better now. Let’s go home.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am.”
“Let me ride you then.”
“If you want.”
“I do.”
She helped him get up and collected the bicycle from the ground. “Why are you smiling, you pitiful bloody-face?”
“I’m smiling because you didn’t doubt my words. It’s the first time when you didn’t say anything in protest. It must be an idiotic reason to smile but I’m smiling because you believe me.”
“I believe you because one would have to be the most despicable of louts to invent something of that sort.”
“You believe that there were crematoriums then?”
“Yes.”
“And the gas? And the SS with machineguns and horsewhips? And the fact that I saw it all, every day, with my own two eyes?”
For a moment, she was silent. “Yes,” she finally replied and threw away the bloody rag she was carrying. “One day I shall ask you all about it but not today. I just gave away all of my father’s clothes. Let me digest that first. If you start telling me about the mountains of corpses, I’ll have a nosebleed too and then who’s going to get whom home?”
“Gerlinde?”
“What?”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For making me smile when I want to cry.”
She reached across the handlebars and squeezed his forearm, right where the faded bluish tattoo was, for a few precious moments.
10
October came. The OSS had been terminated by President
