Chapter Four

ILOVE WATCHING ALEKSANDER wash. It is the only activity in the ghetto that gives me pleasure. He doesn’t see me because I’m hiding behind the kitchen door, eyeing him through the broken hinge, which provides a three-finger-wide span to view him inside the bedroom, which also serves as our washing area. We are among the lucky ones with two rooms for the three of us. Most ghetto prisoners are relegated a room for at least seven people. Jakub is out tutoring students, and Aleksander thinks that I’m teaching too. This is his moment alone, mine to savor.

Aleksander’s solo bathing performance is so tender and raw. His beautiful, starved body is a Rodin come to life. It begins with the dampening of the washcloth, the slight twisting of material, using only the tiniest swipe of soap—if you could call it that—practically an air-kiss. Soap is a nonexistent luxury in the ghetto. That bar melting in his hand with the monogrammed E is taken from what was once the ritzy Hotel Europejski, now a dumping ground housing the Nazi invaders. They renamed it the Europ?isches Hotel—Germanizing everything they conquered, wiping our country’s history clean.

Jakub held his tongue when he saw the two small exclusive bars stashed inside the sewn-in pocket of my dress a month ago. Didn’t ask how I got it. There was the usual pause. The shifting of the brow. The sharp, pained flicker of his eye, as though a shard of glass had fallen into it. The accusatory look. He understands, as we all do, that every single item smuggled into the ghetto comes with a cost. That bar of lavender-scented soap was in exchange for my body. A young Nazi soldier who thought he was having his way with a Polish girl—not a Jew. Two vials of antibiotics, a wedge of cheese, a kilo of flour, and three potatoes also came with the deal.

Watching that guilty soap graze Aleksander’s body, I pretend it’s my lips against his skin, determined to shut out the expense the bar cost my soul. Right now, I allow myself the indulgence. I am just a woman watching the man I love wash, and that’s the place where I want to be—not the other.

My cheeks are flush, and I am unable to peel my gaze from Aleksander’s naked back; if only I could touch it. Long and lean with a silvery sheen as the late morning sunlight casts a path of canted light over his skin. He bends over the tiny wash area and concentrates on cleaning his private parts, lightly touching himself, and I can barely breathe. I reach under my dress and place my hand between my thighs, feeling at once both the heat and unquenchable desire.

I allow myself just a few seconds of pleasure, and then open my eyes and remember where I am, who I am. His brother’s wife.

Every time I’m near Aleksander, enveloped by his presence, I am reminded that I picked the short straw, married the wrong brother.

The truth, childish as it may seem, is that I saw Aleksander first. Before Karina got him. Before Jakub asked me to dance. Before I accepted his hand in marriage and made the single greatest mistake of my youth—the one I can never take back.

KARINA AND Ihad just turned nineteen, ripe for marriage, and decided to attend the fundraiser dance at our former lyceum. It was a reunion of graduates past and present and touted as the biggest social event of the season.

“Even the Blonski brothers are here,” Karina whispered from our corner of the gymnasium. “Don’t look, but they are across the gym, at two o’clock.”

I waited three long seconds and then turned in their direction. The Blonski brothers were holding court in the middle of a group of eligible bachelors. They graduated well before Karina and I got to the school, but their reputation preceded them. Jakub, six years older than me, was making his mark as a journalist, and Aleksander, who was two years younger than his brother, was a rising star in the art community and a well-known catch.

My heart fluttered. Aleksander... I mean, look at him. Tall, broad shouldered, electric green eyes, thick sandy-brown hair, winning smile. And his talent... When Aleksander stared back at me and grinned slightly, I felt my blood sizzle, so much so that I looked away, played hard to get, and feigned disinterest. I even made a point to smile at someone else and completely turned my back to him.

When I finally pivoted around, I caught Aleksander still smiling my way and then realized it was not meant for me. It was for Karina. I glanced over at my best friend, and she was positively glowing. What have I done?

Forget Bina—her flirtatious gaze beamed two dimples deep—she could have anyone. Pick me, and I will make you happy. Aleksander began walking our way. I had been so full of myself, and now I couldn’t stop this train from rolling. But I was only acting, damnit! And Karina, my best friend, with her naturally rosy cheeks, twinkly brown eyes, auburn curls, and just enough curve, stood to win the prize.

Accompanied by his brother, Aleksander strode right past me and asked her to dance. Her, not me. This left me no choice but to accept a dance with his studious sidekick, Jakub, with his dark wavy hair and kind, intelligent eyes. I jealously watched Aleksander whisk Karina onto the dance floor, both laughing as they twirled the night away.

I blew it. My heart was crushed, and it was all my own doing.

SPYING ON ALEKSANDERstanding naked, I think back to that pivotal moment. Not only did Karina and I marry our respective dance partners several months later—it was a double wedding—what a simcha it was (for Karina). I went overboard to mask my true feelings. I feigned happiness for my best friend, pretended that Jakub was my bashert—soulmate. I should have earned an award for my acting performances. The only person with whom I couldn’t pretend was me.

And then, just a few months after the wedding, the invasion happened, followed by the brutal murder of my father, the burning down of Aleksander’s home with his family in it. And then on July 22, 1942—a day forever carved into my heart—the first train destined for Treblinka took away the rest of our families, including my mother and my sister, and everything changed.

Except for this.

Funny, how war both entraps and frees you. What’s the point of niceties, manners, morals, and suppressed emotion when you could die at any given moment? Hitler’s assault did more than murder my family; it unleashed my hidden desire, which rose to the surface, smothering my conscience and any semblance of right and wrong.

