Magda's Daughter (19 page)

‘Ned's right. You will have plenty of time to contact the Niklas family tomorrow.'

‘You do know them, then?'

‘I keep telling you, everyone knows everyone here. But I have been away from the bar long enough. Anna will need help to restock the shelves for the evening trade.'

‘Anna's sister was killed in that massacre. Was she there?'

‘I told you, the Germans assembled everyone in the village in the square.'

‘Do you think she will talk to me about it?' Helena asked.

‘I don't know,' Josef replied honestly. ‘But she grew up here, so she would have known your mother and Adam Janek.'

Helena took a last look up the lane. ‘We'll go there tomorrow,' she said to Ned.

‘I think you should write to them first, and ask if you can call,' Ned suggested.

‘All these food smells are making me hungry.' Josef began to walk back towards the bar. ‘Anna always serves flaki and baked river carp with horseradish on a Monday. Both are excellent. You are in for a treat.'

‘What's flaki?' Ned asked Josef, anxious to talk about something anything other than Adam Janek and Helena's family.

‘Tripe soup.' Josef smiled. ‘It's very good. Hot and spicy.'

‘I'll take your word for it.' Ned had never eaten tripe, and had no intention of doing so.

‘You don't have to. You can soon eat it and judge for yourself.'

Ned saw the preoccupied expression on Helena's face. ‘Try not to think about your mother for a few hours, sunshine. I promise I'll help you to find out the truth about your father.'

‘There really isn't any chance that he was Adam Janek, is there?' The enormity of her discovery was only just beginning to sink in.

‘No, sunshine, there isn't,' Ned said finally.

Helena, Ned and Josef walked back in silence. The shop was now closed and the street deserted, yet it still stank of fish. When they reached the bar, Ned and Helena looked over the half-doors. It too was deserted, apart from a blousy, middle-aged woman with dyed blonde hair, who was sitting behind the counter reading a newspaper. They both presumed that she was the mysterious Anna. There was no sign of her brother. Josef pushed open the doors.

‘Would you like to meet your guests, Anna?'

‘Not in the bar, no,' she admonished him in Polish. ‘You know women aren't allowed in here.' She eyed Ned and Helena. ‘I'll talk to you in the yard.'

‘Our landlady would like us to walk around into the yard. She will meet us there,' Helena translated for Ned.

Josef went behind the bar and tied on a canvas apron. ‘See you later.'

‘Thank you for taking us to the churchyard and the monument, Helena said.

He smiled. ‘My pleasure.'

Helena and Ned walked around the corner, through the archway and into the yard. Their landlady was already sitting on the bench beneath the outside staircase, smoking a cigarette. A tray of small glasses and a glass bottle of clear liquid stood in front of her.

‘Hello, Mrs …' Helena held out her hand, but their landlady ignored it.

‘Anna will do. It's what everyone in the village calls me. And you are Helena and Ned John?' Her voice was harsh, curt and abrupt, but Helena could detect a slight slurring in her speech. She wondered if Anna had been drinking.

‘Yes.' Helena sat at the opposite end of the bench and Ned perched on the edge of the table.

‘It says Janek in your passport.'

‘We have only just married.' Helena hated lying, but now she'd started she felt she couldn't stop.

Anna ground her cigarette to dust in a tin ashtray. ‘Josef told me that your mother was Magdalena Janek and that she has died.'

‘Two weeks ago.'

‘Did you marry before or after she died?'

‘Before,' Helena answered reluctantly. It wasn't just the lies she was telling. She wasn't accustomed to being on the receiving end of so many direct questions.

Anna looked pointedly at the engagement ring that Helena was wearing. ‘You decorate your wedding bands with diamonds in the West?'

‘I liked the ring,' Helena murmured truthfully. ‘Did you know my mother?'

‘If she was the Magdalena Janek who lived in this village, yes, I did.'

‘She was Magdalena Niklas before she married my father.'

‘Then she is the woman I knew.'

‘We've been to the churchyard. Josef showed us Adam Janek's grave.'

