The Snow Hare

by Paula Lichtarowicz

Genres: Coming of Age; World War II; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

An unforgettable love story set in Siberia during the Second World War and of living with impossible choices.

Lena knows she hasn't got long left. While a nurse administers morphine to ease her pain, she relives her life. Growing up in a small town in Poland, she was an earnest young girl determined to become a doctor who found her dreams put on hold as she became the reluctant wife of an army officer and then again by becoming a mother, in which she finds a fierce and surprising joy.

As war approaches, she returns home. But when Russia invades her middle-class family are deemed Enemies of the State and sent to the work camp in Siberia. It is in the endless forest, where, despite the bitter cold, the biting hunger and the back-breaking work, Lena learns that it is possible to fall in love at the edge of the world and the edge of life.

When her lover, Grigori, falls ill she takes the decision to use the precious antibiotics she was given in Poland, to save him. It means that when her daughter becomes sick, she is unable to save her. It's a decision that will continue to haunt her after the war, even as she builds a tentative new life, first in Wales, then England.

Exploring marriage, motherhood, and our incredible capacity for cultivating hope in the darkest times, The Snow Hare is the unforgettable story of a woman who dares to love and to dream in the face of impossible odds, and of the peace we each must make with our choices, even long after the years have gone by.

(P) 2023 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 464

Sample

‘But you need wind.’

Who’s saying this? The girl?

No, it’s Ala. Ala is speaking to her. Her sister is saying, ‘Ulka told me. But it can’t be any old June breeze. It’s got to be a south-westerly, and a strong one, otherwise they’ll end up elsewhere. And they have to come here, they simply have to.’

Where is Ala saying all this?

The geranium pots.

Really?

Yes, Ala is teetering between Papa’s rows of red and pink geraniums in a slit of sunlight at the sitting-room window. She’s sucking on her plait ends and pressing her nose against the glass to stare down the deserted lane.

And she, Lena, where’s she?

There’s a godawful smell – a reek of hot fat and bone – she must be at the hearth, boiling up a rabbit’s head in a pot over the coals in the interests of science.

‘Who won’t come here?’ she says, taking her tongs to prod an ear back under the churning water.

‘The gypsies, stupid. Ulka says they only travel on south-westerlies. And if they don’t come I’ll never get them.’

‘Get what?’

‘Are you a complete and utter idiot, twig? My life’s fortunes.’

It’s entirely unintended, the hoot that comes out of Lena.

Ala glares.

‘Sorry.’

Because both Papa and Ulka have said she’s not to laugh at Ala. This has been mentioned on separate occasions, and repeated, so undoubtedly there’s strong feeling in the household about it. Lena focuses on pinching an ear with the tongs, professional autopsy instruments that she’s unwrapped even though it’s not yet her birthday, and that are proving most satisfactory; steel-sprung with a pleasing snapping action. It only takes the slightest tug for the skin to peel away from the skull. From under the settee, a damp nose appears, followed by orange eyes, gleaming with anticipation, then the rest of Ivan Pavlov scrabbles out.

‘Sit, Pav. Be a good boy. Look at the skin, Pav, good boy. Concentrate on the lovely smell of boiled rabbit.’

The dog’s tail beats on the rug. If Lena’s hypothesis is correct, saliva should begin to leak from his mouth. These emissions should be more plentiful for the familiar-smelling rabbit than for the mole she boiled yesterday. She may send the results to Moscow for the behaviourists to add to their research. Scientific progress depends on collaborative principles.

‘You stink of rotting flesh, twig.’ Ala’s plaits go flying as she turns, tutting, back to her vigil. She bangs on the window and waves at Ulrich, leading his cows down the lane for milking.

Sunday brings the first confirmed sightings of the south-westerly wind in Lena’s town. Three hundred people witness a breeze licking Father Gorski’s skirts on the steps of St Lukasz’s after Mass.

Two days later Ulrich rolls the week’s milk churn to their doorstep, shaking his fist at the sky as he goes. This is all born of a storm in the Carpathians, he mutters. It is making his heifers cry. Only storms from the Ukraine do that.

