Festival of Fear (7 page)

‘She has delusions,' Kasia had told her. ‘The last doctor who came here, he diagnosed her as schizophrenic.'

‘What kind of delusions?'

‘She doesn't believe that she belongs here at all. She believes that she lives on a farm someplace in the country, with her father and mother and her two younger sisters. She says that her father grows turnips, and keeps pigs. She sits in her room most of the day, talking to her sisters, even though she doesn't have any, and never did, so far as anybody can make out.'

‘And Anka?'

‘I don't know. Maybe she
did
get her from her grandmother. Who knows? But what a strange doll, isn't she? I never saw another doll like that. Beautiful, but strange.'

Kasia had taken her upstairs and led her from room to room. Every room was crowded with cribs, and in each crib there was a thin, hopeless child. Some of them sat staring at nothing at all. Others slept, clinging to their blankets. Many of them rocked endlessly from side to side, or banged their heads against the bars of their cribs. One little boy kept his face covered with his hands, and endlessly grizzled.

Every room was cold, with rough brown blankets pinned up at the windows instead of curtains, so it was always dark.

Grace had tried to stay as detached as she could. She had taken scores of photographs, at least ten of every child. When she had finished, she had followed Kasia back down to the hallway, where Grzegorz and Weronika had been waiting for them.

‘Well?' Grzegorz had asked her.

‘I don't know what to say,' Grace had told him. She had been very close to tears.

‘You will show these to your magazine, yes?'

‘I'll do more than that, Grzegorz, I promise you. I'll get these children out of here.'

As she had been about to leave, Gabriela had approached her and tugged repeatedly at her sleeve.

‘What is it, Gabriela?'

‘She wants you to take her with you,' Kasia had translated.

‘I'm sorry, sweetheart. Not this time. But I promise you that I'll come back for you.'

‘She says that the witch is coming to get her.'

‘The witch?'

‘Baba Jaga. She is a witch from Polish legend who is supposed to eat children.'

Grace had taken hold of both of Gabriela's hands, and said, ‘There's no witch, Gabriela. Nobody's going to hurt you.'

But Gabriela had held up her doll, and said, ‘Anka keeps me safe from Baba Jaga. Every time I have a nightmare about Baba Jaga, I kiss Anka and Anka swallows it up. But now she is full up with so many nightmares and she cannot swallow any more. Next time Baba Jaga comes, Anka will not be able to save me. Baba Jaga will eat me, and spit out my bones, and stick my head on a pole.'

Once this had been translated by Kasia, Grace had shaken her head and smiled. ‘Gabriela – nothing like that is going to happen to you. I have to talk to some people in Warsaw about you, and make some arrangements. Do you understand? But when I've done that, I'll come back and take you away from this place.'

Gabriela had looked up at her with pleading eyes. ‘Please, you must take me now. I do not want to be eaten.'

Grace had turned to Kasia. ‘Can't we take her? She's so upset.'

‘It is absolutely not possible, I am afraid,' Kasia had told her. ‘Not tonight, anyhow. We have to ask for the proper permissions from the Public Adoption Commission. They are always helpful with healthy children, but with sick children like these – well, there can be very difficult bureaucratic problems. Hundreds of forms to fill out.'

‘OK,' Grace had said, with reluctance. But then she had wagged her finger at Gabriela's doll, and said, in a stern voice, ‘Anka! You listen to me, Anka, and you listen to me good! You keep Gabriela safe for just a little while longer, OK? Make sure you find the room in your tummy to swallow a few more of her nightmares. We can't have Baba Jaga eating her up, can we?'

Gabriela had said nothing more, but had held Anka close to her, and stared at Grace with such desperation that Grace had said, ‘Come on, Kasia. Let's go. This is all too painful.'

As they had left the Cienisty Orphanage, Grace had seen lightning flickering on the horizon, over the factory chimneys of Katowice, and heard the rumbling of distant thunder, like a wartime barrage. She had looked back, and seen Gabriela standing in the open doorway, still staring at her.

Kasia had been right. If the children at the Cienisty Orphanage had been healthy, there would have been no problem at all in finding homes for them. An American couple could adopt a healthy Polish child for less than $7,500. But who was going to take on a ten-year-old girl with Down's syndrome; or a seven-year-old boy with violent epilepsy; or any child with multiple sclerosis?

