Felicia’s cry shatters the silence and Mila jumps. Mopping her mouth with the sleeve of her gown, she tucks Dorota’s note into her pocket and stands, reaching for the wall to steady herself when the room begins to spin. Breathe, Mila. She’ll clean up later, she decides, stepping carefully over the puddle on the floor. In the kitchen she rinses her mouth and splashes cold water over her face. “Coming, love!” she calls when Felicia wails again.
Felicia is standing at the crib rail, gripping it tightly with both hands, her koc resting on the floor below her. When she sees her mother she smiles brightly, revealing four tiny tooth buds—two each in her top and bottom gums.
Mila’s shoulders soften. “Good morning, sweet girl,” she whispers, handing Felicia her blanket and lifting her from the crib. Two months ago, when Mila weaned her from her breast, Felicia had begun sleeping through the night. With the extra rest, mother and daughter both had turned a corner; Felicia was a happier baby and Mila no longer felt as if she were teetering on the edge of insanity. Felicia wraps her arms around her mother’s neck and Mila relishes the weight of her daughter’s cheek, warm against her chest. This is what I was thinking, she reminds herself. This. “I’ve got you,” she whispers, one hand on Felicia’s back.
Lifting her head, Felicia turns toward the window and points a tiny index finger. “Eh?” she intones—the sound she makes when she’s curious about something.
Mila follows her gaze. “Tam,” she says. “Outside?”
“Ta,” Felicia imitates.
Mila walks to the window to play her usual game of pointing out all the things she can see: four speckled pigeons, perched by a chimney; the opaque white globe of a street lantern; across the way, three arched stone doorways and, above them, three large wrought-iron balconies; a pair of horses pulling a carriage. Mila ignores the swastika flag hanging from an open window, the grafittied storefronts, the newly repainted street sign (she no longer lives on ?eromskiego but on Reichsstrasse). As Felicia watches the horses plod by below her, Mila kisses the top of her forehead, letting the down of Felicia’s cinnamon hair, what there is of it, tickle her nose. “Your Papa must miss you so much,” she whispers, thinking of how Selim could make Felicia laugh by nuzzling his nose into her hair and pretending to sneeze. “He’ll come home to us soon. Until then, it’s you and me,” she adds, trying to ignore the tang of bile, still sharp in her throat, as she processes the enormity of her words. Felicia looks up at her, wide-eyed, almost as if she understands, then brings her koc to her ear and rests her cheek once again on Mila’s chest.
Later today, Mila decides, she’ll pack up some clothes and her toothbrush, Felicia’s koc and a pile of diapers, and walk the six blocks to her parents’ house at 14 Warszawska. It’s time.
CHAPTER SIX
Addy
Toulouse, France ~ September 21, 1939
Addy is tucked away at a café overlooking the Place du Capitole’s giant square, a spiral-bound pad of music paper open before him. He sets his pencil down and massages a cramp from the muscle between his thumb and forefinger.
It’s become his routine to spend his weekends parked at a bistro table, writing. He no longer travels to Paris—it feels too frivolous to get lost in the revelry of Montmartre’s nightlife with his homeland at war. Instead he devotes himself to his music and to his weekly trips to the Polish consulate in Toulouse, where he’s been trying for months to secure a travel visa—the paperwork required for him to return to Poland. So far, the effort has been exasperatingly fruitless. On his first visit in March, three weeks before Passover, the clerk took one look at Addy’s passport and shook his head, pushing a map across his desk and pointing to the countries separating Addy from Poland: Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia. “You will not make it past the checkpoints,” he said, tapping his finger on the line of Addy’s passport marked RELIGIA. ZYD, the designation read, short for ZYDOWSKI. Jewish. His mother had been right, Addy realized, hating himself for doubting her. Not only was it too dangerous for him to travel across German borders, it was, apparently, illegal. Even so, Addy had returned to the consulate time after time, hoping to convince the clerk to grant him some sort of exemption, to wear him down with persistence. But at each visit, he was told the same. Not possible. And so, for the first time in his twenty-five years, he’d missed Passover in Radom. Rosh Hashanah had come and gone as well.
When he isn’t at work or writing home or composing his music or badgering the secretaries at the consulate, Addy pores over the headlines of La Dépêche de Toulouse. Every day, as the war escalates, his anxiety heightens. This morning he’d read that the Soviet Red Army was rolling through Poland from the east and had made an attempt to seize Lvov. His brothers are in Lvov; according to his mother, they’d been conscripted along with the rest of Radom’s young men into the army. Any day now, it seems, the city will fall. Poland will fall. What will become of Genek and Jakob? Of Adam and Selim? What will become of Poland?
Addy is stuck. His life, his decisions, his future—none of it is in his control. It’s a feeling to which he is unaccustomed, and he hates it. Hates the fact that he has no way of getting home, no way of reaching his brothers. At least, thankfully, he is in contact with his mother. They write each other often. In her last letter, which she’d sent just days after Radom fell, she’d described the heartbreak of bidding Genek and Jakob good-bye on the night they left for Lvov, how painful it was to see Halina and Mila do the same for Adam and Selim, and what it was like to watch the Germans march into Radom. The city was occupied within hours, she said. There are Wehrmacht soldiers everywhere.
Addy thumbs through his pages, skimming his work, grateful for the distraction of his music. This, at least, is his. No one can take it from him. Since Poland went to war, he has written doggedly, nearly completing a new composition for piano, clarinet, and double bass. Closing his eyes, he taps out a chord on an imaginary keyboard resting on his lap, wondering whether it has potential. He’s had one commercial success already—a piece recorded by the talented singer Vera Gran that tells the story of a young man writing home to a loved one. List, the letter. Addy composed List just before leaving Poland for university and will never forget how it felt to hear the song for the first time on the air, how he’d closed his eyes and listened to the melody he’d created as it spilled from his radio’s speakers, how his chest had swelled with pride when his name was announced afterward, crediting him as composer. Perhaps List, he’d fantasized at the time, was the piece that would eventually lead to a vocation in music.