By Thursday forked lightning strikes the old quarter. The air cracks to an unseen whip. In the convent schoolyard Lena’s friends lift the flaps of their blazers and grow wings.

‘Rumour has it they’re directly overhead.’ This is what Widow Manowska tells Ala and Lena when they are blown into the baker’s on an errand for Ulka.

‘You mean they’re here?’ Ala clutches Lena’s arm. ‘Above us right now?’

Widow Manowska takes Ulka’s list. Casting an eye to the rattling windows and the black clouds scudding over the roofs, she crosses herself. ‘I didn’t think they’d return so soon. I was heavy with child when they last came to town.’

‘You’ve seen them before?’ Ala whispers. ‘And did they give you your fortunes?’

Mrs Manowska leans close. ‘Every one of them.’

‘Go fuck yourselves!’ Adam Manowska shouts, so Lena jumps. He’s crouched like a baboon on a heap of sacks in the shop corner. Mama says when Lena and Adam were toddlers they would sit inside these sacks for hours playing bakers. They would emerge giggling, covered in dust. ‘Fuck you all.’

‘Hi, Adam,’ Lena says. ‘Nice to see you.’

Mrs Manowska sighs. She loads the girls’ basket with rye loaves and caraway rolls. She reaches into a drawer under the counter and throws in a handful of wrapped cream fudge. ‘Make sure one or two survive for your father.’

Lena opens the bakery door and steps out onto the street with the basket, lowering her head, her eyes scrunched against the whip of the wind. ‘Will you goddamn come on!’ she shouts to Ala, hanging back in the entrance, watching Mrs Manowska unwrap a fudge for her son.

‘Mrs Manowska,’ Ala says, ‘did they tell you when you were pregnant that—’

‘They told me everything, child.’

‘And do you really truly think they’re here?’

Mrs Manowska shrugs. ‘They have the south-westerly behind them, they’ll land by morning if their course is set straight.’

Tired of waiting, Lena tucks her chin into her jacket and sets off up the cobbles, leaning into a grey wall of air.

All Friday morning, Ulka scowls at the sky. After lunch she curses and knots her apron and climbs the ladder to the roof to secure the guttering.

‘It may be I saw a hint of cape,’ Ulka tells Ala on returning to earth and regaining her breath. She takes up apron corners to pat her cheeks dry.

‘A cape?’

‘It may be.’

‘Oh, Ulka, do you think that—’

‘Beneath their flying capes the gypsies keep their tents and caravans and their dancing bears? It may be so.’

Lena snorts and Ulka turns to shrink her with a stare.

‘They have dancing bears?’ Ala spins round and round and claps her hands.

‘It may be so. Although I was told it’s the blackest clouds you want to keep an eye on. Behind these clouds lie the gypsies’ sacks. It’s said these sacks contain the world’s sorrowful histories. That’s why it takes such a wind to drag them along.’

Lena swipes the head off a white rose. ‘Ridiculous.’

Ala stops spinning, hovering on one foot. ‘But, Ulka, what happens if the gypsies’ sacks get spilled?’

Ulka narrows her eyes. ‘I think you can work that out as well as I.’

Lena is on her bed. It’s now Saturday, the 16th of June to be precise, and the wind has vanished from town. She’s unwrapped her medical encyclopaedia and has all afternoon to read it. But Ala’s here, dancing about in the doorway, saying she must come with her and come now, and somehow she always ends up doing what Ala wants. It’s ridiculous, she has her own brain in her head, and functioning vocal cords to form the words ‘go away’, but here she is, tagging along downstairs and into the conservatory where their mother’s resting, her face gabled by song sheets.

Ala is standing in front of the daybed, blocking the light from the garden doors and is stamping her foot, saying, ‘Mama, we simply must go right now. Francesca went this morning. All my friends are going. It’s already two o’clock. And it is Lena’s birthday.’ Ala elbows her.

‘It is my birthday, Mama.’

