The Kommandant's Girl Read Free Page B

your family to say nothing.” He continued, “It will be dangerous for you if anyone knows you are my wife once I am gone.”
    “ Dangerous? Jacob, I am a Jew in a country occupied by Nazis. How much more dangerous can it get?”
    “Just do it,” he insisted.
    “Okay,” I lied, taking the paper from him and sliding it under the mattress. I would not burn the one thing that would always link me to him.
    I lay awake after Jacob had begun to breathe his long, even sleep. Softly, I touched his hair where it reached his collar, burying my nose there and inhaling his scent. I traced his hand with mine, trying to etch the shape in my mind. He shifted and grunted, already fighting the enemy in his sleep. As my eyelids at last grew heavy, I struggled to stay awake. There would be plenty of time for sleeping later.
    But eventually I lost to my exhaustion. I awoke hours later to the sounds of the street sweepers brushing the sidewalks, and the rhythmic hooves of the deliverymen’s horses banging against the cobblestones. Outside, it was still dark. I ran my hand across the empty space in bed beside me, the sheets still warm and rumpled where my husband had lain. His musky scent hung heavily in the air above me. I did not have to look up to know that his rucksack and other belongings were gone.
    Jacob had disappeared. We’d been married for six weeks.
    “…hungry?” Krysia’s voice jars me from my thoughts. I realize that she has come into the parlor and has been speaking to me, but I have not heard what she has said. I turn to her reluctantly, as though I have been woken from a pleasant dream. She holds out a plate of bread and cheese toward me.
    “No, thank you.” I shake my head, still half lost in memories.
    Krysia sets down the plate on the coffee table and comes over to me. “That’s a beautiful picture,” she says, gesturing toward my wedding photo. I do not answer. She lifts up the photo of Jacob as a child. “But we should put these away so no one sees them.”
    “Who would see them?” I ask. “I mean, it’s just the three of us here.” Krysia let her maid and her gardener go before Lukasz and I arrived, and in the weeks we have lived with her, there has been no one else inside the house.
    “You never know,” she replies. Her voice sounds strange. “Better to be safe.” She holds out her hand and I hesitate, not wanting to surrender one of the last ties I have to my husband. She’s right, I realize. There’s no other choice. With a sigh, I hand her the wedding photograph and watch numbly as she carries it from the room.

CHAPTER 2
    T he morning Jacob disappeared, not daring to leave a note, I sat in bed for several minutes, blinking and looking around the bedroom. “He’s not coming back,” I said aloud. I was too stunned to cry. I rose and dressed, my movements reflexive, as though I’d rehearsed for this moment a thousand times. I packed my small suitcase as quickly as I could. Reluctantly, I took off my engagement and wedding rings, and slipped them, along with our marriage certificate, into the bottom of my suitcase.
    At the door of our bedroom, I hesitated. On the crowded bookshelf by the door, nearly buried beneath Jacob’s physics textbooks and political treatises, lay a small stack of novels, Ivanhoe, Pride and Prejudice and a few others, mostly by foreign authors. I reached out to touch the bindings of the books, remembering. Jacob had given these to me shortly after we had met. He used to come visit me at the library every day, and often he brought me small gifts, such as an apple or a flower or, best of all, a book. I laughed the first time he did this. “Bringing books to a library?” I teased, examining the slim, leather-covered tome, a translation of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations.
    “But I am sure you do not have this one!” he protested in earnest, holding out the book, his brown eyes smiling. And he was right, for although I had already read many books, I had not