Read The Wrong Boy for Free Online Page B

could count us. I looked at my mother, at her caved in face and vacant eyes. She’d been pretty once. Now she looked worn. Next to her stood a woman with blistering skin, her pink face shiny with sweat, and beyond her more pinched faces and frightened eyes.
    The sun collapsed and the sky grew dark. We returned to our hut. Dinner was a slice of black bread and a square of margarine which we smeared across the bread with our fingers. The bread tasted like mud but I forced it down. I climbed into a bunk between Erika and mother. Three women squeezed in after us. I was too tired for introductions. I closed my eyes, but I couldn’t sleep. The bed was too hard and the room too quiet. I thought of the villages and homes we’d passed in the cattle train, and the people inside them sleeping on clean sheets under blankets. They had food and water and clean clothes. They went to school and played piano. It had been five days since I’d sat at my piano. I hadn’t missed a day’s practice since I was seven. I slipped my C sharp from the frayed elastic of my second-hand underwear and rubbed its soft, worn wood.
    Mother turned to look at me. “Play something for me, Hanna.” Angry voices shouted at Mother to shut up, but she kept talking. “What about Liszt? Piri will be here tomorrow and you’ve hardly practised.” A torch clicked on at the far end of the hut. Feet slid into shoes. I had to keep mother quiet.
    “I’ll play, but be quiet,
Anyu
. Please.” I moved my trembling fingers up and down my mother’s back. I played Mozart and Bartok while horrible, hungry tears rolled down my face. I was tapping out Chopin’s fifth étude when the block leader walked past. I froze. If she passed the beam of her torch over us we’d be hauled out of bed, but if I stopped drumming on my mother’s back
Anyu
was sure to complain. I forced my fingers to continue. The block leader walked the length of the room three times, then went back to bed. I began my next piece.
    “I know this one. What is it Hanna?” Mother asked excitedly.
    “It’s Liszt’s Hungarian rhapsody,” I whispered, my heart splintering into a thousand pieces. “Your favourite.”
    “And beautifully played. Piri will be so pleased with your progress.” Mother yawned and closed her eyes.
    I fell into a bitter sleep and woke to the sound of shouting. A bell was ringing and girls were frantically jumping from their bunks and pulling on their shoes. I leaped from my bunk, smoothed my blanket over the rough wooden planks and followed Erika to the washroom. Women ran past us. One woman urinated as she ran, a slow, wet trail dribbling down her inside thigh. No one wanted to miss breakfast.
    “You’ll be showered and shaved once a month.” The block leader stood at the door. “Until then, unless you want to smell like a sewer rat, I suggest you find yourselves a tap. You may want to wash your underwear too.” She lifted a pair of underpants from the muddy floor and flung them at the woman who had discarded them. “You won’t get another clean pair for a month.” She addressed the room again. “And if you wash them, you better have them back on before breakfast. There’ll be no whores in my block parading around without underwear.”
    Her scarf came loose and she pushed it away from her face with the back of her muddy hand, leaving a smear of brown dirt across her pink forehead. Erika and I looked at each other. We both opened our mouths.
Pig
. I mouthed the word first. It was a game Erika and I had played since we were children. Mr Halasz our principal looked like a bear, and Mrs Beck from apartment 10C resembled a mouse. Erika had names for all the children at school she disliked – bulging-eyed Max Szabo was ‘the goldfish’ and Ida Stern ‘the piranha’ because of her teeth. The block leader looked like a pig: the angry pink face covered in mud, the broad nose like a snout, the black beady eyes.
Pig
was perfect.
    I looked at the women fighting to stand