At last she is sixteen. Admittedly not much can be done with this fact itself, but one more step has been taken. Now it’s only nine years until she’ll be a qualified doctor. Which is only three thousand two hundred and eighty-seven days, taking leap years into account. The medical encyclopaedia has five hundred and thirty pages with an average of three ailments to a page. If she’s to be ready to practise by the time she’s twenty-five there’s really no time to lose.

A sheet of cantatas lifts and Mama peeps out. ‘Mother of God, it’s hot today.’

‘Please, Mama, everyone’s going, simply everyone.’

Behind the girls, by the open doors to the lawn, the potted palms begin to rustle and snigger. Ala glares at them then returns to business.

‘Mama, please.’

‘We are not everyone, Ala, my darling.’

Lena considers her mother on the daybed in her white smock, her hair – Ala’s hair really – splayed all bushy and gold. ‘You look like you’re laid out at the morgue.’

‘The things this child says!’

‘Mama,’ Ala says, ‘no one in their right mind would miss it.’

The palms whisper, ‘I’ll give you odds of a hundred to one against that.’

‘And I’ll kill you, Romek, if you don’t shut up. With these hands I will.’

Mama’s cantatas slip to the floor. ‘Blessed Mother, this family! Romuś, my darling boy, you really are too close to the draught over there, you know what Doctor Janucek says. I tell you it’s too bad of your father to be away so much when I have my recital season upon me. What about the standards of his own children’s education? Listen to your mama, girls, under no circumstances are you to marry school inspectors, they are no better suited to marriage than travelling peddlers, if I’d have only known when he limped into the convent that…’

The conservatory door swings wide. It’s Ulka with honeyed tea for Mama’s throat after all those encores in the town hall last night. Ivan Pavlov is lurking in her skirts where he believes he can’t be seen. Ulka says the dog thinks himself far cleverer than he actually is, so Lena will test his intelligence this summer using Ulrich’s sheepdog for a comparative study.

Mama raises herself to take her tea and Ala moves to deploy the hair, flinging her plaits about, so Mama can’t help but smile at all this flying gold.

‘Please, Mama, even Pavlov wants to go.’

‘Mother of God, what a name for a dog.’ Mama’s hand flaps at the nose snorting along the daybed for crumbs. ‘Ulka, what to do with these girls?’

Ulka folds her arms on her belly and dispenses one of her looks towards Ala and Lena, before turning it to silence Romek in the palms. She bends to Mama’s ear.

‘Thank you, Ulka darling. Not your best shoes, girls, stay together in the forest and be back by six for Lena’s birthday celebrations.’

Mama’s eyes close and she begins to hum. Ala and Lena kiss her on each cheek and race from the room.

She runs with Ivan Pavlov bouncing beside her, deviating now and then to crash through bulrushes after a whiff of vole. She runs with Ala’s hot hand yanking her along the path on the banks of the glistening San.

‘I want a count, or an officer at the very least. He’ll have a chateau in the mountains and an apartment in Warsaw,’ Ala pants. She is very pink-cheeked. ‘What about you?’

Lena is far too sweaty to care. ‘Can we slow down?’

‘Come on. What do you want?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You must know. Think.’

She is. She’s thinking about breath. The white branches of the birch trees sound as if they’re wheezing above them. Asthma is the term for wheezing in the branches of the lungs. You would prescribe adrenaline injections for acute attacks, otherwise treat with oral ephedrine.

Ala lets go of Lena to unfasten her plaits and shake her hair into a crimped yellow sheet. ‘Maybe my count will have a younger brother. I mean the brother will be poorer, obviously, but he might be a teacher or something. You’d take that for a fortune, wouldn’t you?’

Bronchus, bronchi. Latin, originally from the Greek. And before the Greek?

‘Come on, twig. What would you choose, really, and don’t say an emperor or a pope or something ridiculous.’

Lena stops dead, so Ala turns back, her eyes dancing with apartment-owning counts and officers. ‘What now, twig? Whatever is it?’

It is, truth be told, quite a disappointment to see Ala like this. Because what’s the point of an elder sister if she is not in solidarity with you against the world? She looks at Ala with her bouncing hair and count-crammed eyeballs and once again she can’t understand how, from the same biological starting point, they’ve ended up such ill-matched beings.

