“He had a gap in his teeth and cherry juice on his chin,” I said. “He was the most stubborn boy in Poland.”
Maya laughed.
She’s worn it every day since.
Part Six: The Package
It was a Tuesday evening in early October. The leaves on the maple tree outside our window were turning red. I was in the kitchen making chicken soup, because it was cold and Maya had looked tired that morning.
I heard her come up the stairs. She was walking slower than usual.
When she came into the kitchen, she was holding a small package. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with old-fashioned string.
Her face looked strange. Pale.
“Grandma,” she said. “Something really strange happened at work today.”
I turned off the stove.
“What happened?” I asked.
She set the package on the kitchen table very carefully, like it might break.
“You know I’ve been working at Saint Hedwig’s Senior Residence,” she said. “On Belmont Avenue.”
“The Polish one,” I said. “Yes.”
“There’s a man there,” Maya said. “He’s in the memory care wing, but he’s not confused. He just moved there because he fell last spring and broke his hip. I’ve been doing his physical therapy for six weeks.”
She sat down at the table.
“He’s very old,” she said. “Ninety-seven, I think. He doesn’t talk much. He mostly just watches the window. But he’s always polite. He always says thank you in Polish.”
“Today,” Maya said, “I was helping him with his walker exercises. And he kept staring at me. At my neck.”
She reached up and touched the swallow pendant.
“He asked where I got it,” she said. “I told him my grandmother gave it to me. He asked where my grandmother was from. I said Warsaw.”
Her voice got very quiet.
“He stopped walking,” she said. “He just stood there holding the walker, staring at me. And then he asked if my grandmother’s name was Zofia.”
My heart skipped.
Nobody had called me Zofia in decades. In America, everyone knew me as Zoe. Even my children. Even Abe, most of the time.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I said yes,” Maya said. “And he sat down right there in the hallway. On the floor. With his broken hip. The nurses came running.”
My hands were shaking. I put them on the table to make them stop.
“Is he all right?” I asked.
“He’s fine,” Maya said. “He wouldn’t let them help him up for a long time. He just sat there crying. Then he asked me to wait. He asked one of the nurses to bring something from his room.”
She pushed the package toward me across the table.
“He asked me to give you this,” she said.
“How did he know you were my granddaughter?” I asked. My voice sounded very far away.
“The swallow,” Maya said. “He said he’d know it anywhere. He said he picked it out himself.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“Did he tell you his name?” I asked.
Maya shook her head.
“No,” she said. “I asked. He said you’d know. He said if you didn’t know, then it didn’t matter.”
“He asked me to tell you one more thing,” Maya said.
“What?”
She looked at me with her dark eyes. Abe’s eyes.
“He said,” she said slowly, “you have to keep your promise.”
Part Seven: What Was Inside
My hands began to tremble so badly that Maya had to help me untie the string.
The paper was old. Soft. It had been folded and unfolded many times. Inside was a small wooden box, the kind that cigars used to come in, with a brass clasp.
I opened it.
The first thing I saw was a book.
A small hardcover, faded green, with a picture of an elephant and two children on the cover. The corners were worn round. The spine was cracked.
W pustyni i w puszczy. In Desert and Wilderness. The adventure story about two children lost in Africa.
The book I’d borrowed from Stanislaw in August of 1939. The book I’d taken with me on the train. The book I’d thought I’d lost somewhere in the crossing.
No.
I hadn’t taken it.
I remembered now. I’d left it on the kitchen table that last night, in the rush, while my mother was crying and Babcia was refusing to come. I’d meant to grab it. I never did.
I opened the cover with shaking fingers. On the first page, in a child’s careful handwriting, it said:
This book belongs to Stanislaw Nowak. Lent to Zofia Lewin. She has to give it back.
Under the book was a photograph.
It was small and brown and curled at the edges. Two children sitting on stone steps. A boy with hair sticking up in the back and a gap in his front teeth. A girl with dark braids and a tiny pendant at her throat.
They were both squinting into the sun. The boy was grinning. The girl was laughing.
I had never seen this photograph before. I didn’t even know it existed.
On the back, in faded pencil, someone had written: Staś i Zosia. Czerwiec 1939.
Stas and Zosia. June 1939.
Under the photograph was something wrapped in a scrap of faded blue fabric.
I unwrapped it.
It was a ring.
Not a real ring. A child’s ring, made from a twist of copper wire, with a tiny blue glass bead where a stone would go. The wire was dark with age. The bead was chipped.
And under the ring was a small iron key on a loop of string.
My grandmother’s key.
The key she had pressed into my hand at the door. The key I had held in my fist on the train. The key I thought I’d lost somewhere between Warsaw and Chicago.
I had not lost it.
I’d left it on the table too. Beside the book.
At the bottom of the box was a folded piece of paper.
I unfolded it. It was a letter, written in Polish, in shaky old-man handwriting.
I hadn’t read Polish in years. I had to go slowly.
Zofia,
I kept the book. I kept the key. I made the ring the week after you left, because I wanted to be ready when you came back.
You did not come back. But I never stopped being ready.
I am at Saint Hedwig’s, Room 214. I am very old and very slow. But I am still the most stubborn boy in Warsaw.
You said I’d better not forget.
I didn’t.
Staś
The moment I finished reading, I lost the ability to speak.
I sat at my kitchen table with a cigar box in my lap, holding a copper wire ring and a little iron key, and I cried like I had not cried since I was ten years old.
