by Monica Hesse
His body is too small. It should be taller, or fatter. His eyes shouldn’t have to be so old. He shouldn’t have to be here. He shouldn’t have to eat like an animal.
I have eaten like this. I have sat in a circle of half-starved people and known I would fight someone who tried to take what I had.
Sister Therese notices the boy across from me, too. I wonder if he’ll be punished or told he must finish what’s on his plate before taking more. Instead, she gently slides the basket closer. “Have another,” she says. “But try the soup with a spoon? We have important guests!”
The small kindness does me in. As if it could possibly be enough. As if there are enough tender gestures in the world to make up for the brutalities these children have suffered.
A sound escapes from my throat, wet and feral and anguished. I shouldn’t cry here at the table, but I don’t know if I can hold it in, either. I force bread into my mouth, but I can’t swallow it. It just builds stickily in the back of my throat.
A few meters down, I hear a clatter: Another boy has accidentally upended his bowl of soup. The spoon skitters onto the floor, and his face melts in apology and sadness.
“No matter,” Sister Therese says cheerfully. “Happens at least once a meal.” She turns to me. “Zofia, as you’re our guest, could I give you the honored role of taking care of Simon?”
“Take care?” I mumble.
“Help him get cleaned up,” she elaborates, mimicking a gesture of washing. “Be in charge of looking after him. The washroom is down the hall.”
Simon slides off the bench and comes over, expectantly. He holds out his hand. And I freeze.
My hand won’t move, and my legs won’t, either. They’re shaking. My underarms flood with sweat. “I can’t,” I whisper.
“Pardon?” Sister Therese says, distracted.
Take his hand, I instruct myself. Take him to the washroom; this isn’t difficult.
“I can’t look after him,” I say louder, more desperately.
And I can’t explain the violent dread rising in my belly at this request, only that I know I can’t. I can’t be in charge of taking this small boy to the washroom. I can’t be in charge of this boy, I can’t take him to the washroom, I can’t help him get cleaned up, because I can’t take him to the washroom because I can’t be in charge of this boy.
“Let me.” Josef, his hand steady on my knee under the table, understanding something’s gone wrong. “Simon’s definitely too grown-up to want help from a girl. Isn’t that right?”
“Right,” the boy named Simon says uncertainly, not sure why he’s been passed off.
“Off we go. Let’s rinse this sweater, and you can show me where there’s something dry.”
After dinner, I sit mutely while the plates are cleared away, and while an older man appears to say he’s in charge of managing the supplies. “Good news,” Josef says, including me in the conversation. “They’ll give fifty blankets.”
“That’s wonderful,” I manage.
“Ernst can help carry them to your wagon,” Sister Therese offers.
“They were just asking if we needed anything else before we left,” Josef interjects. “Do we need anything else?” His question is pointed and, I think, a little baffled. This is your last chance, he seems to be saying. Why haven’t you asked about your brother?
“Some food,” Sister Therese decides. “While Ernst and Josef pack up the blankets, let’s go see if the kitchen can spare some leftovers for you to take with you.”
“I don’t want to take from you. The food should be for the children.”
“I’m at least going to pack you a few apples and a thermos of water. Unless I can find Lemuel’s bottle of Coca-Cola?” She winks mischievously. “I wanted to try some. Didn’t you?”
Josef has gone now, following Ernst to where the blankets are kept. I know he was right. This is the last chance I’ll have to ask about my brother. Sister Therese turns toward the kitchen. I run after her and grab the coarse sleeve of her habit. “Please.”
“Yes?” She looks perplexed.
“I’m looking for my brother. I haven’t seen him in more than three years.”
“Oh, my dear.” She reaches for my hand, and her fingers feel surprisingly strong. “I hope you’re reunited with him soon. I’ll add him to my prayers, if that’s all right with you.”
“No. I mean, yes, if you’d like. But what I was trying to say—he’s twelve, the same age as some of the children here. I think he was in Dachau. The same as some of the children here.”
