He kept the Fiat in sight.
That was the only rule that mattered now.
Not the road. Not the noise. Not the sky. Just the small, dust-coated shape of Hanna’s car ahead of him, its rear window smeared, its movement uneven over broken ground. Elias fixed his gaze on it as if the act of looking alone could hold it in place.
Smoke still hung low over the street. It moved in slow drifts, disturbed by passing bodies, by the wake of the two cars, by the distant concussions that had not stopped, only spaced themselves out into something more irregular, more unpredictable. The air tasted wrong — chalk and ash and something bitter beneath it.
Anna’s face was still at the glass.
He could see it through the rear window of the Fiat when the angle was right — small, pale, turned forward now. No longer twisting back. No longer fighting to see what had been taken from her.
Forward.
The street itself had lost its shape. Elias knew this stretch. Twelve hours ago his father had driven them both back home in the fiat, noticing things because there had been time to notice them — light on windows, a man closing his shop, the slow rhythm of evening settling into place. Now it was the same street and not the same street at all. The geometry remained, but everything human about it had been stripped away or broken open.
Ahead, the road narrowed without warning.
Hanna slowed.
Elias did the same, easing off the accelerator, the Alfa’s engine dropping to a rougher note as the tyres rolled over glass and grit. He leaned forward slightly, trying to see past the Fiat.
The tram lay across the tracks at an angle that made no sense.
One end still on the rails, the other lifted and twisted, its body tilted as if something had picked it up and set it down wrong. One of the carriage windows was shattered completely, another cracked through in a spiderweb that caught the light.
The doors hung open. People were still inside — he could see movement, slow, uncertain, figures trying to orient themselves in a space that had changed shape around them.
Others were already outside.
A man sitting on the pavement, staring at his hands as if they belonged to someone else. A woman standing beside the tram with her mouth open, not speaking, just breathing too fast. A child crying somewhere he could not see.
Hanna brought the Fiat almost to a stop.
For a moment it seemed as though they might not get through.
Then Józef’s voice, faint but precise, reached them even through the closed windows of the Alfa as Hanna cracked hers open.
“Between the tram and the wall,” he said. “There is space. Take it slowly.”
Elias watched the Fiat edge forward.
There was a gap. Not one meant for cars — meant for people, perhaps, before the wall had partially collapsed — but there was enough if you did not hesitate.
Hanna did not hesitate.
She turned the wheel, guiding the Fiat through with inches to spare, the side mirror nearly brushing broken brick. The car jolted once over something unseen and then straightened.
Elias followed.
The Alfa felt wider. It was not, but it felt it. He adjusted his angle, breath held without realising it, easing through the same narrow passage. For a second the world narrowed to stone on one side, metal on the other. Then he was through.
Behind them, the tram remained, tilted, abandoned, already becoming part of the obstruction the city was turning into.
They moved on.
Marszałkowska should have opened up.
It did, but not in the way Elias remembered.
The boulevard stretched ahead, wide enough still to take them, but one side of it had been torn apart. Not flattened — this was not that kind of destruction yet — but struck, repeatedly, unevenly. A building here with its upper floors collapsed inward. Another with its windows blown out entirely, curtains hanging like torn fabric.
Smoke rose in thin columns from multiple points, not yet merging, but close to it.
He saw the pharmacy.
Or what was left of it.
The green lamp was dark, the glass shattered, the frame hanging at an angle. The shopfront had partially caved in. Shelves were visible through the break, medicines scattered across the floor in pale shapes. The lamp that had been burning last night when he drove past it in his father’s car, the clarinet still playing on the radio, the city not yet knowing what the morning intended.
He said nothing.
He kept his hands on the wheel.
The bookshop was worse. The upper floors had given way, collapsing into themselves, the facade still standing but hollowed out behind it. Books were scattered across the pavement, pages lifting in the disturbed air. He watched one turn over slowly in the wake of the Fiat and thought, without meaning to, of Anna’s notebook on the sideboard. Of whether it was still there. Of whether anything was still there.
He stopped thinking about it.
The Fiat ahead moved with a kind of absolute focus. Hanna did not slow for anything she did not have to. She threaded the car between obstacles with the precision of someone who had made a decision and would not revisit it.
