Chapter Eleven

IT IS STILL dark and misty out when I wake Aleksander. I had let him sleep for nearly four hours. He lies in bed, rubs his eyes, and stares at the ceiling, confused, as though trying to recall how he ended up here. He slings his legs off the cot, sits bolt upright, and faces me. “Christ, Bina, what time is it?”

“Almost five a.m.”

“What!” He jumps out of bed.

“It’s okay. You needed it,” I tell him.

He stretches, comes to the small bistro table where I made him breakfast, a thin slice of bread, a chunk of cheese, a cup of tea. He stares at the food and sits. “Thank you for this. I dreamt I was painting again... back in my studio, looking out the windows into the yard. Remember those windows, Bina? Floor to ceiling. So beautiful. You could see the lilacs blooming for miles, and the poppies—all that color.” His eyes light up. “Even my favorite brushes were surrounding me. I felt them. I could even smell the turpentine, the linseed oil. It was all so goddamn real. And then... came the fire, destroying everything.” He rakes his hand through his thick, dirty hair, looks away.

“I understand,” I say gently, leaning up against the sink, not mentioning the thrashing that went on in the cot. “I’ve had countless dreams in which I’m onstage, the audience is clapping, and I’m so excited that it feels like I’m drunk. But it all ends the same way... Just before I take my final bow, the curtain comes down with a crash and smothers me as though it were alive.”

We both remain silent for a few minutes, lost in thought, pondering all the double meanings. “After you eat, wash up. There’s a clean shirt for you too. Then let’s talk.” I gesture to the large bowl next to the sink that I already filled with water for him. “That, by the way, is my bathing area.” I laugh. “Not exactly the Hotel Bristol.”

He sniffs himself. “I stink.”

“Eau de ghetto.” We both laugh.

I force myself to look away as Aleksander peels off his clothes. I make myself fake-busy organizing when there is nothing to do except to make the bed, which consists of one sheet and a wool blanket. From the corner of my eye, I see the bright bluish-purple bruises lining his back, where the police beat him with their batons. My eyes water, thinking of those traitorous brutes, wishing I could kill them all. He takes the cloth with water and washes his face and chest, then dries off, slowly buttoning up the clean shirt as he looks out the window with a faraway stare.

“You can see it from here,” he says with his back still facing me. “The tops of the buildings, the barbed wire and broken glass embedded on the wall meant to tear us to shreds. They really are monsters.”

“Yes,” I reply simply, as he looks down at the shirt.

The shirt once belonged to Jakub. I use it as a nightshirt. I know Aleksander is picturing his brother wearing it, and it’s unbearable for both of us. I had nothing else big enough to give him but that. He walks toward the cot, picks up the mug of lukewarm tea on the way, and drags the lone chair with him for me.

“Sit. Let’s talk,” he says, pointing to the chair.

“You mentioned a grenade that Eryk threw,” I begin as I sit across from him. “How was that even possible? Where did we get it?”

“We didn’t get it. We made it.” He pauses. “Tosia.”

“Tosia? The redhead?”

He nods. “She studied chemistry for a year at university before she was kicked out, which basically qualifies her as our bomb maker.” He laughs, but the smile seems to slide off his face. “We smuggled in some raw materials. It’s crazy, isn’t it? I mean, I’m an artist and now a killer. That girl is a bookworm, and now she’s our bomb maker. But brilliant and surprisingly confident for someone so young.”

I feel a sharp twitch inside my chest. Am I jealous of freckle-faced, scrawny Tosia? Yes, I answer myself. I’m jealous of anyone Aleksander admires.

He reaches for his shoe at the side of the bed, rips out the sole carefully, and then removes the scrap of parchment paper stuck to it. On it is a scribbled address. He hands it to me. “Memorize this, then tear it up. You have a meeting there later today,” he explains. “It’s already been arranged through Zelda’s contacts. I’m going to wait here for you and pray that you are successful so I can return to the ghetto with good news. We need it.” His expression clouds over. “We must get the guns and ammo immediately. We simply can’t wait. There’s going to be another roundup soon, and from what I’m hearing, most likely the final one.”

My throat constricts. We are both thinking of Jakub on the last train. I feel his presence here with us now, looming larger than life, in this microscopic room.

