THE TIME OF LILA AND MAJA

The girls were born the year Michał died of heart disease in Taszów hospital, and Adelka started going to high school. She resented them for being born. She could not sit and read to her heart’s content, as she wanted to. Instead, her mother’s shaking voice would call her from the kitchen and ask her to help.

Those were lean years, like the prewar jackets with frayed seams that were worn now instead of an overcoat, poor, like pantries where there is never anything but a pot of lard and a few jars of honey.

Adelka could remember the night her mother gave birth to the twins and wept. Her grandfather, already ill then, sat by her bed.

“I’m almost forty. How am I going to bring up two little girls?”

“The same as the other children,” he had said.

But the entire burden of bringing up this double trouble fell on Adelka. Her mother had lots of other things to do – the cooking, the laundry, and cleaning the yard. Her father only appeared in the evenings. They spoke to each other angrily, as if they couldn’t bear the sight of each other, as if they suddenly hated each other. He would go straight down into the cellar, where he illegally tanned hides. That was how they survived. So after coming home from school Adelka had to fetch the pram and take the girls for a walk. Then she and her mother fed them and changed them, and in the evening she helped her mother to give them a bath. Only once she had watched to see they were asleep could she finally sit down to read. So when they fell ill with scarlet fever she thought it would be better for everyone if they died.

They lay in their little double bed unconscious with fever – identical, two-fold child suffering. The doctor came and said they must be wrapped in wet sheets to bring the fever down. Then he packed his bag and left. At the garden gate he told Paweł that he could find antibiotics on the black market. The word sounded miraculous, like a magic potion from a fairy tale, so Paweł got on his motorbike. In Taszów he learned that Stalin had died.

He waded through the melting snow to Ukleja’s house, but he didn’t find anyone there. So he went to the marketplace, to the district committee, to look for Widyna. The assistant’s eyes were swollen from crying, and she told him the secretary wasn’t receiving. She refused to let him go further inside. So Paweł went back outside, and looked around the town helplessly. “Whoever has already died and whoever is yet to die, Taszów is full of death,” he thought. Then he decided he should just go and drink some vodka. Right away, at once. His legs took him of their own accord to the “Cosy Corner” restaurant. There he went straight up to the bar, where Basia was flaunting her wasp waist and enormous breasts. She had pinned a piece of lace in her thick hair.

Paweł wanted to go behind the counter and cuddle up to her fragrant cleavage. She poured him a double vodka.

“You’ve heard what happened?” she asked.

He knocked back the vodka in one gulp, and Basia offered him a plate of herring in sour cream.

“I need antibiotics. Penicillin. Do you know what that is?”

“Who’s sick?”

“My daughters.”

Basia emerged from behind the counter and threw her coat over her shoulders. She led him along the back streets downhill, to the river, and in among some small cottages where the Jews used to live. Her strong legs in their nylon stockings hopped across the soggy piles of horse manure. She stopped outside one of these cottages and told him to wait. A minute later she came back and named a sum of money. It was staggeringly high. Paweł gave her a roll of banknotes. Soon he was holding a small cardboard box. The only words he understood of the message on the lid were, “Made in the United States.”

“When are you coming to see me?” she asked as he got on his motorbike.

“Not now,” he said and kissed her on the lips.

That evening the girls’ temperature dropped, and next day they were well. Misia prayed to the Virgin Mary of Jeszkotle, Queen of Antibiotics, for this sudden recovery. In the night, once she had checked to see if their foreheads were cool, she slid under Paweł’s quilt and cuddled up to him as close as she could.

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