Traffic — if it could still be called that — was thickening. Not organised. Not directional. People moved in every direction at once. Some pushing carts. Some carrying children. Some carrying nothing at all. A car stood at an angle across part of the road, its door open, no sign of the driver.
Elias adjusted his path constantly, small corrections, never stopping, always keeping the Fiat in sight.
Beside him, Margaret spoke.
“They’re circling.”
He glanced at her, then back to the road. “What?”
“The planes.” Her voice was quiet but certain. “Listen.”
He did.
At first there was only the general noise — the distant concussions, the murmur of voices, the scrape of movement. Then, beneath it, something else. A change in the tone of the engines above. Not departing. Not continuous. Returning.
He swallowed. “Yes.”
He did not ask how she knew.
The silence inside the Alfa had the quality of something under pressure.
Not empty. Not comfortable. Full of things that had no place in a car on a burning street and were present regardless.
Margaret broke it with the practical thing first, the way she always did.
“Józef needs a doctor.”
“I know.”
“The leg has been bleeding for — I don’t know how long. And the arm—”
“I know.”
Neither of them completed the sentence that followed. A doctor. In Warsaw. This morning. The words existed without being said and were worse for it.
A moment passed.
Then Margaret shifted slightly in her seat, her gaze still forward. Her voice had the careful quality it had when she was approaching something she had decided needed to be said and had been deciding how to say it for some time.
“The drawings,” she said. “Anna’s drawings. When we stop — when we find somewhere — I need to speak-“
The bomb cut her off.
Not close — parallel street, a block east — but close enough to compress the moment, to strip the air out of it before it could settle into meaning. The car shuddered. Outside, every person on the street flinched simultaneously.
Margaret stopped.
Elias kept the wheel straight. Kept his eyes on the Fiat. Kept moving.
When the noise had folded back into the general register of the city’s destruction he glanced at her. She was looking at the road. Her face had closed in the way it closed when she had decided something was not for now.
He did not push.
He registered it — the specific word she had reached for, the specific request, the alone — and filed it in the part of him that was not driving, that was keeping a list of things that needed attention when the world permitted attention. He assumed it was about Anna’s state of mind. He assumed a great many things about Margaret that he would spend the rest of his life revising.
He kept driving.
In the Fiat, Anna sat very still.
The book rested in her lap. Her hand lay on top of it, not gripping, just there, as if contact alone mattered.
Hanna glanced at her once. Then again.
“Anna,” she said carefully. “Look at me.”
No response.
“Anna.”
A pause. Then, very quietly, without turning her head:
“Where are we going to sleep?”
The question landed in the car with more weight than anything that had come before it.
Hanna opened her mouth. Closed it again.
“We’ll find somewhere,” Józef said from the back.
His voice was thinner than it should have been. It cost him something to speak. That much was clear.
Hanna checked the mirror.
He was still conscious.
That was what mattered.
They were two streets from Marszałkowska when the sound came.
It did not resemble anything Elias had heard before — and he had been hearing things all morning that had no category. This was different. It began high, then descended, a mechanical screaming that seemed to tear the air as it dropped.
Not just loud. Designed. Something in the pitch of it bypassed thought entirely and arrived directly in the body, in the back of the neck and the chest and the palms of the hands. He understood in the half-second he had to understand anything that this was what it was built to do. The sound itself was the weapon. The bomb was secondary.
Every person in the street reacted.
Heads snapped upward. Movement faltered. For a fraction of a second the entire street held its breath.
Then the bomb fell.
Not on them.
Parallel street. Close enough.
The pressure hit first, travelling through the buildings on either side, a deep concussive force that made both cars shudder. Elias felt it through the steering column, through his arms, through his chest.
Ahead, a section of building gave way.
Not gradual. Immediate.
Thirty metres in front of the Fiat, the facade dropped into the road, brick and timber and plaster collapsing outward in a thick choking cloud. Debris piled waist-high across the street in seconds.
Hanna stopped.
Elias stopped behind her.
For five seconds, nothing moved.
In the Fiat, Anna had her hands over her ears, eyes shut tight.
In the Alfa, Margaret’s hand rested against the dashboard, fingers spread, steadying herself.
Then Józef’s voice:
“Left. Take Sienna Street.”
