The Winter Guest Read Online Free PDF

zoo might be like, though she had only read about such places. Homes transparent, lives exposed to one another. Everyone knew everyone else’s business, almost before it had happened. “Nie.” Ruth suspected that she did not want to hear the answer. She inspected the apples the woman handed her, which were mottled and bruised. She did not protest, knowing the rest in the barrel would be no better.
    Pani Kowalska wiped her hands on her skirt. “Gone.”
    “Perhaps they went to find Leopold,” Ruth suggested. The elderly couple’s son, just a few years older than Michal, had disappeared ahead of a transport of conscripted men to the front. The call-ups had taken place with alarming frequency of late, young men ordered to report for either military service or other forced labor for the Reich.
    “Not if he went to forest they didn’t.” Ruth did not want to admit that she was unfamiliar with the term. “To the woods to fight,” Pani Kowalska clarified unbidden. Ruth had heard the rumors of soldiers from the decimated Polish army who had gone underground to wage war against the Germans.
    Ruth searched for another plausible explanation. “Without him to work the farm, they must have decided to go to relatives.”
    Pani Kowalska shook her head, chins jiggling. “They left with the door open, all of their belongings still inside. Who on earth does that?”
    Who indeed? One would board up the house if truly going for a while and planning it—unless one did not want anyone to know or to attract too much attention.
    “And then there are the goings-on in Nowy S˛acz,” Pani Kowalska added, gaining steam even as she returned to sorting potatoes. “They arrested all of the Jews.” How had the woman heard such things? The news on the radio would not have spoken of them. But gossip, even about those they did not know, seemed to travel with the wind like pollen. “Good riddance, I say,” the old woman spat with more bile than Ruth might have thought she could muster. Ruth did not respond, but sadness tugged at her. Why did Pani Kowalska sound so angry about a handful of Jews in another town? Ruth did not have any particular affinity for the Jews, but it was the ugliness of it all that bothered her.
    “Christ killing heathens. Always driving down my prices,” Pani Kowalska added, as if answering the unspoken question. So that was the real reason. Her hatred of the Jews stemmed less from purported drinking of baby’s blood than the price of turnips.
    The Jews weren’t all hard-charging vegetable merchants, Ruth wanted to point out. “Surely just the men have been taken,” she offered instead.
    Pani Kowalska shook her head. “All of them.” What would the Germans want with the women and children? And what could they possibly do with so many people? Ruth’s arms suddenly ached for her brother and sisters. But before she could ask, the old woman looked past Ruth’s shoulder at another customer. “Tak?”
    Ruth stepped aside and surveyed the rest of the market. Taking in the flies that swarmed above the meat stand as though it were August, she decided to save the rest of their ration coupons for her next visit.
    At the corner, she spied a familiar figure approaching, a sallow, fiftyish women who stared vacantly ahead and carried her empty basket as though it bore rocks. Ruth started quickly in the opposite direction. Her foot caught on the curb and she stumbled, catching herself before she fell to the ground. Piotr’s mother turned toward her, then looked away quickly, no more wanting the encounter than Ruth did. But it was unavoidable. Ruth brushed her hands on her skirt and took a step toward the woman.
    A moment of silence passed between them. It was your fault, Ruth wanted to yell, seized with the urge to slap her sagging cheek. Piotr’s mother had welcomed Ruth warmly in her home, professing that Ruth was the daughter that she’d never had. But at the first opportunity, she had turned on Ruth, casting her