Page 4 of The Storyteller of Krakow

‘Right,’ Kasia said, stopping outside the wrought-iron fencing. ‘You’ll go straight back inside?’ she asked.

‘You not coming in?’

‘I have to get this one home,’ Kasia said, looking at Hana.

‘Must be nice to finish early for the day then?’

Kasia shook her head. ‘I have no one to watch her. I need to be here, really.’

‘I said I would, you know, watch her. I can tell her about the bear.’ I tried to inject a pleasant pitch to my voice, yet even to my ears it sounded too demanding, too controlling.

‘Thanks, but I wouldn’t put that on you,’ she said and gave me the briefest of smiles.

‘Okay.’ I turned away from her and walked up the gravelled driveway towards the ‘home’ that was not mine and never really would be. As I reached the door, I looked over my shoulder and watched Kasia and her daughter walk away. I wished she had let me talk to the girl, tell her about Wojtek. It had been years since anyone had listened to those particular stories, and goddamn it, I missed those days and would be happy to be taken back into that part of the past again.

‘Lena!’ Joanna opened the door before I could and began to give me her lecture. For once I didn’t argue; I let her say what she needed to and made my way to my room, all the while wondering how I could get Kasia to trust me with her daughter for just one afternoon, just one small window of time so I could show someone who I really was instead of this old, troublesome woman they all had me labelled as.

If only they knew, I thought as I opened the door into my room. If only they knew about Lena Zielińska and who she used to be – a fearless woman, a woman who wore red lipstick, a woman who met a bear and how that bear saved her life.

If only.

2

JANUARY 2014, KRAKÓW

Willa Nadziej (Hope Villa residential home)

I couldn’t sleep. That bear’s face was in my mind, his plastic snout that was nothing at all like Wojtek’s, was bugging me. I tried to read one of the many novels I had scattered about my room, but I could not concentrate on any of my stories – the made-up ones at least. It was Wojtek’s story that was pulling at me.

Although, it wasn’t just the bear itself. It was what he dragged up with him. A cheap toy with a plastic snout shouldn’t be able to do that, but it had. All evening I found myself casting about for things to hold on to; names, faces, places, the order of events, like a woman patting her pockets for a lost key. At home, days blurred. You ate, you slept, you sat, you repeated. Memories became something you could misplace without anyone noticing. And I had mislaid enough in my time to know the panic of it. So I lay there in the dark, listening to the building breathe, and tried to pin the past down before it floated off again.

I had so very little after moving here six years ago, after my minor stroke that left me with nothing more than a slight lisp and a shuffled gait when I got too tired. I’d gotten rid of so much, assuming as one does at my age, and after a stroke, that one is on that downwards trajectory towards the grave, so what was the point of keeping stuff? I had no children, no grandchildren, so it all went in the bin save for my books, a few photographs and some old journals I’d written sporadically over the years, little snippets of memories that came unburdened to me, and which I’d felt were worth writing down.

But since meeting Hana, I wanted to get my story straight, just in case Kasia let me tell her about the bear, Wojtek. So, despite the tiredness, I turned on a light, delved into a battered leather holdall and drew out the journals and the photos.

Oddly enough, reading through my scribbled notes did not draw me back into the past as I thought it would. I realised then that the memories were still there in my mind, perhaps slightly altered, but still a fuller picture than the chicken scratchings I had put on paper.

As I closed the journals, I wondered why I wanted to speak to Hana. I’d never sought out children before. Not because I hated them, exactly, but because I never knew what to do with all that noisy, untidy life. Children come with questions, and sticky hands, and the constant expectation that you will soften. I wasn’t made for soft. Yet I’d spent years as a doctor patching up the aftermath of other people’s lives – women with split lips and bruises they lied about, girls with fevers, babies with lungs that rattled like old pipes. I could hold a child steady while I stitched a cut. I could calm a mother enough to get her to breathe. I could do useful. Love, though – love was another language entirely and I so very often had gotten it wrong in the past.

So what was it about Hana that tugged at me? It wasn’t Bogdan’s death. Death was just the last bow, as I’d already told Leon, and it rarely surprised me any more. It was something else; something in the way she held herself, careful and watchful, as if she expected the world to knock her over.

I made myself a cup of tea and sat in my green armchair, looking out towards the city’s lights. It was then that it clicked. Piotr, my brother. She reminded me of him. Her nervous way, her pretending to be poorly when she clearly wasn’t. Quite frankly, I’d bet she was being bullied at school; she had that same pale, retreating look about her that my brother had had.

And then, the bear. The bear that was taught in schools, the bear that went to war, the brave bear. But I knew him only as Wojtek and for such a brief part of my life, too. I wondered, sat here now, whether in the recesses of this addled mind I had thought the story, or rather my story of Wojtek, would help the poor child. Take away some of that melancholic air that hung around her and her missing glove.

There was something familiar in Hana’s quietness that I didn’t like admitting to. Not the bear, not the stories – just her. The way she watched first and spoke second. The way she held on to her mother’s hand as if letting go would make the world tilt. I had seen that kind of careful child before, and I had lived with the knowledge of what happens when the wrong person decides to make sport of it. People always imagined guilt as loud, a grand confession. Mine had never been like that. It was small and persistent, like a stone in a shoe: you could walk on it, you could pretend you were fine, but every so often it rubbed and reminded you exactly where you were going. Hana brought that feeling back. And with it, my memories of Piotr.

Piotr was thirteen. Me eleven. I was younger than him, but I was not as quiet or as sensitive as he was, so I should have known better. I wasn’t the best sister, nor was I the best ‘girl’. I eschewed dolls, dresses and tea parties, favouring instead wearing too big trousers held up by my father’s belt, and a pretty blouse to give it some oomph.

If my parents had been like other parents, then I was sure they would have whipped me, or at least yelled, but they were too concerned with their patients to pay me the mind that I perhaps needed to knock me into shape.

My father, a doctor, and my mother, a nurse, worked long hours, worried about their patients and their village on the outskirts of Siedlce. An eclectic mix they dealt with. Some Russians, Jews, Polish Catholics who still did not believe in the power of science, gypsies, and any transients who appeared in town. They didn’t discriminate, never turned anyone away. Unusual for the time, I’m sure, but that’s who they were.

Then there was Piotr and me. We were left to our own devices much of the time, as I had run off two housekeepers and one nanny, and my parents decided Piotr would be able to take care of me.

There was a day, like I said, when I was eleven and he thirteen, when I did something that stayed with me. The guilt was not grand or holy. It was a nagging thing, a constant scratch under the skin, and at my age there was plenty of skin for it to worry at. I knew, practically, that I had not killed my brother. A bullet had done that, and a war, and men in uniforms making decisions far above the heads of children in an orchard. But life was not only made of practical truths. It was also made of the small moments that tilted you without you realising. One shove, one humiliation, one choice made in a hot second, and then everything after had to adjust around it. Sometimes I wondered if that day had nudged Piotr into becoming someone else; if it had put something sharp in him, something that later pointed him towards the army, towards proving, towards leaving. Perhaps it was nonsense. Perhaps he would have gone anyway. But when you were old, and you had nothing but time, you started tracing lines back through your life, looking for the moment the path had split. And for me, it always split there.

Before I could think more on it, I felt my eyelids close, not to sleep, but to be drawn back to see my brother again, his own pale face. Because before I could ever get to the bear, I had to understand how I had gotten to meet him in the first place.