Hanna turned.
Sienna Street.
Elias knew it. The butcher, the smoked meat his mother had bought for the bigos two days ago in a different life. The familiarity of it arrived without permission and left without ceremony.
The road was passable. Just. They moved forward, slower now, the tension inside both cars tightening with every metre.
Then they saw the crowd.
It was not moving.
That was the worst part. Not panic. Not scattering. Just a mass of people pressed along the sides of the street, all facing the same direction, all fixed on something ahead that the cars could not yet see.
Hanna slowed. Stopped.
Elias felt the decision before he made it.
He left the engine running.
Margaret said his name once — sharp, warning — but he was already opening the door.
The air outside was thicker, louder. He pushed through the edge of the crowd, ignoring the looks, the bodies, the voices asking questions he did not answer.
Then he saw it.
The building had come down completely. Not partial. Not damaged. Gone. The facade and two floors lay across the street from wall to wall, an impassable mass of broken structure. No way through. Not for cars. Not even easily for people.
And in front of it —
Pani Lewandowska.
She stood beside her handcart, two bags secured neatly on it, posture straight, expression composed in a way that seemed almost impossible given the circumstances. She saw him. Recognition flickered. No surprise.
“Twarda Street,” she said immediately. “It was clear twenty minutes ago. Go now.”
No hesitation. No question. Then she turned back to the crowd, already directing movement, already assigning purpose where there was none, having appointed herself to a job that needed doing and simply beginning to do it.
Elias did not argue.
He turned back.
“Twarda,” he said as he got back into the Alfa.
Margaret nodded once.
Ahead, Hanna had already begun to move.
Twarda Street held.
For now.
It ran closer to the western side of the city, and from here Elias could see the difference. Smoke there was thicker, rising in a column that no longer suggested individual impacts but something sustained and continuous.
The sky above it darkened even in the morning light.
They were making progress.
The station was close. Four blocks, perhaps.
He felt it — dangerously, briefly — a flicker of something like hope. He did not trust it. He kept driving.
Then the Fiat stopped.
No obstacle. No visible cause. Just — stopped.
Elias braked hard, the Alfa jerking slightly as he brought it to a halt behind her.
He knew before he reached the door. Something in the way the Fiat had stopped — not gradually, not cautiously, but suddenly in the middle of movement, as if the decision had been made for it.
He was out of the car in seconds.
Hanna was already trying the ignition again.
Nothing.
Józef’s head turned slightly in the back seat. He had heard it too — the change in the engine’s note over the last twenty minutes, the thing it had been developing and neither of them had had the space to address.
“Flooded,” he said.
Elias reached the open window. “What?”
“The choke,” Józef said, each word measured, each one costing him. “Too much fuel. Hold it open. Try again.”
Hanna did as he said.
The engine turned. Failed.
“Again,” Józef said.
Second attempt. Nothing.
Elias felt the time stretching, warping, every second heavier than the last. Around them the city continued its work. Somewhere to the west, something was burning that had not been burning a minute ago.
“Again.”
Third attempt.
The engine caught. Rough at first, then smoothing, finding itself.
Elias exhaled without realising he had been holding his breath.
Hanna did not look back. She put the car into gear and moved.
Elias returned to the Alfa, hands shaking slightly as he gripped the door. He got in.
Margaret was watching him.
“The station is four blocks,” she said.
“I know.”
He put the car into gear. Followed.
Then —
The sound.
Closer this time. Above them. Descending.
The same mechanical screaming tearing down through the sky with its specific designed purpose, leaving no space for thought, no space for anything except the body’s oldest instruction.
Elias did not look up. He did not need to. He understood now what that sound was built to do and he refused to give it what it wanted.
He kept his eyes on the Fiat.
He kept driving.
The bomb fell behind them.
The impact came in layers. First the pressure — slamming into the back of the Alfa, pushing it forward, the steering wheel jerking hard in his hands. Then the sound, vast and consuming, flattening everything else for one full second. Then debris, striking the car in a hard uneven rain — fragments of what had been behind them, what they had just driven through, what was now gone.
He looked in the mirror by instinct.
The street they had come from was filling with dust. Not smoke — dust, the specific grey of pulverised stone and plaster, rolling outward from a point he could not see clearly.
