by Monica Hesse
“It has been a long day for you?” she says.
“It’s been a long day, Baba R—” I start and then stop, humiliated. I almost called this woman my grandmother’s name. It’s not even as it was with Gosia. I have no excuse; I barely know this woman. I’m just so exhausted.
Frau Wölflin doesn’t notice the slipup. Or if she does, at least she doesn’t say anything. “I mean, it has been a long day,” I correct myself. “Thank you for asking.”
“You don’t need to drink that.” She nods at the untouched glass of milk on my lap. “If you’re tired, you can go straight to bed.”
“I don’t mean to be rude, but perhaps I will. We were riding for a long while.”
I don’t know what I was expecting when Josef said I could sleep in their daughter’s room. But by the age of the Wölflins, I think I believed the girl would be my age or older. Instead, when I follow Frau Wölflin up the narrow staircase and wait as she whispers in her daughter’s ear—Hannelore, we have a guest; Zofia is staying with you tonight—the blond pigtailed head that stirs beneath the duvet belongs to a child, not more than eight or nine.
“Don’t worry.” Frau Wölflin smiles. “Lore is used to this being something of a boardinghouse. She won’t be startled to see you in the morning.”
When Frau Wölflin leaves, I slip off my shoes but realize too late that I left my overnight valise downstairs. Rather than fumble my way down in the dark, I loosen the tie in the back of my dress and then climb into bed fully clothed, easing part of the goose-feather duvet aside and slipping in as quietly as I can.
I’m tired for so many reasons that it’s hard to untangle them. I’m exhausted by hope. I’m exhausted by the fact that I woke so early this morning. I’m exhausted by this country. I’m exhausted by my own body, sometimes, which feels like it might not ever be as strong or resilient as it once was.
I’m exhausted by my own mind. That might be the most exhausting thing. My own mind, thinking a farmwife is my grandmother, and not letting me know what I should believe. If I could stop being at war with my own mind. Tame the monster. Stop my dreams.
IN THE MORNING, HANNELORE HAS WOKEN BEFORE ME. Everyone must have. I hear noises in the kitchen downstairs and smell porridge. Peeking out the warped-glass window, I see two figures, Josef and Mr. Wölflin, mending a fence; the sun is far above the horizon.
Hurriedly, I stuff my feet into my shoes, kicked under the bed last night, and rush downstairs. Frau Wölflin is clearing the plates from everyone else’s breakfast; her long braid from last night now neatly pinned in a crown around her head.
“I don’t know how I slept so long,” I apologize, reaching for the stack piled on the rough-hewn wooden table. “I know Josef promised we’d help with chores.”
Frau Wölflin waves my hand away, nodding toward a bowl in the middle of the table, resting on a rag place mat. “I saved you a few boiled eggs. When you finish eating, grab an apron and go outside to help with the washing? Hannelore has been excited for you to come down.”
As if on cue, the door swings open, and Hannelore walks in, her own hair braided to match her mother’s, a smattering of freckles across her nose. “Are you finally awake?” she asks accusatorily. “I had to take my clothes and dress in the kitchen so I didn’t wake you up.”
“I’m so sorry.” I try to keep a straight face while apologizing for this crime, but her tiny voice is so indignant it’s hard to keep from laughing.
“It’s all right. You’re up now,” she acquiesces. “I’m allowed to show you how the spigot works outside, and if there’s time later before you have to leave, I’m allowed to show you my dolls.”
“You have quite the plan for visitors.”
“We get a lot of them,” she sighs. “For a long time, we didn’t get any, but now we always have them.”
“Why didn’t you get any visitors before?”
It’s Frau Wölflin who answers, walking over to stroke her daughter’s hair. “During the war,” she explains. “We tried not to have visitors during the war.”
I sense there’s meaning in that sentence, but I’m not sure what. What were they afraid of during the war? Looters, or Jews looking for protection. It had to be one of the two.
“Are you coming?” Hannelore’s tiny hands are on her hips.