Understanding washes over her face. “Oh. Oh. You didn’t come all this way here looking for him, did you? Is that why you were asking whether any were missing tonight?”
“He wasn’t at dinner. But I was thinking, maybe he could still come here later,” I say. “It sounds like you still have arrivals?”
“We do. Every day. Some children who come here, this is the second or third stop for them.”
“Or maybe one of the children coming from somewhere else has met him already,” I suggest. “And they’ll remember him.”
“Do you want to give me his name and a physical description?” Sister Therese asks. “I can post a ‘missing’ report on our bulletin board. Someone who crossed paths with him might see it.”
We change directions now, not to the kitchen but back to the office, where Sister Therese opens the same drawer that had the bottle opener. She smooths a sheet of creamy stationery onto the desk, dating it at the top. “Start with what he looks like. Close your eyes if it helps,” she offers. “Sometimes it does.”
When I close my eyes, I can see Abek’s face better than my own, but in a way that’s hard to put together in useful words. Fat cheeks? He had them before; he couldn’t possibly now. A loose tooth? It would have fallen out long ago. His hair might have been cut; his bruises might have healed or multiplied. I could tell Sister Therese that he was as tall as the armoire on the wall where my parents used to measure our height, but he would have grown.
“He has—” I start uncertainly. “He has brown eyes. Hazel, actually, the irises have some green. His hair is wavy. One of his eyebrows might be split down the middle. Just before we were taken, he had a wooden sword fight with another boy; we wondered if it was going to leave a scar.
“He would only be looking for me, Zofia,” I continue. “Our parents are dead, and he knows it; they were sent to the gas chambers as soon as we arrived in Birkenau from Sosnowiec.” I go on and on, but at some point Sister Therese stops moving her pencil. It doesn’t even look like she’s listening; she has an odd expression on her face, somewhere between trepidation and annoyance.
“What is it?”
“Is this a prank?” she asks. “Because if it is, it’s not very funny.”
WHAT DO YOU MEAN?” I ASK SISTER THERESE. “A PRANK?”
“Did Lemuel or one of the other boys put you up to this?”
“Lemuel or—of course not.”
“That would be cruel, waiting until Frau Fischer is gone and pulling a trick.”
“Sister Therese,” I say frantically. “I promise you, I have no idea what you’re talking about, and this isn’t a joke.”
Now the expression on her face has turned from irritation to something different—concern and worry. “You said Sosnowiec? All the way in Poland?”
“Yes.”
“We did have someone here.”
“Someone? Was his name Abek?”
She presses her lips together. “I don’t remember his name. I remember the town, and I remember a boy who had been in Birkenau. At that point, most of the children here had come from Flossenbürg; the Red Cross brought a group. I noted every time someone came who wasn’t from there.”
“Didn’t you make him sign in somewhere?”
“This was early. Months ago. We weren’t making anyone sign in then; we were barely even an official camp. I’m not even sure if UNRRA had sent Frau Fischer yet.”
“You didn’t keep any reco
rds.” I’m trying to keep my voice steady, but it’s careening.
Sister Therese lifts up her hands, a gesture to calm me. “You have to understand. Children streamed in without shoes. We tried to give them shoes. They came in hungry, and we fed them. Some stayed, and some left. But I remember one boy—I remember his saying he was going to look for his sister. He didn’t seem to think he had other family, but he said his sister might have survived Birkenau. That stuck out to me because, as I said, we hadn’t seen many people who had been there. He said his family owned a factory in Lower Silesia. He stayed for only a few days.”
“Was it a clothing factory? Was it named Chomicki and Lederman?”
“I don’t think he said. I really don’t remember. I just know that he wanted to find his sister, and he left when he found out we were taking in only children under seventeen, which made me think his sister was older than that.”
“Was he healthy?” I ask desperately. “Did he look healthy?”
