Page 22 of The Lost Husband

“Did it break your skin?” Elias asks frantically.

“No—no, I’m—I’m just stuck.” I think.

Avi wriggles the fabric of my coat around until I hear a pluck. The ground shudders beneath me again, and I clench my toes as my foot slips.

“Keep moving, Celina,” Avi says. I fix my stare on Avi’s boots and the dried blood on the wire surrounding Elias’s coat. “You’re almost there.”

I lose feeling in my hands and my lower body as I pull my last limb over the wire. I collapse into the snow as the wet, freezing fabric of my uniform clings to my ribs. I reach for the potatoes, dragging them along the snow, and shove them back into my pockets.

Avi and Elias struggle to untangle their coats from the coils as I muster the energy to push myself up and off the snow.

Gerda places her hand on my back. “Come on, dear. You’re getting soaked.”

She sounds like Mama. The thought of Mama’s hand on my back, encouraging me to try harder at whatever I was doing, was all I ever needed. The memory hits harder than the fall against the icy ground.

As soon as I’m up on my feet and we move again, echoing mumbles grow from the woods ahead, where the smoke is still calling for us. Whoever started the fire, hasn’t left yet.

The closer we get to the smoke, the louder the voices. I try and focus on the words, trying to make out the language, but nothing is clear. Almost nothing…

I stop, the snow sinking beneath me. I stare ahead with sudden reluctance, not from the unfamiliar language, but from the harsh odor whipping through the air. Smoke isn’t always just smoke—sometimes it’s a storm of human ash, which may be all I remember now.

TEN

MARCH 1942

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Soft strokes from my pencil scratch against my sketch pad as I capture the glare of light striping the vase in the center of the kitchen table. Before I complete the outline of the shape, the lighting shifts. Something more than a cloud rolling in.

A thud from the living room startles me and I drop my pencil and pad. “Noah, are you all right?” I hurry around the corner from the kitchen to the living room, finding complete darkness along the way.

The strike of a match, the singe, and the glow of a candle carve a path to Noah. “I’m sorry.” He reaches for my hand. “The Nazis are marching down our street. We need to keep the room darkening curtains in place.”

I want to tell him the Nazis can’t see into our window from the street, not up on the third floor of the building, but he knows this.

“What else is happening that you aren’t telling me?”

He makes his way over to me and wraps his arms around me back, pulling me in close. “This is our safe place in a world that’s falling apart.”

“What about the kitchen window?”

“No one is passing down the back road yet. I know that’s your source of light for drawing.”

I didn’t realize the light from the living room was too. “It’s hard not to feel like the walls are beginning to close in on us,” I say. I mean it quite literally.

“I know.” He brushes his hand in a circle along my back. “From what I’ve been hearing, and from the contacts Christoph’s been building in underground legal circles, Poland is foretelling of a future I would prefer to ignore, but I can’t.” He pauses, the silence highlighting how dry his throat is as he swallows. “They aren’t just restricting people. They’re prohibiting movement of goods… Paper, grain, ink, and rail access. Governments don’t reorganize an entire economy unless a big and permanent shift is imminent.”

“The walls really are closing in on us then,” I utter.

“I won’t let them, my love. I won’t. Trust me. That’s all you have to do. The two of us are smarter than those Nazi thugs. Remember that.”

Of course I trust him, but I know he will do anything to prevent me from living in fear too.

“The Reich has already banned us from most public places. You can’t work in a public profession, and now we have curfews.”

“It hasn’t stopped our lives. We have income from my private work, and I’d rather be in our flat with you at night, where I have you all to myself—my beautiful wife.” He brushes a soft kiss on my neck. “We can forget about the world outside this prison.”

“Do you think my parents know…what’s happening here?”