What’s left is the damp washcloth in Aleksander’s hand, the lavender soap swipe, the elegant way he places the items on the top shelf over the basin, and then flexes naked in the mirror. I like to believe that he is reminding himself of who he was before. Darling of the art world, Aleksander was a sought-after painter who once exhibited with other avant-garde artists at the National Museum in Warsaw, before his paintings were removed and he, too, was booted out by the very same curator who had begged to showcase his works and then stole all his paintings.

Aleksander’s hands fall loosely to his sides as he eyes himself in the cracked mirror; a jagged fracture cutting through the glass like a streak of lightning. I place both hands against my rapidly beating heart, when suddenly he turns toward me as though sensing the magnetic pull of my forbidden gaze. I suck in my breath as he grabs a towel, wraps it around his waist. There is nowhere to hide. I brace myself against the wall behind me for the imminent confrontation, as Aleksander’s bare feet stomp across the hardwood floor in my direction. What do I say when he discovers I’m spying on him?

“Bina?” he calls out. I’m caught. The washing sessions are officially over. I try to mask my red-faced guilt.

Focusing on his probing eyes, I feign surprise. “Aleks, I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to disturb you. I had forgotten something here earlier for class. Didn’t mean to interrupt your privacy...”

He folds his arms firmly across his bare chest, raises a brow. “Yes, you did.”

Yes, I did.But I say nothing, too afraid of what new lie might escape my mouth.

He shakes his head, and his damp hair sprays slightly. “I know you’ve been fighting with Jakub since that meeting. I mean, the walls here are paper thin.” He searches my face. “I didn’t want to interfere the past few days. But I could feel you trying to draw me into the argument, to choose sides. I know what I said at the meeting. And I agree with you, but he’s my brother, and—”

I put up my hand to cut him off, relieved that this is his concern and not the spying. “You’re right,” I say carefully. “But I wasn’t being entirely truthful right now. I also came to apologize. I knew you’d be here alone.”

A truth snaking a lie. I came to see you wash, to view the droplets sliding down your body like rain on a windowpane. The only way I can get through this terminal nightmare is to witness your beauty and imagine myself touching, tasting, feeling every inch of you.

“Apology accepted.” He smiles with teeth that are still nearly white, as everyone else’s have decayed and become stained from lack of nutrition, fresh water, anything healthy or sanitary.

“Aleks—” I pause. There is so much more to say, but I stop myself.

“Back at that meeting, what you did, what you expressed, wasn’t easy,” he says. Still the damn meeting? Is he really that obtuse? “But I agree,” he continues. “Enough with words—we need action. We can’t pretend we are going to survive. We can’t pretend that those barbarians will honor any agreements. The truth is, I can no longer ignore my own feelings.” He glances at the door, as if Jakub could walk in at any second. “I need to tell you something.”

Finally. I brace myself, my hand clasping a loose brick sticking out of the wall beside me. He wants to tell me he feels the same, that he, too, looks at the sheet dividing his bed and ours at night and envisions my naked body. “I have joined the fighters—the ZOB unit,” he whispers instead. “I’ve been secretly attending their meetings and training with them. I am going to help with the resistance from inside the ghetto. If I die, then I sure as hell am going to take as many of those Nazi bastards as possible with me when I go.”

Training? Guns? Ammo? Secret meetings? How did I not see or know that Aleks is part of this? I spend three-quarters of my day obsessing about him. “Jakub is against those young fighters,” I remind him. “Calls them troublemakers and says that they are going to make things much worse for us.”

“Jakub doesn’t know.”

Like my father, Jakub sees nothing.

“I still attend Jakub’s meetings. I still give him drawings for the archives, but I’ve been meeting in an underground bunker and—”

“Take me with you,” I beg, my eyes trained on his.

He is silent for a long moment. “No, Bina. Absolutely not.”

His penetrating gaze, deep green with mottled flecks of gold, reminding me of the jade marbles that my sister and I used to play with when we were little girls, sears through me. My body is ignited by the lavender scent of him. He must know how I feel. But he quickly takes a step back as if my nearness is invasive. My heart drops. Loyal to the end, that’s what Jakub always said about his younger brother. I saw it, too, when he ran back into that burning house and reemerged with his charred wife and baby daughter dangling in his arms. And me... loyal only to him.

“One meeting. Please let me come...”

He exhales deeply. I can feel his mounting anger. “No.”

“I know where it is,” I persist. “I’ve heard the rumors. It’s in the basement of that house on the corner of...” I stop when I see the rage visibly shrouding his face. But it’s true, I hear things, the whispers about the covert resistance group springing up. So many whispers. There is breath, and then there is the breath beneath the breath—the only sound in the ghetto that matters.

“Bina, if something—anything—happens to you and it’s my fault...”

Something already happened to me, Aleksander. And it is your fault.I glance at the gray, threadbare towel around his waist, wishing I could yank it from his hands and drop to my knees. Wishing I could take him fully in my mouth right now, then lie together entangled across that tattered mattress shoved up against the window. Wishing more than anything that I could feel my skin pressed against his.

I look away, because if I don’t, I will ruin this. His loyalty to Jakub is a nonnegotiable, a blood pact between brothers. When I glance up, I see Aleksander’s steadfast fraternal devotion locked inside his clenched squared jaw. But something is changing. I know it because I studied body language, gestures, facial expressions, all the ways in which an actor morphs into character.

Aleksander’s words are saying one thing, but his body, loose and agile, tells another story. It’s in the way he leans in, the curl of his shoulders, the want in his cold nipples—erect like twin arrowheads against a smattering of golden chest hair. I can barely gather my breath. He is clearly fighting this thing between us inside his head. But perhaps, just maybe, not inside his heart.