Free The Girl from Krakow by Alex Rosenberg Page A

there. No one here needs to know about our problem. Anyway, no one in a small town like this can help.”
    “Lvov?”
    “Yes, there is a medical school, a large hospital, a women’s clinic. After all, it’s the third largest city in the country. No one will need to know anything but the doctor examining you. I knew him slightly in Krakow. Now he practices in Lvov. His name is Pankow. We have exchanged correspondence about the matter, and he wants to examine you himself.”
    Rita wanted to remonstrate. Urs had opened a correspondence with a stranger on the most intimate of marital relations. It hadn’t occurred to him to secure his wife’s permission first.
    But then she thought, Don’t make an issue of this. There hadn’t been any issues between them, never any hard or harsh words, never any arguments, scenes, tears, or anger—in fact, no emotion whatever. Urs never seemed to have any, and Rita had by now taught herself not to. She had convinced herself that the lack of strong feeling was a sign of maturity. People driven by emotion, she had convinced herself, were less content than those whose lives were calculated. Now, recovering quickly from her momentary despair, forcing herself to think about matters this way, she tried to see Urs’s point. Having married for comfort, she really had to earn it. Besides, she did want children—Urs’s children, for that matter—both to fulfill the unspoken terms of the agreement and because he had many fine qualities. Yes, the course Urs had outlined was perfectly reasonable.
    And then she thought, At least I can get away from Karpatyn for a day. Spend a day in a bustling city, one much bigger than Krakow. Calmly she asked, “When does he expect me?”

    A week and exactly one bout of marital intimacy later, Rita was in Lvov. It had been a one-and-a-half-hour train journey through the flat, steppe-like countryside of Southeastern Poland, bare since the harvest. Each village they passed looked like the last—slattern hovels of stuccoed timbers huddled around a Ukrainian Orthodox church. Hardly anyone alighted or descended at any of the half dozen stops between Karpatyn and Lvov. And why should they? Rita thought.
    Lvov was a refreshing surprise. Why hadn’t she come before? It was a metropolis. Electric streetcars slid noiselessly past the main station and ran down cobbled streets in three directions. Large black automobiles and still larger trucks moved quickly past the few farm carts. The buildings across the street from the station were four and five stories high, faced in dressed stone, with arched windows from which glowing lights shone into the gray midday. There was a café at the corner, crowded inside, but with a few tables still braving the chill. The street was alive with shoppers, a newspaper kiosk doing a lively business, even a chestnut roaster plying his trade at the curb. She looked wistfully at the café. No time for a coffee. Rita found a cab, an old but shiny Peugeot, and gave the driver Dr. Pankow’s address.
    Five minutes from the station, the taxi stopped before one of these formidable stone-clad buildings. Rita paid and stepped out. At the entry under an overhanging balcony, she sought the doctor’s brass plate and entered. Beyond the lobby, white marble slab stairs wound around a wrought iron elevator cage, something she had not seen for almost two years. She waited till the cabin descended. It took her to the second floor, where she knocked at a frosted glass door. The physician himself could be heard to say, “Come in.” He looked up at her from his desk, neither smiling nor frowning. “ Pani Doctor Guildenstern?”
    Rita was taken aback momentarily by a form of address reserved for her mother-in-law. “Yes, Doctor. How nice to meet you.” It wasn’t really nice. He was a formidable, stern-faced character, heavyset, with deep parenthetical wrinkles on either side of his mouth, eyes hidden beneath a heavy brow. Who did he look like? she