‘Suit yourself.’ Ala shrugs and she’s off so fast that Lena almost loses her.

But opening out from a narrow path between the oldest birches is the clearing. And Ala’s waiting, waving, and behind her, dominating the centre, is an enormous tent, pale as a mushroom, its peak taller than the crowns of the trees, guy ropes like jungle roots across the grass. By the tent’s entrance a bear in a sequinned waistcoat jiggles its hips on a planked stage. In the spaces between the guy ropes, stalls are selling barszcz, or spiced apple punch, or slivers of suckling pig rotating on spits. There are games too; hoops to throw, hammers to lift, and right on the clearing’s edge, a line of men wait to hurl knives at a spinning wheel.

A bearded man, dressed in Cossack style, leaps up on the stage beside the dancing bear. Lowering his horn he begins to shout, offering midgets and strong men and sword-swallowing ladies – in fact every known wonder of the world, and several unknown ones too – and all this inside the tent this very afternoon for five zlotys only. Five zlotys is all the lucky ladies and gentlemen will need to watch the most unforgettable show this side of heaven.

‘No,’ Ala says. ‘No way.’

‘Yes.’

‘Goddamn no, twig.’

‘Goddamn yes. It’s my birthday.’

‘We’re here to get our fortunes.’

‘And it’s my birthday, Ala.’ Lena stares at her without blinking. If she keeps it up long enough Ala will give in. She just has to wait it out.

It’s gloomy inside the tent, smoky from the paraffin lamps staked between the rows of benches and around the sawdust-strewn ring. Lena has to put a lead on Pavlov to stop him scuttling back out after a taste of roasting pig. Ala complains that it reeks of sweat and ale.

Luckily Lena spots Julia, Ala’s best friend, sitting on a bench halfway back from the ring, and even better Danushka’s with her, Julia’s younger sister who’s in Lena’s class. Except, what’s this? – when they go up, Julia is sobbing into her handkerchief.

Danushka rolls her eyes at Lena. ‘My sister had her fortunes given to her.’

‘Were they good ones or bad ones?’

‘No one knows. There’s too much snot for any understanding.’

Lena sits down beside her. ‘And yours, Dan, what were you given?’

‘Quod plerumque. What you would expect.’

Lena laughs out loud. Danushka is not one to be easily impressed. Dan is the best in school for Latin, and Lena for General Science.

‘But Ala’s fortunes are looking good.’ Danushka nods towards the opposite side of the tent where three men in dark uniforms are taking their seats.

Lena snorts. ‘Goodness what polished belts, and look, their mamas have done a lovely job of pressing their cap corners.’ She gives Ala a nudge: ‘Officers, straight ahead.’ At once Ala begins flicking her hair about like a fly-ridden horse, so Lena can’t help but lean to Dan’s ear. ‘It’s not just acrobats performing today.’

The horn is blown, the tent flaps close, and a juggler runs into the ring with flaming torches, throwing them into a fiery wheel. Lena cups her hands around her mouth and shouts, ‘Keep them up!’ And Ala closes her eyes.

‘He’s looking this way,’ Dan whispers, ‘my life on it he is. The officer in the middle; the one with glasses.’

‘He’s spotted you,’ Lena tells Ala, ‘the officer in the middle. The one with the glasses is staring.’

‘Go to hell, twig.’

‘On Romek’s lung, he is. His spectacles imply that he opens a book now and then. Should I go over and warn him what you think of education? He’s not so bad when viewed from a distance. I can confirm two eyes, a full complement of legs, and arms of functional length. Goodness, what shiny boots he’s got. Mama’s going to adore those.’

From a platform high above them, a flashing parcel comes tumbling down a rope, unravelling into a silver-cloaked woman with a rapier clenched between her teeth. Lena jumps up. ‘This I’ve got to see!’

Ala grabs her skirt and yanks. ‘Sit goddamned down!’