Twarda Street. Twenty seconds behind them.
He looked away.
Ahead, the Fiat swerved left, clipped the kerb, corrected. Hanna fought the wheel with both hands and brought it straight.
Elias kept the Alfa moving. Small correction right. Then forward.
They were still moving.
Still together.
Ahead — through smoke and dust and a morning that had long since stopped being a morning — he saw it.
The station.
Or what remained visible of it.
The eastern wing was burning. Not smouldering — burning, flames climbing through the structure with the specific serious commitment of fire that has found its material and intends to keep it.
Smoke poured upward in a column that had been building for some time. The approach road was clogged — people, vehicles, carts, chaos, all converging on the same point without coordination, without information, without anywhere else to go.
Józef had been right.
Elias let the knowledge settle into him without trying to shape it into anything useful. His father had been right. The station was a target. The station was burning.
And they were four blocks away with nowhere else to go and the decision had not been made and there was no time left to make it.
Ahead, through the rear window of the Fiat, Anna’s silhouette was still.
Facing forward.
Not looking back.
The cars did not slow.
Not yet.
They turned east without speaking about it.
There was no discussion because there was nothing to discuss. The road to the station was not a road anymore. Hanna simply turned the Fiat at the first intersection that had not collapsed, and Elias followed, and the burning wing of the station slid out of the windscreen and behind them, and neither of them had said a word.
The street east was narrower. Residential. A row of townhouses on one side that had not yet been hit, their windows still intact, a cat sitting on a low wall as if it had not yet decided whether the morning was serious. On the other side, a bakery with its awning torn down and the baker standing in the doorway looking at the sky with the expression of a man who had opened his shop at five thirty and was still trying to understand what he had opened it into.
Elias kept the Fiat in his field of vision. Forty metres ahead. The small dust-coated shape of it, moving.
Beside him, Margaret had not spoken since the bomb on Twarda.
In the Fiat, Hanna was crying.
She did not know she had started. She became aware of it the way you become aware of rain — the specific sensation of wet on her cheek, the taste of salt at the corner of her mouth. She did not stop driving. She did not wipe her face. The tears simply went where tears went and she corrected the wheel around a pothole she almost had not seen.
“I’m sorry, love,” she said. She did not mean to say it. “I thought—”
“Hanna.” Józef’s voice from the back. Thinner than it should have been. Costing him, the way every word had cost him since Sienna Street. “You were trying to protect our children.”
She shook her head. She did not trust her mouth.
“And the cellar wouldn’t have worked either.”
She glanced in the mirror. His eyes were closed. His lips were grey. But he was speaking, which meant he was here.
“The building above ours took direct hits in the first wave,” he said. “I heard it in the walls while we were packing. The foundations would have gone. We would have been buried alive under our own apartment by now.”
“You are telling me this,” she said, “to make me feel better.”
“I am telling you this because it is true.”
She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. She was not sure why — there was no one in the car to see. Anna was looking straight ahead. Józef had closed his eyes again.
“I love you,” she said, very quietly.
His eyes stayed closed. “I know.”
Margaret spoke without turning her head.
“We can’t stay on these roads.”
Elias adjusted his grip on the wheel. “I know.”
“They are bombing every main street. East will take us toward the bridge eventually, and then—”
“I know.”
A small silence. Then, in a different register — careful, the way she got when she was approaching something she had decided:
“Eli—”
He glanced at her. She never called him Eli. It was Anna’s name for him and Margaret had always honoured that, always used the full name, always.
“Elias,” she corrected, without quite looking at him. “Whatever happens next. Whatever we have to do. We stay with them. Whatever it takes.”
He looked at her properly for the first time since they had got in the car.
Her face had the quality it had had in the hallway at six in the morning. The yes of it. The I knew.
“Margaret—”
“We stay together,” she said. “That’s all.”
He nodded once and looked back at the Fiat.
She had not answered his question. He had not asked one. That was the quiet between them — the question that had been sitting since the hallway, that had nearly been asked on Marszałkowska, that would not be asked today because today was not a day for asking.
Then Anna saw them.
Not one figure — three. One running, one on the ground, one standing with a coat in their hands beating at another person whose back was on fire. The distances were wrong. The figures were small. The burning was not. Anna’s eyes went to them and stayed there.