‘He has a fine memorial cross.' Anna opened the bottle and poured out three measures. She pushed one towards Helena and another towards Ned.

‘He does. And no, thank you.'

‘Drink it,' Ned ordered. ‘You've had a shock.'

‘Getting drunk won't help,' Helena bit back.

Ned picked up his glass and sniffed it. ‘You'll hardly get drunk on a thimbleful of local vodka.'

‘So you used the name Janek before you were married.' Anna drank her measure of vodka down in one.

‘Yes.'

‘Did your mother tell you that Adam Janek was your father?'

‘Yes.'

Anna replenished her glass. ‘Poor Adam; he was very young when he died. And he only had time to father one child – a girl with the same name as you.' She looked at Helena appraisingly.

‘So we found out in the churchyard.' Helena lifted her glass and sniffed the contents, but didn't drink it.

‘Adam Janek was very good-looking.'

‘So my mother always told me.'

‘The Janeks were the most important landowners for miles around. He was the last of them.'

‘I've already told Helena and Ned that.' Josef brought two stools out of the bar and set them on the opposite side of the table to the bench. He took one and pushed the other towards Ned. ‘Stefan is watching the bar, Anna. I told him to fetch me if anyone comes in. ‘

‘The Janeks were exceptional. Wealthy and kind,' Anna continued, as if Josef hadn't spoken. ‘If someone on one of their farms was too sick to work and couldn't pay the rent, they would waive it. Not many landlords before the war were that concerned about their tenants, I can tell you.' She stared down into her glass of vodka.

Helena opened her duffle bag and brought out her purse. She opened it and showed Anna a photograph of her mother, which she had cut to fill a clear plastic slot. It was in colour, the last one taken of Magda, at Alma's staff Christmas party.

Anna looked at it for a few seconds. ‘Yes, that is the Magdalena Niklas that I knew. Older, careworn, not as pretty as I remember, but still her.'

‘Please,' Helena begged, ‘can you tell me anything about my mother and Adam Janek?'

Anna poured herself another measure of vodka. ‘What do you want to know?'

‘My mother told me many stories about what it was like to grow up in this village, but she only talked once about her last day here.'

‘The day of the massacre?' Again Anna drank the vodka in one.

‘Yes.'

Josef spoke to Ned in a low voice, and Helena realised with gratitude that he was translating her conversation with Anna.

Recalling what Josef had said about the villagers' reluctance to talk about the killings, Helena searched for a less horrific memory that her mother had entrusted to her. ‘Mama told me about her wedding to Adam Janek. She said the whole village came, and there was dancing, feasting and music in the square for three days and nights.'

‘Theirs was the last big wedding here before the war. Magdalena was the prettiest girl in the village, so it seemed only right that she caught the richest man. The whole countryside came together in those days to celebrate a wedding. And a Janek wedding was a once-in-a-lifetime occasion. Everyone wanted to pay their respects to the bride and groom.'

‘My mother said that she travelled miles to get the material for her dress. And it was real silk.' Although Helena hated herself for thinking of her mother as a liar, after discovering that Adam Janek couldn't possibly be her father, she felt the need to check every single thing Magda had told her.

‘Adam arranged for Magda and her mother to pick it up from someone he knew in Cracow, and the Niklas family made it up beautifully. That dress was the envy of every girl in the village. My sister Matylda was fifteen years old when your mother married Adam Janek, and Magda promised Matylda that when it was her turn to marry she would lend her the dress. When Matylda turned sixteen there was no stopping her nagging to be allowed to marry. She used to say, “There won't be any expense, Magda will loan me her dress”' Anna pulled a pack of cigarettes from her pocket. ‘But by then it was wartime and Matylda's boyfriend was no Adam Janek. He wasn't just poor. He was fighting and living with the partisans in the forest. My parents were afraid that his life would be a short one. With good reason, as it turned out. It's just that they never thought that Matylda's life would be short as well.'

‘Adam Janek didn't fight?'