The sword-swallower, a slight young woman, strides along the front benches flexing the glinting blade. She steps up on a box in the centre of the ring, wide-legged, opening her mouth and leaning back, holding the rapier directly above her like Damocles’s sword. Slowly the metal descends towards her stretched lips, then the blade begins to disappear down her throat until only the rapier’s handle protrudes.

Lena leaps up to roar her approval. Ala puts her face in her hands and inches away along the bench.

‘Thank the blessed Virgin that’s over,’ Ala says when the world’s strongest man has been and gone, and the flaps are raised to daylight. She’s standing and heading for the exit.

‘You can thank me when you marry your officer,’ Lena replies, trailing behind.

But Ala ignores her. She’s off, running down to old man Bosko, who’s turning his chestnuts on the griddle, wiping his face because of the heat of the coals. Old man Bosko knows everything worth knowing. Lena watches him raise his spatula and point south. Ala turns back and waves at her, ‘The marshes, come on.’

Once they’re out of the forest, Ala stops and shields her eyes to scour the land alongside the river. The brown-crusted ground is an acre wide and thicketed with reeds and bulrushes, dry enough to walk on in summer, but a bog, alive with trout and carp as soon as the October rains fall and the San bursts its banks.

‘There! Over there!’ Ala cries. ‘I see them!’

A dozen or so hoop-framed caravans stand in a row near the thin silver river, shaggy ponies hobbled in the vehicles’ shade. It seems very still in this open space after the noise and action in the tent. Little knots of townspeople wait behind the caravans, fanning faces or smoking pipes, or simply gazing at distant herons’ nests or the squabbling geese.

‘Which one, twig? Which caravan?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Of course it matters. There could be any number of fortunes out there.’

Lena looks over the caravans, unpainted and tatty. She shrugs. ‘They all look alike to me.’

‘They can’t be.’

‘All right, go for the most popular one, where the most people are waiting.’

‘But they might shut up business for the day before I get to go in.’

‘The least busy then?’

Ala looks at her. ‘You think?’

Ala is off, running to the farthest caravan, one with a dirty red sheet hanging at the back. A man comes out, squinting in the sunlight at the top of the wooden steps, then he hurries down and away. No one else is waiting so Ala lifts her skirts and jumps up. She pulls back the curtain and disappears inside.

Lena looks around for something to do. She considers heading back to the birches and breaking off a switch to continue her investigation into a left shin–right shin pain disparity. Understanding pain will no doubt constitute an essential part of her medical training. Or she could go down to where the marshes get really boggy and see how far she can hop on the log path before she sinks. But in the end she just sits down watching a damselfly zipping through the reeds. Pavlov leans against her and she pulls his ears for him. ‘Pray that Ala gets her officer predicted, Pav, otherwise there’ll be foul weather at home for days.’

But then Lena remembers she doesn’t need to worry about Ala.

This is what her father always says.

Ala is like a seed from a dandelion clock, Papa says. She’ll be happy whichever way the wind blows her.

As Papa always tells it, Lena had shaken her head furiously when he first explained this.

‘But me, Papa?’ she’d apparently said. ‘What am I?’

‘You? Magdalena Luiza?’ He’d had a good titter. ‘You? Let me see…’ And he’d laid down his trowel – they were in the bean rows at the time – and scooped her up, upending her and lurching along the canes so furry pods brushed her bouncing face, going up and down laughing as she screamed at him to stop. When he planted her back on the ground and got his breath back he’d leaned over his cane so their blue eyes were level. ‘Well, little miss, it seems obvious to me that what you most resemble is a short brown stick—’

‘Papa! I’m not a stick!’

‘– one that seems to have grown for the sole purpose of poking and prodding at whatever has the misfortune to lie beneath.’

She’d shook her head at him, several times, fish-mouthed with protest. At least this is how Papa always tells it, mimicking her outraged expression when he does.

How old was she then? Four? Five? She’d lowered her face and charged to butt him in the stomach. ‘I’m not a stick, I’m not a stick!’

‘I’m afraid so, Magdalena Luiza. There you have it.’