I can see she plans to monitor my whole breakfast, so I decide to abandon it, finding an apron in the cupboard Frau Wölflin pointed me to and tucking the boiled eggs into the pocket.
Outside in the light, the Wölflins’ land is scraggly and wild-looking. A vegetable garden out front needs weeding; a shutter needs to be repaired. It’s no wonder they’re happy to have boarders; this property is too much for an older couple.
Hannelore shows me how we’ll fill a wash pan with water from the outdoor spigot. How one pan will be for dishes and the other for clothes, and how we’ll save the leftover water for watering the garden later.
“Your friend Josef said you’re from a city,” she explains. “I didn’t know if you’d know how to use a water pump outdoors.”
“I am from a city, originally,” I tell her. “But for a long time I lived… somewhere else. We only had an outdoor pump there. Sometimes we didn’t even have that.”
“Did the water in the pump freeze over? That happens here in the winter.”
“Something like that. Are you going to school today?” I ask, changing the subject.
“I learn at home. Stiefmutter didn’t like me to be out by myself while soldiers were around. Maybe I’ll get to go now.” Stiefmutter—stepmother. That would explain how Frau Wölflin can look so old but have a child as young as Hannelore.
“That will be nice. I liked school when I was your age.”
The kitchen door swings open, and Frau Wölflin comes out, heading to the edge of the property where Josef helps Herr Wölflin repair the fence. As I watch, Josef heaves his shoulder against a rotted post, leaning into the wood, digging his feet into the ground. The front of his shirt—his grayed, faintly bloodstained shirt with a still-ripped pocket—is now damp with perspiration; his dark curls stick to his forehead.
I should apologize for being short with him last night. I should also stop looking at him now. I can’t bring myself to do either.
Frau Wölflin finishes checking on the fence progress and comes over to Hannelore and me, dropping an absentminded kiss on the top of Hannelore’s head. “Take him water soon,” she instructs, nodding back toward her husband. “He’s not as young as he thinks he is.”
This is a family. It’s not what my family looked like. But it’s a family nonetheless; no wonder I wanted to call Frau Wölflin Baba Rose. I realize, watching her worry over her family, that I’ll never again have someone worrying over me. Even if I find Abek, I’ll always be the one doing the looking after.
I look down, trying to focus on cleaning the plates in front of me. When we finish the washing, and after we wipe the dishes dry and pin the dresses on a clothesline, Hannelore grabs my hand.
“They’re still doing the fence; there’s enough time!” she exclaims. “I can still show you my dolls, and we can draw pictures.”
Across the yard, Josef sees us heading back toward the house. He raises his eyebrows, asking if I’m okay, and I wave that I am. But then he points to his wrist, as if he were wearing a wristwatch, though he isn’t, to say we shouldn’t stay much longer. Everyone at Foehrenwald is waiting for supplies.
Back upstairs, in the bedroom with sawdust floors and wooden beams across the ceiling, I sit where Hannelore directs me and obediently take the doll she hands me. The scene she wants to enact is a schoolhouse, her playing teacher to the dolls’ students. Some of the details she makes up are funny, but she gets a lot of it right. Frau Wölflin must have been trying to prepare her for school.
After she’s made all the students sing a song and take an exam, and I’ve run a pretend spelling bee, Hannelore says it’s time to put the dolls away and asks if I’d like to draw pictures.
“I don’t think I have time,” I tell her regretfully. “My friend said we needed to leave soon. But thank you for spending the morning with me.”
She purses her lips. “I can still give you a picture. I drew one of you while you were sleeping.”
I smile. “You little spy!”
“I wasn’t drawing it while I was watching you. I drew it while we were eating breakfast. I couldn’t get your face right because it was hidden by the pillow, but Josef said it’s okay.”
“Well, I would love to see it.”
She fetches the sheet of paper from the top of her bureau and hands it to me, picking up a doll to change its clothes while I admire the drawing. It’s a group of people, standing in front of what I recognize is the farmhouse we’re staying in.