“He seemed so, yes,” she says, and a deep sense of relief courses through me. “He was healthy. He was well.”
“But you didn’t—but you couldn’t—”
“I couldn’t force him to stay.” Sister Therese’s face is stricken. “Or to give me more information. Please believe me, Zofia, we were doing the best we could. There were just so many people passing through then.”
“Then why do you remember him at all?” I press on, insistent. “If so many people passed through—you asked me if Lemuel was playing a joke on you because I asked about him. How can he be important enough that the boys would use him for a joke but insignificant enough that you don’t even remember his name?”
She winces at my words. “None of the children are insignificant.”
“But this boy had a name.”
“I remember him because… because we had an incident.”
I lean back, startled. “What kind of incident?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“What incident?”
She sighs. Her next words come out like she’s dragging them. “He stole from me. All right?” Beneath her habit, she lowers her eyes.
“We were so short of beds then that I let him have my room,” she says. “I kept the grocery money in my nightstand—the money we were using for all the children. When I went in the next morning to check on this boy, he was gone and so was the money. I remembered that boy because the rest of the children didn’t have enough breakfast the next day, and everyone here knew why.”
He stole? I feel a jolt of confusion and shame. Abek stole the grocery money from Sister Therese? “I see.”
Sister Therese didn’t want to have to tell me this part of the story. She reaches up to tuck a loose curl back under her habit, and she looks older than she has all afternoon. “I didn’t blame him, of course. I knew what he must have been through, and he was only a child.”
My heart is leaping and falling at the same time. I don’t know what to make of her story. Was this starving boy Abek? This boy who came and left without a name and disappeared with only hungry mouths behind him? Did I lose my chance to find him because instead of looking when I should have been, I was lying in a hospital?
“We should still put up a notice,” Sister Therese insists. “In case he comes back. Or someone else arrives who’s met him.”
“We should still put up a notice,” I agree, but my voice is as hollow as a cave.
I start again with my descriptions, and Sister Therese dutifully writes them down. When I’m finished, the whole page is filled with her handwriting. She replaces the cap on the pen. “I really am sorry that I didn’t—”
“It’s fine. There’s nothing to be done about it now.”
She takes the paper, and we walk to the hallway where the bulletin board is. As Sister Therese promised, it’s in a prominent location, just inside the main entrance, where almost every visitor would have to pass. But when I see it, my heart sinks even further. Not a square inch of the actual board is visible. It’s all been papered over with flyers, layers and layers of them, with descriptions of other people’s family members and other people’s losses. Some of the pamphlets have pictures attached—how lucky for them to have pictures—and there are old, wrinkled grandparents, and smiling fiancés, and gap-toothed daughters.
Sister Therese tacks the description of Abek in a corner. It’ll be papered over in a week.
“I can copy more,” she offers. “And send them with the workers who visit different camps, to be pasted on bulletin boards there.” She bites her lip. “I know you’re frustrated, but this is good news, isn’t it? If it was him, it means he was still healthy after the war. I saw him with my own two eyes.”
I try to force a smile. “Can I see where he slept?”
“I promise you, he didn’t leave anything. There won’t be any clues.”
“I’m not expecting any. It’s just that”—this sounds silly, but I don’t care—“it’s just that in Birkenau, we slept in crowded bunks with no mattresses. I would like to think of him sleeping someplace warm.”
“Of course.”
She leads me up a narrow set of stairs, wooden and squeaking, to the wing where children are already asleep. At the second room, she lowers her voice to a whisper. “This was my room at the time; now we’ve given the space to the children.”
She opens the door just wide enough for us to slip through, and I blink to adjust to the light. Four single beds line the walls. Plain, but the bedclothes look clean, and each has a spare blanket folded at the foot. It looks like a fine place to sleep. Warm and tidy. Why wouldn’t he stay and wait for me to find him? Or if he left, why wouldn’t he come home, as I told him?