Maya came around the table and wrapped her arms around me.
She didn’t say anything. She just held on.
Part Eight: Room 214
We went the next morning.
Maya drove. I sat in the passenger seat holding the cigar box on my lap. I’d put on my good blue dress and my pearl earrings, and then I’d taken them off, and then put them back on. I felt ridiculous. I felt ten years old.
“Grandma,” Maya said gently at a red light. “Are you okay?”
“I’m ninety-six years old,” I said. “And I’m nervous about meeting a boy.”
Maya laughed. Then she reached over and squeezed my hand.
Saint Hedwig’s Senior Residence is a red brick building on Belmont Avenue with white columns and a garden out front full of marigolds. A statue of a saint stands near the entrance. The lobby smelled like coffee and floor polish.
Maya signed us in at the front desk. She pushed my wheelchair down a long hallway with framed pictures of Polish churches on the walls.
We stopped in front of Room 214.
The door was open.
Inside was a small room with a bed, a dresser, an armchair by the window, and a bookshelf crammed with books. On the windowsill was a pot of red geraniums.
In the armchair by the window sat an old man.
He was small, the way very old men get small. His shoulders were stooped. His hands were spotted and knotted with arthritis, folded on top of a wooden cane. He wore a gray cardigan buttoned wrong.
His hair was white and thin. But it stuck up in the back.
He turned his head when he heard the wheelchair.
He looked at me.
For a long moment, neither of us said anything.
Then he smiled.
And there, between his front teeth, was the gap.
“Zosia,” he said.
His voice was thin and cracked, like an old record. But I knew it. I knew it the way you know a song you haven’t heard in eighty-seven years.
“Staś,” I whispered.
He tried to stand up. Maya rushed forward to help him, but he waved her away. He pushed himself up on his cane, one inch at a time, until he was standing.
Then he walked toward me. Slowly. Three steps. Four.
He stopped in front of my wheelchair. He looked down at me with watery blue eyes.
“You got old,” he said.
“So did you,” I said.
“I’m still taller,” he said.
And then we were both laughing. And crying. And he was bending down, and I was reaching up, and we held on to each other in the middle of Room 214 at Saint Hedwig’s Senior Residence while my granddaughter stood in the doorway with her hands over her mouth.
Part Nine: What Happened
We talked for six hours that first day.
Maya brought us coffee and sandwiches from the cafeteria. Then she brought us dinner. Then she sat in the hallway with her phone and called her mother and her aunt and her uncle and told them all to come.
Stanislaw and I sat by the window with our knees almost touching, holding hands like children.
He told me everything.
When his mother brought him back from the countryside that September, he ran up the stairs to our apartment. The door was open. We were gone.
Babcia Ruchla was sitting alone at the dining table with the brass candlesticks.
“Where’s Zofia?” he asked.
Babcia shook her head. She held out the book and the key.
“She left these for you,” she said. “By accident. Keep them safe for her.”
The war came. Warsaw was bombed. Our building was damaged but still standing. The Nowaks stayed.
When things got worse, when people like my grandmother were being taken from their homes, Mrs. Nowak did something very brave and very dangerous.
She brought Babcia Ruchla across the hall to their apartment. She hid her in a small room behind a wardrobe.
“For two years,” Stanislaw said, “your grandmother lived with us. She slept in that little room. She taught me to play chess. She taught my mother to make cinnamon bread. Every Friday night, after the curtains were closed, she lit those two candles and sang. Very quietly.”
He swallowed.
“I learned the words,” he said. “I still know them.”
Babcia got sick in the winter of 1942. Pneumonia. There was no doctor they could call, no hospital where she would be safe.
Mrs. Nowak sat with her every night. So did Stanislaw.
“She died in February,” he said. “In her sleep. My mother held her hand.”
He squeezed my fingers.
“Her last words were about you,” he said. “She said, Tell my little bird she was right to go. Tell her to come back someday.”
I couldn’t speak.
For eighty-four years, I had not known what happened to my grandmother. My father had searched until the day he died. There were no records. No grave. No answers.
And all that time, she’d been safe. Loved. Held. By the family across the hall.
“We couldn’t bury her properly,” Stanislaw said quietly. “It wasn’t safe. My father and I carried her at night to the old cemetery on Okopowa Street. We put her near the wall. My mother wrote her name on a stone and buried it beside her, so someone would know someday.”
He looked at me.
“After the war,” he said, “I went back. The stone was still there. I had a proper marker made. It says Ruchla Lewin. Grandmother. Beloved.”
Part Ten: Chicago
“The Uprising came in 1944,” Stanislaw said. “I was fifteen. I carried messages through the sewers. My father was killed in the fighting. My mother and I survived. Barely.”
He looked out the window at the marigolds.
“After the war, I studied engineering,” he said. “In Kraków. I built bridges. Real ones. Over the Vistula.”
“Did they reach the clouds?” I asked.
He laughed.
“Not quite,” he said. “But almost.”
He married a woman named Halina in 1954. They had two sons. In 1958, when things in Poland were very hard, they came to America.
To Chicago.
I stared at him.
“You’ve been in Chicago,” I said slowly, “since 1958?”
“Avondale,” he said. “Then Jefferson Park. Then Norwood Park.”
“I lived in Albany Park,” I said. “Since 1952.”
“Two miles,” he said. “Maybe three.”
We looked at each other for a long time.
Sixty-eight years. Two miles. Maybe three.