“It’s a lovely picture. Tell me about it. This is you?” I point to the smallest figure. “And this is me and Josef, and these two on the other side must be your parents.”
“Stiefmutter and Stiefvater,” she says.
“Silly,” I say. “They can’t both be your stepparents.”
“They are.”
I shake my head, certain she’s just misunderstood the term. “Is your mother married to your stepfather, or is your father married to your stepmother?”
She looks back down at her doll, rebuttoning a pinafore over the dress. “Mommy’s not here. She said she would be back for me later.”
“Where is your mommy now?”
Hannelore adjusts the pinafore again, longer than she needs to, and suddenly she looks much older than eight. “I don’t know where she is. She hasn’t come back yet. I couldn’t talk about her before, but Stiefmutter says now I am allowed to because the Nazis lost.”
I swallow hard. “Did your mother leave you because it was safer? Is that what she said?”
“Yes. She didn’t want anyone to take me. And I have light hair, so I’d be easy to hide.”
Is this what we should have done with Abek? Beg a childless couple to keep him safe? If we’d done that, would I have been able to knock on their door now and find him in a cozy attic bedroom decorated with his drawings?
“I have a photograph,” Hannelore says. She’s gone back to the bureau, opening up the bottom drawer and taking out a box. From it she removes a book, and she’s now riffling through the pages, pulling out photographs hidden between them. “I don’t remember her very well, but she was so pretty I think she could have been a film star. Don’t you?”
She hands me the photograph. “She’s very beautiful,” I agree, looking at the young woman with big eyes.
“Her name is Inge. Isn’t that a pretty name?”
My voice cracks. “Very pretty.” I suddenly don’t want to hold the photograph anymore, hastily handing it back to Hannelore, only vaguely aware that I might be scaring a little girl.
“Hannelore, it’s been very nice playing with you, but I should probably go.”
“Nobody said we had to stop.”
“I know, but—my friend, he wanted to start early, and we have a long trip!”
I’m on my feet, moving quickly toward the door, down the stairs, grabbing my bag from the foot of the stairs, where I’d never retrieved it from last night. Outside, Frau and Herr Wölflin admire the fence, now completed and straight, and Josef is rinsing his face off in the spigot.
Hannelore’s mother, Inge, was beautiful enough to be a film star. But when I looked at that photograph, I could think only of another woman named Inge, a nothing-girl from the hospital who wasn’t beautiful. Who was covered in scabs, and whose teeth and hair had mostly fallen out.
It’s not the same person, I tell myself. You know it’s not; the stories don’t match up.
But so much of it does match up; so many of our stories are the same. The Inge I knew talked about her daughter, living with a kind German couple. She sat on the windowsill of the hospital and sang songs into the night sky, and then one night, in a way that looked like a graceful lean, in a way that almost looked like an accident, she leaned farther out until she tipped through the windowsill.
Her real name was Inge, but we all called her Bissel. Bissel. “A little bit,” in Yiddish. Because of the time one of the nurses had tried to tell us none of us were crazy, but then she looked at Bissel and said, “Her, maybe. A little bit. She is maybe a little bit crazy.”
I’M READY TO GO,” I TELL JOSEF. HE RISES FROM THE SPIGOT, using a faded cloth to dry his hair. When he looks at me, he can sense something is wrong.
“I’ll just go get our bags,” he says.
“I already have them.” I point to where I’ve set them by the wagon.
“We can’t leave without saying goodbye to the Wölflins.”
“You do it. I’ll wait here.”
I spent the ride yesterday trying to convince Josef I wasn’t crazy, and now I’m undoing it with every sentence, with my abruptness, and with the off-kilter way I climb onto the wagon without waiting for a hand.
Josef is polite enough for both of us. He goes back inside to offer our thanks to the Wölflin family, telling them—I don’t know what he’s telling them. That I feel sick, or we’re late, or I’m unspeakably rude. They make gestures that I can see are offers: Do you have to leave so soon? Can we send you away with anything? And Josef refusing, No, thank you. We’ll be fine, but how kind of you to ask.
