Death in Twilight by Jason Fields Page B

Actually, I’m not sure when I’m not scared anymore.”
    There were several cots in the room, she picked one and sat. Aaron sat down next to her. They could both feel the wooden rails give a little, despite her small size and Aaron’s ever-shrinking weight. He held her. She held him.
    “If I’m not worried about the Gestapo showing up at my door, then I’m worried about you in here,” Yelena said. Aaron could feel her shaking her head, negating everything she’d seen and felt over the last year and a half.
    “How are things outside the ghetto?” Aaron asked, trying for a lighter tone, though he didn’t feel light.
    “It all looks the same, but everything feels different. It’s all so empty, the shelves in the stores, the streets themselves.”
    She shook her head again.
    “But, speaking of the world outside, I brought you some things I think you probably need.”
    She reached her hand into her bag.
    “I’m sure I need them. I can’t think of a single thing I don’t need,” Aaron said with a bitter laugh. “Neither can anyone else I know.”
    Yelena pulled out a thick sweater, two warm shirts and even a few pairs of underwear.
    “You would have made a terrific Jewish mother,” Aaron said. “Bringing underwear to the ghetto.”
    He pitched his voice to a gravely falsetto. “‘At least when the Germans shot him, he was wearing clean underwear!’”
    She picked up the tone.
    “‘If he wasn’t, I’d have died of embarrassment.’”
    They laughed softly together. It was a comedy routine they had shared since they’d met in a bar years before, when Aaron had begun his training in the Zendarmerie, far from Miasto.
    Yelena Gorska had been bored but well educated. Aaron had been handsome and exotic — at least by the standards of the small town where they found each other. There were a thousand things they shared in common and more that divided them. All of it was entirely beside the point. Within hours, it was obvious to both of them that they were in love.
    Yelena got an apartment with Aaron’s pay and he visited as often as he could during training. They called each other man and wife though no ceremony was ever held, socialized little and told only their closest friends. By then Aaron was estranged from his family. Yelena’s parents had both died young.
    His training complete, the couple took a small house in the town where Aaron was assigned as a gendarme. A few years later it was there that the war found them.
    Aaron became a soldier and told Yelena to go to Miasto, which seemed far enough from the front to offer some protection. She moved into a neighborhood he knew well, though he’d never lived there. When Aaron had been dumped into the city’s ghetto, he was able to contact her through a mix of bribes and telephone calls.
    It was a strange business, but even as the walls had gone up, some lines had been left uncut. Everyone assumed that either they wouldn’t last, or they were monitored. Aaron had worked the phones carefully, using only the homespun code that had developed over the months of German occupation to ask his questions.
    Aaron didn’t understand where Yelena’s courage came from. It was Yelena who had suggested that they work together to get supplies into the ghetto. It was she who bought favors from the Blue Police — Polish constables who had been coopted by the Nazis. Many of the Blue Police liked the Germans as much as the Jews did, and they were more than happy to be corrupted by the beautiful woman who cried so pitifully about her husband.
    Such long and lonely nights she must have
, they thought.
    And, at least until the tightening noose utterly strangled the Jews, the operation was highly profitable. Yelena learned that she had quite the head for business, making it grow and bringing in ever more supplies.
    The smuggling would have been impossible if the Germans themselves were less corrupt. Even now, there was money to be pillaged from the Jews, so Nazis at all