The Winter Guest. Pam Jenoff
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the ones Helena and the children often discussed, describing in mouthwatering detail the cakes and breads as if doing so might cause them to actually appear. Instead, Ruth dreamed of stockings, the smooth silk kind, well-woven without any holes or pulls. Nylons, she’d heard them called on the radio. They talked of German soldiers giving them to the girls. She sniffed. Piotr had not given her any gifts, even when she’d knitted him the scarf. He had talked about making her something for her birthday or Christmas, but their courtship hadn’t lasted that long.
Setting the coffeepot with the rusted handle on the stove, she looked around the house, their one saving grace. Built by their grandfather over the course of a decade, it was made of stone, and sturdy enough to keep out the harshest of weather. There was a large living room with a wide-beam oak floor and fireplace, and the lone bedroom off the back. Beside a faded picture of the Virgin Mary, a ladder climbed to the loft where the children had slept when their family had still been whole. Ruth saw an image like a long-forgotten dream of Tata playing with Helena on the floor, roaring with laughter as she and Mama looked on. They had been too happy to know how poor they were. Ruth had joined in, too, sometimes when the play was not as rough. Other times, she had watched from the side, wishing she could be a part of the game but too timid to play.
Seeing the house clearly now, Ruth began mentally inventorying the cleaning and decorating that needed to be done for Christmas. Once she had looked forward to the holiday so eagerly. Now it felt an effort, the idea of celebrating without their parents inconceivable. But they had to keep to their traditions as much as possible for the little ones’ sake.
There were other things that had to be done before deep winter set in, too: Helena would have to reseal the windows and repair the chimney crack their father had neglected to fix. Tata had promised grander things, too, like plumbing pipes for an indoor toilet. He had always tried so very hard to please Mama, but the basic chores to keep the house running and the odd jobs he took when he could get them seemed to fill every waking hour. Mama did not complain when such extra things did not materialize.
Once Ruth had imagined a home of her own—nothing terribly grand, just a bit bigger than this, with a flower garden. But that vision had walked off over the hill with Piotr, and remembering it now, she felt frivolous. Daydreams were not a luxury she could afford anymore, and wanting too much, well, maybe that was what had caused all the trouble in the first place.
Ruth uncovered the plate of peas that she’d left by the sink the previous evening and began shelling them for the soup she would make for lunch. A year earlier, the broth would have been thick with sour cream and pieces of lard. Now it would be mostly water. There was a bit of beetroot, too; she could shred and mix it with some vinegar and call it salad.
She pulled out the radio that sat hidden beneath the sink, adjusting the volume so as not to wake the children. Radios had been forbidden by the Germans, and keeping it was her one act of defiance, a link with the outside world. Only heavy static came through. Whether the radio was dying or the Germans had jammed the signal, she did not know. She made a note to ask if Helena could fix it. An unintelligible voice crackled then, growing clearer in time for her to hear the announcer warn in a low gravelly voice that Jews were no longer to ride the trolley cars.
Reaching for the coffeepot, Ruth stifled a laugh. There was no trolley in Biekowice, and no Jews, either. She had seen Jews only once in her life on a trip with her parents to the market in My´slenice. “Dorfjuden,” she’d heard them called on the radio recently. Village Jews. Their cluster of dismal, tar-roofed shacks made her family’s own cottage seem luxurious by comparison.
“I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of them, really, with all of the trouble,” Helena had remarked a few weeks earlier over breakfast, in that vague manner of speech they tended to use around the children.
“Better that they stay where they are,” Ruth had replied, her own voice sounding harsh. She did not mean it unkindly, nor did she harbor any special animosity toward the Jews. But while the Germans seldom seemed to trifle with Poles, they had enacted an endless series of laws aimed at the Jews, forbidding them from doing ordinary things and making their already-miserable lives harder. Ruth just didn’t want, as Mama would have said, to borrow trouble by having them around.
But Helena had a point, Ruth reflected now. Why didn’t the Jews scatter and flee the Germans? Though they probably thought there was strength in numbers, staying in their small compact centers just made them an easier target.
There was no mention of the bombing on the radio that Helena had thought she had heard the previous evening. Ruth smiled with satisfaction, glad that her sister, who always accused her of having an overactive imagination, had this time been wrong.
She finished shelling the peas and transferred them to a smaller bowl. From the bedroom came the sound of Michal’s snoring, the girls breathing gently beside him. She sighed. No one saw the work she did, the little things that kept them going. Helena deemed the chores she did outside and in the barn so much harder, scoffing at what she called “woman’s work.” Perhaps that was because Mama had made it look so easy, doing things twice as well and without complaint. To Ruth, though, it sometimes felt like too much.
Ruth washed the plate and dried it carefully, setting it back in its place in the cupboard. She tried to keep everything exactly as Mama had, as though she might walk through the door at any moment and inspect everything with a sweeping eye and issue Ruth a grade. Not like Helena, who blew through a room like a storm, sending things scattering. Borrowed was how the house seemed to Ruth, though she had grown up here herself. Like a sweater she kept carefully because she would one day be expected to return it. To acknowledge anything more would mean that Mama might not come back, and the thought was more than she could bear.
Ruth was suddenly restless. It was not like her. Usually Helena was the one hopping around like a chimpanzee. “Bored?” Ruth had replied incredulously once when her sister remarked upon it. The notion seemed absurd, especially when there was so much work to be done. But now the house felt small and confining. She wanted to go—not into the woods, rough and deep, like Helena, but somewhere else.
Ruth tiptoed back into the bedroom to the washbasin, studying her reflection in the pale early light that just illuminated the cracked mirror. She took in her thick auburn hair and round blue eyes with a twinge of self-admiration, avoiding the scar that marred her neck. She combed her hair and patted a bit of Mama’s old lotion onto her cheeks, fighting the tears that welled up at the familiar, flowery smell. The jar of lotion Mama had given her was one of Ruth’s most prized possessions and she loved the way it soothed her cheeks and eased the redness brought on by the wind and cold. She did not know where the cream had come from or how she would replace it when the last precious drops were gone.
It was important, Mama had said, to always look one’s best, even for the most mundane of occasions. Ruth did not wear the lotion every day, though; she used to save it for Sundays when Piotr came. Her mind reeled back to one of his visits a few months earlier. The weather had been unseasonably warm and he had cajoled her into the shadows of the trees, persuaded her to let his hands wander lower and longer than they had before. But she had pushed him away a minute later and he had not tried again. Her cheeks stung now, remembering.
Turning from the mirror, she looked down at the sleeping children and a wave of affection passed over her. She had been sixteen when Karolina was born, old enough to have a family of her own if things had worked out differently. At the sight of the squiggling bundle in their mother’s arms, she’d felt a longing she could not remember with Dorie or Michal—and more than a twinge of envy as Tata hovered above, glazed eyes proud and happy. Not that Ruth was jealous of his attention—she had long since resigned herself to being the daughter he did not see, his main interest in Helena because she would walk the woods and do rugged things with him. But Ruth wanted to be the center of her own family, an adoring husband standing anxiously above her. Now she had the family, the responsibility of caring for the children, only with none of the love or affection of a husband.
“Watch the others,” she whispered into Michal’s ear, judging by the way the covers shifted that he had heard her. The girls did not move. Let me go with you, Dorie would have pled through the long, uneven fringe of hair that fell into her eyes.