Hanna did not see at first because she was watching the road. Then she felt the stillness of Anna beside her and glanced over and saw what her daughter was seeing and reached across without thinking, her right hand going flat across Anna’s eyes.
“Don’t look, sweetheart. Don’t look.”
Anna pushed her mother’s hand away.
Not roughly. Not in rejection. With the specific careful determination of a child who had decided she was not going to be protected from what was happening to other people. She did not look away. Her face did something Hanna could not read and did not want to read.
From the back, Józef leaned forward as far as his injuries allowed. His good hand trembled with the effort of raising it. He could not quite reach Anna’s shoulder. His fingers touched the back of her seat, the top of her cardigan, no more.
“Little one,” he said. The name he had not used since she was very small. “Little one, look at Tata.”
She turned.
He smiled. His face was grey and his mouth was slack at one corner and he smiled anyway.
“We keep going,” he said. “That is all we do. We keep going.”
She nodded. She was crying without sound.
Józef let his hand fall.
Elias saw the building before he felt the bomb.
He was looking past the Fiat, looking ahead, looking for the next obstacle, when the front facade of the townhouse on the right-hand side of the street simply came off.
Not collapsed. Came off. The way a mask comes off a face.
The entire front of the building peeled forward in one piece, almost slow for the first quarter of a second, and then it was no longer slow, and then the stone and the glass and something long and dark and metallic — an iron railing, ornamental, the kind that ran above a door — were already in the air and already moving and already too fast.
He understood, in the half-second he had to understand anything, that the iron was not going down.
It was going across.
And the Fiat was directly in its path.
He did not have time to shout. He did not have time to brake.
The pressure wave hit the Alfa a full second after the iron reached the Fiat.
The Alfa went sideways.
Elias’s hands were on the wheel and his hands stayed on the wheel but the car went where the wave sent it. The rear wheels lifted onto the kerb. The windscreen webbed with a crack that ran from the lower passenger corner all the way to the top without fully breaking. Margaret’s head struck the glass with a sound that Elias heard inside his own skull. A fragment of something — stone, metal, he did not know — hit the bonnet and bounced with a noise that was wrong for any substance he could name.
Then dust.
Complete. Immediate. Grey. It filled the inside of the Alfa through every vent and gap and crack, and Elias could not see the steering wheel in front of him, and he could not hear anything except a high flat tone where his hearing had been, and he did not know how long he sat like that. Three seconds. Five. Longer.
Then Margaret’s hand on his arm. Hard. Anchoring.
He came back.
The dust was beginning to clear. The high tone in his ears was beginning to let other sounds through — the distant engines, voices somewhere, the specific settling noise of a building that has just lost its face.
He looked through the cracked windscreen.
The Fiat was not moving.
He was out of the Alfa before he remembered opening the door.
Margaret was behind him. She was bleeding from somewhere above her eye — a clean line of red down her cheek that she was not aware of. He saw this in the half-second it took him to register her and then he was running.
Ten metres to the Fiat.
He saw the iron first.
Ornamental. A section of railing perhaps a metre and a half long, the kind of thing that would have sat above a doorway as part of the facade, now sticking out of the back of the Fiat at a shallow upward angle, piercing the rear window, piercing the rear of the back seat, piercing—
He did not let himself finish the thought.
He reached the driver’s side.
Hanna had come back to consciousness in stages.
The first thing was that the engine was off. The second thing was that her left leg was wrong — the door on her side had come inward and something was pinning her below the knee, and when she tried to move the leg it did not move. The third thing was Anna.
Anna was slumped forward against the dashboard. Her hands were in her lap. She was breathing. A piece of glass from the shattered side window had opened a long cut across her right thigh, the blood already soaking through the cardigan she had pulled over her lap when the cold had got to her in the first hour of this day that did not feel like one day anymore.
“Anna.”
No response.
“Sweetheart. Look at me.”
Anna turned her head. Her eyes found her mother.
She was conscious. She was not screaming. She was somewhere below screaming, the airless place, the place from the hallway at six in the morning, the place where the body had taken in too much and did not yet know what to do with it.
Hanna’s leg throbbed once, hard, and she did not look at it.
“Where is your father?”