After more than three months of pleading and cajoling, however, Kasia had found places for all twenty-seven children – with private families, or children's homes, or hospices. It was her tragic photographs that touched most people's hearts. They had been published in
The Philadelphia Inquirer
and
Newsweek
and shown on CBS and NBC nightly news.

She had been able to call Kasia at the end of February to tell her that she was flying over to Poland again, and this time she was going to take the children back to Philadelphia, all twenty-seven of them.

Kasia's voice had sounded very distant. ‘I am so sorry, Grace. Now we have only twenty-six.'

‘What's happened? Don't tell me that little Andrzej's heart gave out?'

‘No . . . it was Gabriela. She disappeared from Cienisty three days ago. We thought that she had run away. She was always talking about going back to find her father and her mother and her two sisters. But early this morning some people were picking mushrooms in the woods nearby, and they found her body.'

‘Oh, no! Not Gabriela.'

‘The police don't yet know how she died. They say that her body was savaged by animals, dogs maybe, so it is difficult for them to be sure.'

Grace had slowly sat down. Through her kitchen windows, she had seen Daisy building a snowman, with two lumps of barbecue charcoal for eyes and a carrot for a nose and one of Jack's old, khaki fishing hats on top of his head. Daisy was only a little older than Gabriela, but she was rosy cheeked and well fed, with shiny blonde hair. Watching her running around their snowy back yard, in her red woolly hat and her fur-collared coat, Grace had thought of the last time she had seen Gabriela, standing in the front porch of the orphanage in her shabby black tracksuit, with Anka clutched tight in her arms.

‘
Please, you must take me now. I do not want to be eaten
.'

Kasia carried little Andrzej out to the waiting bus. It was sunny outside, but very cold, and exhaust fumes floated past the window like departing ghosts. Grace was about to follow her when she thought she heard a noise in one of the bedrooms upstairs – a mewling sound, like a cat, or a very young child in distress.

She went to the bottom of the stairs, and called, ‘Hallo? Is anybody there?'

She waited, but there was no reply. The children couldn't understand her. Many of them wouldn't have been able to understand her even if she had spoken to them in fluent Polish. But they always spoke to her, and smiled, and touched her, and called her ‘Gracja'.

She had nearly reached the front door, however, when she heard the mewling noise again.

‘Hallo?' she repeated. There was still no reply, so she climbed the stairs to the second-floor landing. She had torn down all of the blankets from the bedroom windows, so that sunlight fell across the corridor in a series of shining triangles. She walked slowly past all of the open doors, looking into every one. All she saw was empty cribs and filthy mattresses, and white plastic potties.

She was just about to go back downstairs when the mewling was repeated. It sounded as if it was coming from the bathroom, right at the very end of the corridor. She opened the bathroom door and said, ‘Hallo? Is anybody still here?'

The bathroom was cold and silent, with a huge bathtub that was stained with rust, and old-fashioned faucets with strings of black slime hanging from them. In the far corner, next to the grimy washbasin, there was a dilapidated laundry basket, with a broken lid.

Wrinkling up her nose, Grace picked up the lid and looked inside. There, lying on a tangled heap of soiled pajamas, was Anka, Gabriela's doll, with her wild white hair.

‘Anka!' said Grace, lifting her out and straightening her arms and legs. ‘Who left you in there, you poor little creature!'

Anka stared back at her, as serene and knowing as ever. The sight of her brought back such a vivid picture of Gabriela that Grace felt her eyes fill up with tears. If only she had listened, when Gabriela had begged her to take her away. Who cared about bureaucracy, and form filling, when the life of a seven-year-old girl was at risk?

‘Come on, Anka,' she said. ‘At least I can save
you
.'

She carried Anka downstairs. Then she walked out of the front door and closed it behind her. It refused to shut completely, so she opened it again and slammed it hard.

She climbed on to the bus. Kasia and Grzegorz were sitting at the front, next to the driver. Halfway down the aisle sat two young nurses from the children's hospital at Chorzow. Grace had arranged for them to accompany the children all the way to Warsaw, and then for two student nurses from UHP to take care of them while they were being flown back to Philly.