‘Not with the partisans. He thought it his duty to be the spokesman for the village. The Germans controlled everything, and made more and more demands on us every day, for food, farm produce, workers to send into the Reich. My parents were over forty, so we thought they'd be safe. But they weren't. They were taken in 1942 and never came back. I tried to find out what had happened to them. But it was as though they had vanished from the face of the earth.' Anna's hand shook as she struck a match and lit another cigarette.

‘I'm sorry.'

The silence grew in intensity until it was almost palpable. When Josef moved closer to Ned, the thud of the stool legs landing on the dirt floor of the yard startled Helena, making her jump.

Anna broke the silence. ‘It all happened a long time ago,' she said harshly, adding, ‘You're here to ask about your mother, not my sister and parents. The old wives in the village had almost given up hope of Magdalena and Adam having a child when their daughter was born. They had been married some years, and tongues had begun to wag – that one or the other was barren. But then Helena arrived and proved the gossips wrong. You always expect men to want boys but Adam doted on that baby. For three weeks he was the happiest man on earth then …' She drew heavily on her cigarette.

‘My mother told me that the German soldiers came into the village without warning and rounded everyone up.'

‘I knew they were coming, and so did my brother and the priest, because the partisans called here in the early hours of that morning. About one or two o'clock. This bar was a meeting place. Partisans came late at night to barter with the farmers, who sold them black-market food. Messages were passed on, and guns, ammunition and petrol stolen from the Germans were delivered to and distributed through our back door. The Germans were suspicious. They raided us many times but never found anything. The partisans told us there were rumours in the town that the Germans were planning some kind of action. They'd had a tip-off from one of the clerks who worked for the Nazis, and were going into the woods to warn the other partisan groups to move further away from the roads. But we knew what “actionË® meant. The Germans had cleared the Poles out of many villages to make room for the ethnic German settlers they had brought in from the Baltic States like Latvia and Lithuania.'

‘Why?' Helena asked.

‘To Germanise Poland. That was the German plan. To re-settle Poland with Germans, who could control the country. We Poles would only be allowed to stay in our homeland as labourers and servants. We learned that early on in the invasion when the Germans closed all the high schools and made it illegal to educate any Polish child beyond the age of twelve.'

‘My mother told me about that and the effect it had on her younger brother and sister,' Helena said.

‘Lack of secondary education was the least of our problems at the time,' Anna continued. ‘Children can always be educated at home. After the partisans left, my brother went to Adam Janek to ask his advice. Afraid that the Germans were going to conscript more people to work in the Reich, Adam suggested that my brother take all the young people into the woods and hide them. Adam, Stefan and the priest were still going from house to house at four o'clock in the morning, telling people to pack a few necessities and run to the woods when the German convoy drove in.' Anna waited until Josef had finished translating what she'd said.

‘The Germans parked a tank in front of the church. We all knew that they could – and would, if the mood took them – blow up the village, because other villages had been razed to the ground. Soldiers jumped out of the lorries they'd parked behind the tank, and went round the houses, rousing everyone from their beds and demanding they go into the square. Because of Adam, my brother and the priest, most people were dressed. When we assembled, the Germans started separating the young people from the old. There weren't many young men; most were with the partisans. Adam had his arm around Magdalena and he was holding Helena. He tried talking to the commanding officer. He spoke good German and Russian as well as Polish. The priest told me later than Adam was asking why they wanted to take the young people. The commanding officer ignored him. One of the soldiers tried to snatch Helena from Adam's arms. He refused to let go of the baby or Magdalena. The soldier knocked Magdalena back, pulled out his gun and shot baby Helena. The bullet passed through her body, killing both her and Adam. That started a panic. Everyone ran, and the Germans opened fire. When they stopped shooting there were nineteen bodies in the square. The soldiers went into houses to look for more people. A few young girls had hidden in an old wooden house in the lane leading out of the square. The Germans saw them, set fire to the house, and shot them when they tried to leave. It wasn't the only house they burned to the ground that day.'

‘And my mother?'

‘Magdalena was pushed into line along with fifteen other young women, two young men and about a dozen young children and babies.' Anna closed her eyes for a moment as though trying to shut out the memory.