Anna’s eyes moved.
Hanna turned.
The first sound she made was not a word. It was not a scream. It was a small quiet sound, the sound of air leaving a body that had not decided to release it.
Józef was looking at her.
The iron had entered at the left side of his abdomen. She could not see how far it had gone because his coat was in the way and because she could not fully turn her body because of her leg. But she saw his face and she saw his eyes and she saw his mouth and his mouth was red.
“Hanna,” he said.
“I’m here. I’m here, love.”
“Anna—”
“She’s alive. She’s alive, Józef, she’s alive. She’s hurt but she is alive.”
He closed his eyes. For a second she thought that was it. Then he opened them again and looked at her, and the look contained the twenty-six years of their marriage — every winter, every summer, every meal, every one of her arguments with his mother, every one of her victories over his mother, every time he had checked the door twice, every night he had sat across from her at that table and not known how to say any of what he was thinking and said it anyway by the way he passed the bread, the way he refilled her glass, the way he had looked at her last night when she set the pot of bigos down and said Hanna in that one voice.
“Please,” he said. He had to stop. He had no breath. He started again. “Save.” He stopped. “Anna.”
He said each word separately. He did not have the breath for more than one at a time.
She could not answer.
He looked at her for another second. The focus went out of his eyes slowly, the way light went out of a window as the sun moved. Then his head tipped slightly to the left against the iron.
“Józef.”
His mouth was open. His eyes were still open.
“Józef, no.”
She reached for his face with her good hand. His skin was still warm.
“Not now,” she whispered. “Not now, please. Not now.”
Elias was at the window.
He saw his father through the glass and he understood in a single moment, the way you understood things that were too large to understand in sequence. He understood and then he made a sound. He did not know what sound it was. He would not remember making it. Margaret, behind him, stopped moving entirely. Her face emptied of everything except recognition — she had seen this. Not this exact thing. But she had seen what this meant.
Anna, inside the car, had turned and seen her father.
She was screaming now. Not words. Just sound, continuous, the specific frequency of a child whose body had run out of anything else to do.
Hanna looked up at Elias through the window. Her face was wet.
“Elias.” Her voice came through the glass muffled but clear. Steady, because someone had to be. “The passenger side. The door on Anna’s side. Try that one.”
He went around.
The passenger door was jammed but not crushed. He threw his shoulder against it. Once. Twice. It did not give. On the third try something in the frame flexed. On the fourth it opened with a tearing sound.
“Anna.”
She was curled forward, both hands on her leg now, her face wet, her breathing broken.
“Anna, look at me.”
She looked at her mother instead.
“Mama—”
Hanna reached across with her good arm and cupped Anna’s face. Her hand was shaking. Anna’s blood was already on her fingers from when she had touched Anna’s leg, she did not remember touching Anna’s leg, and the blood was on Anna’s face now, a smear across the cheek, and Hanna did not seem to notice.
“You listen to Elias,” Hanna said. “You listen to Elias. You listen to your sister. Everything they tell you. You listen.”
“Mama, no—”
“You listen, sweetheart. You promise me.”
“I don’t want to leave you.”
“Sweetheart—”
“I don’t want to leave you, Mama, I don’t want to leave you, I don’t want to—”
Hanna smiled.
Elias would carry his father’s face from the hallway at six in the morning for the rest of his life. He would carry his mother’s smile from this moment alongside it. The two of them together. The worst two things he had ever seen people do.
“I will never leave you,” Hanna said.
She touched Anna’s chest. Two fingers. Flat against the sternum.
“I will always be here. Right here. Always. Do you understand? Right here.”
Anna was crying so hard she could not breathe properly.
Hanna looked up at Elias.
“Elias.”
“Mama—”
“Protect Anna at all costs. At all costs. Do you understand me?”
“Mama, please. Let me try. Let me try to get you out. Margaret, come here, help me—”
From somewhere to the west, rising above the general destruction of the city, the descending mechanical scream. Another one.
Hanna’s face did not change.
“You don’t have time.”
“There is time. Margaret—”
“Elias.”
Her voice hardened. The mother voice. The one from twenty-five years of running this family, of commanding this family, of saying Sit. Down. and meaning it.
“You don’t have time. That plane is going to drop here. You have a minute. You have less. You take your sister and you go.”