‘But, Papa, can sticks be happy like dandelions?’

‘I fear you won’t be entirely content until you’ve turfed an army of ants over your toes. Please do not pummel me, Magdalena Luiza. We may struggle to contain our essential natures, but your mother assures me it is a mark of a civilised society to make a show of concealing one’s mood.’

‘Twig? Twig! Wherever are you?’

Standing on the top step at the back of the caravan, Ala is waving with both arms like a person summoning assistance. Except she’s grinning – thank the devil himself for that. Words start spilling out of her before Lena even gets close. ‘A man in uniform! Someone here will be in my future – right to the end of everything – but before that we’ll make a great journey together! A man in uniform, twig, and children – two if I’m lucky, she said. She said I’d be luckier than others in life.’

‘Everyone is luckier than others in one way or another, Ala.’

‘Not everyone.’

Lena opens her mouth and closes it. Then she can’t resist. ‘Oh, Ala, think about it for one second, if you can manage that. “Luckier than others” – it’s an entirely meaningless statement. What is luck anyway? It’s not even something that exists.’

Ala is gaping at her. Lena looks away. Ulka has promised cherry cake for her birthday. ‘Come on then.’

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Ala hasn’t moved.

‘Home?’

‘You can’t.’

‘Observe how legs work: nerve, muscle, sinew, bone in perfect synchronicity.’

‘Not yet, I mean.’ Ala is suddenly at her side, keeping pace. About to seize her elbow. ‘The thing is, twig, she wants to see you.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Send in the child who’s sulking by the river, that’s what she said.’

‘Well it can’t be me because I don’t sulk.’

‘Twig, listen. You have to go in there.’

Lena kicks at the reeds. ‘I don’t have to do anything.’

‘She said send in that child, I have a gift to make her, that’s all she said.’

‘You told her it was my birthday? Oh, Ala, you goddamn told her!’

‘Would it matter if I had?’ Ala smiles all sugar and cream.

‘Goddamn you, Ala. I mean goddamn. Really. Fine, I’ll goddamn go. But only for the purpose of investigating the irrational. Though quite why I should be forced to do these things on my birthday is quite beyond me.’

She stomps off towards the caravan and thuds up the steps with little grace.

‘Ma, are you awake?’

JoJo. Here, sitting stiff-shouldered by her bed. She raises a hand as if to touch his cheek. How big he’s grown. She should tell him this. Tell him what a man he has become.

He takes her hand, pulls it to his lips. ‘You need something, Ma? A drink?’

She moves her head slightly from side to side. His eyes are sad. Poor boy. She would like to tell him not to worry about having to speak when he makes these visits. She’d like to say, ‘It is enough for me to see you moving through the air; to hear your breath in the room. It is enough and it is everything.’

‘Is there something else I can get you, Ma? A cloth for your face?’

Again she shakes her head, smiling till dampness comes to her eyes. If she could loosen her throat and talk freely she would like to tell him how he used to stand stiff as a pikestaff – four years old – holding up the feed bucket as the Clydesdale thundered down from the hill. She would say how Blackie came only to him; this soot-haired, fierce little boy, who never stepped back, who always held his ground. She’d recall for him the time Blackie was sold and he refused to eat for five days. She’d tell him how much she has always adored this fire he keeps burning in his heart. She’d like to lie and tell him he was never second best.

She digs her thumb into her throat. ‘Darling, are you eating?’

And he looks at her and snorts. He slaps his thigh and starts to laugh. The image of his father, of course. ‘Ma, honestly!’

But she doesn’t laugh with him. She should try for more words because who knows if this chance will return. Tell him to fill himself with fat, spoon it in, say, ‘Listen, child, you can never eat enough in this life. Lay flesh on your bones and the fat on top. Keep your body strong and whatever you do stay standing. Do this and you might just avoid the grasp of the god beneath the soil.’ This is what she needs to say.

He wipes his eyes with his thumbs, looking to the window. ‘Papa’s blackbird’s back,’ he says. ‘Look, Ma.’