Aleksander leans forward, his elbows on his knees. “This will be their victory lap—rounding up the last of us—those who have been hardest to kill, miraculously evading death. Zelda and the team are working on building alliances with other groups in the ghetto. We must put philosophical differences aside, unite, train people to fight, construct more bunkers and attic passageways between the deserted apartments, and build more tunnels into the Aryan side. But we are outnumbered, outmanned, untrained.” He puts down the cup of tea, his cheeks fill with air. “This really could be the last of it, the end of us.”

I let that sink in. Aleksander is not a pessimist nor a complainer. If he says that, I believe him. I shudder, and my mind goes to a place where it shouldn’t. What if we don’t go back? What if we run away together now? We made it out. Free. Let’s flee to the forest, Aleks. Let’s start over. I feel the forbidden words press at the tip of my tongue, but I swallow them. Zelda.

“We will never be free,” he says, as though reading my thoughts. “Even if we survive somehow. You get that, right? We have seen too much. We will never unsee what they’ve done to us. And we owe it to Zelda and to the others.” He points out the window, gesturing to the ghetto in the distance. “It wouldn’t be hard to run and join the Polish resistance, the partisan units in the forest, or even find a way to steal across the Russian border, but I could never live with myself. I won’t stop you, Bina.”

“I would never leave...” you, I say only inside my head.

Our eyes meet in a way they have never met before. Straight on, with force. He breaks the intensity first by glancing down at his hands now resting in his lap; there’s nowhere else to look. Beautiful, veiny, and calloused from countless brushstrokes, fingernails permanently lined with pigment.

“Revenge is redemption.” He whispers Zelda’s motto with a fight gesture. “That’s all we’ve got left.” His face turns ashen. “Everyone I loved is dead, and now Jakub is gone. Everyone except for...” He doesn’t finish the sentence, but I feel the muted word with every fiber of my being. You. I shout it inside my head.

You. You. You.

I can’t help it, can no longer stop myself. I reach out and touch his haunted face. My finger tenderly grazes the course bristles casing his chiseled jawline. I feel my skin flush, my heart beating wildly, until his green eyes morph from sparkling jade to a deadly grenade. Anger, disgust, hate, betrayal. I don’t know which. I can’t read his revolving expressions fast enough. I yank my hand away as though it landed on hot coal. What have I done?

Aleksander’s glare is so aggressive that I feel pinned down by it. “They are relying on us.” His voice is rough, punishing, trying to pretend that touch didn’t happen. If only it hadn’t.

“And we won’t let them down.” My voice is strangled by the thick mucus filling my throat.

He stands abruptly, making the necessary space between us. He walks to the window, but there is no escape from me in this matchbox-size compartment. The weighty silence expands and suffocates. Jakub may still be alive. How could I have touched him that way?

Aleksander turns to face me, and I’m barely breathing. “Between us, Zelda believes the final aktion is going to happen on Hitler’s birthday, on April twentieth. That’s less than four weeks from now. It is Stroop’s chance to show off, deliver a birthday gift to Hitler—meaning us. That’s why we need to move fast. We are all out of time.”

Aleksander’s voice rises to a near shout, and I quickly shush him. He points to the scrap of paper with the address on it that was buried in his shoe and is now curled up on the small wooden nightstand. “The group ?egota is our last shot to get weapons. A lot is riding on you.”

“Zelda briefed me before I got here,” I tell him, still trying to pretend that touch didn’t happen. “So, who am I meeting? And what exactly am I asking for?”

He scratches his head. “The contact is a bit of a mystery. They call him ‘Motyl’—Butterfly. A code name, obviously. Take any weapon that they can give us—I mean, anything. I’m going to make you a wish list. There’s money.”

“Money from whom?” I raise a brow. “Manny?”

“Who else? The King of Thieves, of course.” Aleksander laughs, then stops cold. “They seized Manny’s wife and kids while he was working and put them on the same train as Jakub. Manny is unhinged, ready to blow up the Reichstag.”

Something mercurial darts through his eyes as he picks up the piece of paper with ?egota’s address and waves it. “This is our defining moment. If we fight back, Bina, if we don’t get on their last death train, and instead we blow out Hitler’s birthday candles before Stroop does, then we win even if we lose.”