Back in the wagon, the horses hooked up and plodding, I watch the little white farmhouse recede until it looks like a postcard. Josef lets it disappear from the horizon before he turns to me. “Did something happen?”
“Everything,” I choke out.
“Everything?”
“Everything happened,” I say again, because right now that seems the best way to describe it. Sister Therese, and a mystery boy stealing money from a convent, and Inge falling out the window, and another Inge leaving her daughter, and Hannelore showing me a photo, and the similarities of their stories, of everyone’s stories. All of it is cumulative.
“Zofia, I already said yesterday that I don’t think you’re crazy. So do you want to explain more?”
I twist the handle of my valise. The clasp seems even more broken than when I picked it up. “That girl. Hannelore. She’s not the Wölflins’ real daughter. She was in hiding.”
Josef looks surprised that’s what’s on my mind. “I know. Herr Wölflin told me. Her mother was the daughter of good friends of theirs, the couple who used to own the feedstore. They were taken.”
“Inge,” I say. “Inge is dead.” Just then, the wagon goes over a rock, so the word comes out as a stab. Dead.
“Zofia.” He jerks the horses to a stop. “What are you saying? Did you know that girl’s mother?”
“No. I don’t know. I don’t think so. I knew an Inge, but we called her Bissel.”
I tell Josef, in messy fits and starts. I tell him how I barely knew Bissel at all, that none of us really did, except that she slept in a bed next to me for two months and talked all the time about her daughter, whom she was going to find when the war was over. But she didn’t. Instead, she sat on the windowsill and leaned backward.
“And her daughter is waiting,” I say. “Bissel’s daughter is waiting somewhere like Hannelore is, thinking she’ll come home for her. But she’ll never come home. She’ll keep waiting, but Bissel will never come home, and I know that, and she doesn’t.”
“Hannelore’s mother isn’t coming home, either,” Josef says. “Hannelore might still believe her mother is coming to find her, but the Wölflins know better. Herr Wölflin told me; they’re writing letters, but they already assume she’s dead.”
“They assume, but they don’t know,” I say. “And that’s the worst of all. The worst possible thing.”
“The not knowing?”
My mind is spinning. “Suppose you could learn the answer to a mystery you wanted solved. But of all possible terrible answers you’d imagined, this one was even worse. Would you still want to know?”
“Zofia, I’m not following,” Josef says, con
fused but not impatient. “Hannelore’s mother, Inge, reminds you of another woman named Inge, and both of them left their daughters with families who don’t know what happened to them? What are you asking?”
What am I asking?
I am asking: If my options were never being able to find my brother, or knowing for sure that something terrible had happened to him, which would I choose? What’s the line between the amount of information that brings hope and the amount that brings despair?
Do you choose the comfort of fantasy? Or do you choose real pain?
No. That’s not what I’m asking. That’s not what I’ve ever been asking.
Since the moment I woke up in the hospital, since the moment the war ended and I began trying to piece my brain back together, I have really been asking only one question.
“Josef.” My voice is barely above a whisper. “What if my brother is dead?”
I’ve said it. The thing I’ve never allowed myself to say or allowed anyone else to say, either. That is the question I want answered.
I saw hundreds of people die. Shot. Hanged. Starved. Beaten. Broken.
I came here today chasing hope and coincidences. The boy in the records from Dachau whose name looked like Alek Federman. The boy who came to Sister Therese. What if none of the coincidences go anywhere because my brother is dead?
The reins twitch in Josef’s hand. I wait for him to assure me Abek is not dead. I wait for him to tell me again that I’ve received a promising lead from Sister Therese and that I should hold on to it.
Indulgent optimism is the gift that every person I’ve met has given me. Gosia. Dima. The nurses. They all told me that it could take a long time, but I shouldn’t give up hope. Or they patted my arm and found a way to avert their eyes. Or they wrote to Bergen-Belsen and didn’t tell me when they received a response. They all found any number of ways to deal with me. With my frailty, with my pain, with my stubborn hope.