The children themselves were unexcited. Some of them rocked in their seats, as they always rocked, while others stared listlessly out of the windows. None of them had any experience of a day away from the orphanage, so they had no idea of where they might be going or what was going to happen to them.

However, the nurses gave them each a carton of Sokpol cranberry juice, and a Princessa chocolate wafer, and they were so pleased that they chattered and laughed with pleasure and one or two of them even screamed.

Kasia took hold of Grace's hand. ‘It is a wonderful thing that you are doing today, Grace.'

Grace looked down at Anka, sitting in her lap. ‘I just wish that Gabriela could have been here, too.'

‘The police think she ran away,' said Grzegorz. ‘They believe she was try to get home to her father and mother.'

‘So she died of what? Exposure?'

‘They think so,' said Kasia. ‘Her body was so badly torn to pieces that it was almost impossible for them to say. They could not find one of her arms.'

‘Oh, God. I hope she didn't suffer. She was so frightened that she was going to be eaten by a witch, and look what happened to her. I feel so guilty.'

‘It was not your fault, Grace,' Grzegorz told her. ‘These childs, they have great luck to be alive at all. Even ordinary childs in Katowice has terrible troubles with the health, because of the pollutement in the air. The steelworks, the factories. The doctors find the heavy metals even inside the unborn babies. Lead, arsenic. We try our best, but we cannot save every one of them.'

Grace lifted up Anka. ‘Gabriela said that Anka always kept her safe, didn't she? Anka breathed in all of her nightmares, so that they wouldn't hurt her.'

Kasia tugged Anka's hair, trying to straighten it. ‘Many Polish children have nightmares about Baba Jaga. She is
very
scary!'

‘I never heard about her before.'

‘Well, Baba Jaga lives in the forest, in a wooden hut that runs around on chicken legs. The keyhole to her front door is a human mouth with sharp teeth inside it, and the fence around her hut is made of human bones with a skull on top of every pole, except for one, which is supposed to be for
you
, if you are having a nightmare about her.'

‘In that case,' said Grace, ‘I think I'll try not to.'

Kasia smiled. ‘Baba Jaga is always hungry, and so she is always out searching for food. She flies in and out through the chimney, in a mortar, with a pestle to steer with, and she carries a net for catching children.

‘The story goes that the only child who ever managed to escape from Baba Jaga was the daughter of a turnip farmer.'

Grace said, ‘The daughter of a turnip farmer? That's what Gabriela believed she was, didn't she?'

Kasia nodded. ‘Every time Baba Jaga was about to eat her, the girl said that she would taste much better with turnips, so Baba Jaga took her back to her father's farm to collect a sack full of them. The girl cooked them into a turnip stew, and Baba Jaga ate so much that she fell asleep.

‘It was a bitter night in winter, and Baba Jaga slept so long that she was frozen stiff. The girl was able to steal the special key from Baba Jaga's belt and escape.'

‘Poor Gabriela,' said Grace. ‘If only
she
could have escaped.'

The doll, Anka, continued to stare at her, unblinking, and for a split second Grace could have sworn that she was smiling. But she was only being jiggled by the bus, as they turned off the side road that took them away from the Cienisty Orphanage, and on to the broad S1 highway to Warsaw.

The sun shone, the cumulus clouds blossomed in the sky, and the two young nurses started the children in a clapping song.

‘
Kosi kosi lapci, pojedziem do babci
!
Babcia da nam mleczka, a dziadzius pierniczka
! Clap, clap little hands, we will go to grandma's! Granny will give us milk, and grandpa a gingerbread cookie!'

Jack and Daisy were sitting in the second-floor lounge of the Holiday Inn in Warsaw, waiting for her. Jack was looking unshaven and tired, and his dark hair was ruffled, but Grace knew that he had only been back from Tokyo for a day and a half before he had brought Daisy over to Poland.

When she had told him about her determination to rescue the children from the orphanage, Jack had told her that she was mad. ‘You're a crazy woman. You're worse than my mother. All
she
did was rescue cats.' But he had supported her right from the very beginning, and never once told her that she was wasting her time. More than that, he had called in favors from senior executives at five different hospitals to whom he sold scanning equipment. He had emailed dozens of his friends and golf partners and he had even taken the junior senator for Pennsylvania, Bob Casey, Jr, for lunch at Vetri's, and canvassed his support, too.