She turns to see the bird hop along the sill, blinking and peering in. ‘Sure,’ she whispers. ‘He’s wanting his breakfast.’

Lena is out on the path waiting for the cart to arrive, waiting too for Ala and Mama to finish their fussing. It’s a warm evening, a week after the gypsies came to town. In the pink dusk, bees are working over Papa’s jasmine above the lintel. Lucky bees who aren’t forced to wear white satin confirmation dresses with peach bows stitched on ‘for interest’, who never have to go to pointless parties. She walks down the path to wait at the gate, slipping her fingers into the pocket she asked Ulka to stitch down the seam of the dress. She’s decided to bring it, the gift the gypsy gave her. As soon as the mothers are occupied she can take Danushka aside and consult. With any luck Dan will have an idea what to do.

‘Did your sister intend to dress as if she was in one of the cheaper Black Sea resorts?’

Lena sniggers and looks down the hall where newly arrived guests are batting bursts of chit-chat back and forth, tapping heels on marble, waiting, no doubt, for a measure of champagne to warm their tongues. Ala and Julia are loitering under the chandelier right by the front door, practically boring holes in the wood with their eyes. Danushka has a point, if a sharp one. Ala’s wearing one of Mama’s recital gowns and has somehow defied gravity by stacking every strand of her hair high as a sand tower on her head. A turquoise feather perches on the top like a flag in peril. She shrugs. ‘It’s practically certain,’ she says.

It’s practically certain Ala will marry the officer from the gypsy tent. Everyone’s agreed on this. When they got back from the forest, Ala had gone straight to the kitchen and, with Lena as witness, informed Ulka of the events in the tent and the fortune readings the gypsy woman had given her. Ulka agreed there might be promise in them, and told Mama over breakfast on Sunday morning. Mama couldn’t help it all coming out to Julia’s mama after Mass, and Julia’s mama clapped her hands and said an invite to Julia’s name day celebrations must be sent to the barracks at once; that would be the thing to do. She’d despatch her maid, Elena, who was fiercer than a terrier when it came to digging out persons of interest, no matter how deep their burrow. On Tuesday Ulka bumped into Elena at the butcher’s and received confirmation that an invite had been issued to three men of officer rank in the Engineering Corps who’d been in the gypsy tent on Saturday, one of whom was a spectacles wearer. There followed a forty-eight-hour period of silence, during which Ala chewed down her nails and stacked up her hair twenty different ways, before word came in a note from Julia, rolled along the floor to Ala during their graduation exam on Thursday afternoon. The officers had accepted the invitation.

‘Which can only mean one thing,’ Ala said to Lena in the bathroom that Thursday evening, a flush on her cheeks.

‘You’ve messed up the exam?’

‘No, you know, it’s—’ Ala’s lip began to wobble.

‘Practically certain?’ Lena offered with more enthusiasm than she felt.

After all, it was only what everyone else was saying.

‘They’ll be engaged by autumn, I suppose.’ Danushka licks cream off her thumb. It was a good decision to position themselves by the kitchen door where a finger might slide onto a tray of warm canapés. ‘Will you be bridesmaid?’

Lena puts her hand in her pocket and turns over the gypsy’s gift, wondering when to move the conversation to weightier matters. She shrugs and says she hasn’t really thought about weddings. ‘I’ll probably be settled in Kraków by then.’

‘Very wise.’ Danushka is tapping her riding crop against the toe of her boot. Lena admires her friend’s fortitude in choosing breeches even though her mother fell to her knees and pleaded for lace. ‘I don’t think I could bear it myself. Why anyone wants to marry is beyond me. I’ve already warned Julia she’ll have to use our cousin to hold her train when the time comes.’

‘Dan, listen, you know when Ala dragged me off to get her fortunes—’

‘But speak of the devil.’ Danushka raises her crop and points down the hall. ‘We have company at last. I mean the only sort of company anyone’s interested in. Shall we? For the sport of it?’

Linking arms they waltz to the front door. The three officers from the gypsy tent have actually materialised and, in an even greater miracle, seem to be propelling themselves willingly over the threshold. This