“Mama—”
“Go.”
Margaret had come to the driver’s side.
She was standing at the window looking at her mother. She did not speak. Hanna looked at her through the glass and Margaret looked back and neither of them said anything at all.
Margaret’s lips formed a word.
Goodbye.
Hanna’s lips formed the same word.
Goodbye.
Margaret turned away. She was crying without sound, the way Margaret cried.
As she passed Elias, she said: “Her leg. Eli — her leg is bad. We need to stop the bleeding before anything else.”
He did not correct her. He did not think she had noticed.
Anna did not want to leave.
She fought him. Not hard — she was nine years old and her leg was bleeding and she had no strength — but she fought. She clawed at the seat, at the frame, at her mother’s hand when Hanna had to let go of her face. She was saying something that was not quite words, that was becoming words and then falling apart into sobs before the words could finish.
“Let me go. Let go of me. Eli, let go — I want Mama — let go, I want Mama, I want — let go—”
He lifted her out.
She hit him. Small hits, on his shoulder, his chest. The way a child hit — with despair, with refusal. He carried her to the Alfa. He set her in the back passenger seat. Margaret got in beside her.
Anna lunged for the door. Elias closed it.
She tried the handle. He locked it from the driver’s side.
She pressed her face against the window and screamed for her mother and he could not look. He could not look. He walked around the front of the Alfa and he did not look at the Fiat and he did not look at his mother through the windscreen and he got into the driver’s seat.
He looked back once.
Through the windscreen of the Alfa, through the shattered rear window of the Fiat, he saw his mother.
She was holding Józef’s hand. His head was against her shoulder.
She raised her other hand.
Just a small gesture. Nothing dramatic. The same gesture she had made last night in the hallway when she had patted the doorframe after saying She wants you — the universal Hanna gesture of approval. Of yes. Of it is all right. Of you did well.
You did well. Go now.
He turned the key.
The engine caught on the second try, the carburettor exactly as his father had said, exactly as his father would never say again.
He put the Alfa into gear and he drove.
Hanna was alone now.
Anna’s voice was no longer audible. The Alfa was already moving. The plane was getting louder.
She took Józef’s hand in both of hers. It was still warm. His wedding ring was against her palm.
“Hold on, love,” she whispered. “Hold on. I will be with you soon.”
She did not cry. There was not time.
She thought, as clearly as she had ever thought anything:
Anna is alive. Margaret is alive. Elias has them.
They are going.
We raised them well, Józef. Do you remember the river? She was three years old and she did not let go. We raised them well.
The plane was directly overhead.
She leaned forward as far as her trapped leg would allow and pressed her forehead against Józef’s forehead. His skin was cooling. She did not mind. She kissed his mouth. Blood and all. He was her husband and she did not care.
She closed her eyes.
The last thing she thought about was the kitchen.
Early morning. The smell of the bigos just starting to come up. Józef coming in with the newspaper under his arm. Anna running in behind him in her slippers. Margaret at the table already, reading, one hand in her hair. Elias not there yet — Elias in New York — but coming home. Coming home soon.
We raised them well.
In the Alfa, Elias was driving.
His hands were on the wheel. He could not process what had happened. He could not grieve. He could not feel anything except the next thing, which was that Anna’s leg was bleeding, which he could fix, which was the one thing available to him.
The explosion behind them arrived as a pressure wave first. Then the sound. Then, in the rearview mirror, the specific rising column of dust and fire where the Fiat had been.
Anna saw it.
She was already crying. She stopped making any kind of sense. The sounds that came out of her were not words, were not crying, were something else — the sound a nine-year-old made when her mother and father had both died within minutes of each other and there was no vocabulary in her for what had just happened, no frame for it, nothing.
Margaret had her arms around her.
“Her leg,” Elias said. His own voice sounded distant. “We need a pharmacy. I can handle this if I have supplies — I did medical papers during the engineering course, I can clean it and close it if I have what I need. We need a pharmacy.”
Margaret nodded. She did not speak.
“Eli,” Anna said, between sobs. Just his name. “Eli. Eli. Eli.”
He did not answer. He could not. He drives.
The morning was not yet seven o’clock.8Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡxDppCWfYM7
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