In the dim shadows, I recognize the boy in the bed closest to the door. It’s the little one from supper, the one who had been sneaking extra food. He sleeps with his knees tucked to his chin and his arms wrapped around them.
Quietly, so as not to disturb the sleeping boy, Sister Therese lifts up a corner of his quilt and shows me the mattress below. It’s been sliced open, and inside, what at first look like rocks are actually lumps of bread.
“He’s afraid there won’t be more,” she whispers. “They’re always afraid there won’t be more.”
AS JOSEF AND I CLEAR THE TOWN AND DRIVE DOWN A DARK road through its outskirts, the wooden bench seat digs into my bony buttocks in a vicious way that it didn’t before; every rock sends a pain through my back and down my phantom toes.
“So do think it was him?” Josef says quietly after I’ve told him what happened. “The boy who came to the convent?”
“I don’t know.”
“It seems like good news, though.”
When I don’t respond, Josef turns to face me. “Good news, right? If it was him, you missed each other by only a few months. Or, do you not think it’s him?” He cranes his head to try to look at me. “Zofia?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say, unable to find the words to explain my complicated feelings.
Do I think it was him? He was a boy from Sosnowiec’s region who had been through Birkenau and was looking for his sister. Could there have been many boys like that?
But… I can’t picture Abek stealing money from people who needed it, people who had been kind to him.
I stole Dima’s money. I stole money from someone who had been kind to me, because it was the only way I could think of to find my brother. It’s the only circumstance in which I could imagine myself a thief. Was it the same for Abek? Is the theft actually the best sign that it was Abek?
I can’t figure out how to articulate everything in my head. How my hope is eaten by guilt that I wasn’t able to get there sooner. How hearing about someone who might have been Abek is not the same as finding Abek. How arriving a few months too late feels the same as never arriving at all.
The situation with my brother is not the kind of thing where there are compromises or half measures. Either it is Abek or it isn’t. Either I’ve brought him home or I have
n’t.
“But if she saw someone who might be him a few months ago—you’re being ridiculous,” Josef insists, breaking my train of thought. “Do you have any idea how lucky some people would feel with that news?”
“I will feel lucky,” I blurt out, “when the person riding next to me in the wagon is my brother and not you.”
It was a rude thing to say, but I’m so exhausted and so confused. And most of all, I feel I’m owed a rude thing to say after the things Josef said earlier. When I see him wince at the insult, I almost apologize. But I don’t want to open up the conversation again, and I would rather him be hurt if it makes him stay quiet.
Neither of us say another word. He drives, and I sit like a statue; the road is long and empty. The only sound is the two horses clopping over the dirt. When, after an hour, it becomes too dark to see the road in front of us, Josef pulls up to a house where a light still burns in the window.
“I think we should stop for the night,” he says, and I don’t protest. “I’m going to go in and see if they know of a place to sleep nearby.”
Josef leaves me with the wagon. Feather whinnies softly in the dark until he returns a few minutes later. “We can stay here, in exchange for helping out with chores tomorrow,” he says. “You’ll sleep in with their daughter. I’m in the barn.”
Josef takes my valise, still stuffed with all the belongings I packed this morning, when I hopefully thought I might not return to Foehrenwald at all. Before he carries it to the door, Josef turns back and opens his mouth like he wants to say something. He doesn’t, though, and neither do I.
The couple waiting by the lamplight is older, the man white-bearded and the woman with a gentle slope in her back. We’ve caught them as they were heading to bed; the woman—Frau Wölflin, she introduces herself—is already wearing her nightgown, her graying hair trailing down her back in a loose braid. They don’t seem to mind that we’ve shown up nearly in the middle of the night. Frau Wölflin says they leave the lamp on just for that reason. They need help with the farm, and they feed and bunk travelers in exchange for assistance. She hands a stack of blankets to Josef, and while her husband takes him out to the barn, she pours me a glass of milk. I hold it and try to respond to her polite questions about how far we’ve traveled and the conditions of the road.