by Monica Hesse
“I’m sorry I left so early,” I say, smoothing out the untangled string in my lap. “I thought I should get back to Abek, and I didn’t want him or Esther to worry, and…”
And I had no idea how to act, I silently finish the sentence. Because I’ve never been in that situation and never thought I would be.
Josef stops my apology. “Of course, of course. I assumed you wanted to get back. I was going to leave you alone this morning because I thought you’d spend it with Abek.” He polishes another link on the now half-sparkling chain. “How is Abek? How is it being with him?”
“He’s—” I stop myself because I was about to say, He’s fine, which is such an incomplete response for this situation. Josef looks up at me and sets his work back down on the grass. He’s actually interested in my response; he isn’t just looking for something perfunctory. “He’s been out here for an hour, teaching me to ride this stupid bicycle. Even though I’m terrible at it and the bicycle is terrible. And it’s strange, because…”
I pause because I’m trying to formulate something out loud I haven’t even had a chance to formulate in my head. “Because since he came back, the whole thing has been like a dream almost. Having him at the wedding, having him sleep in our cottage. But in an odd way, just now, this morning, is when I’ve felt most like I had a brother. Not just a memory. If that makes any sense.”
Josef bites his lip, nodding. “I think it does. With my sister—there’s a difference between loving a person and loving a memory of them. Or loving who someone is and who you want them to be.”
“Esther says we even laugh the same.”
“You don’t.”
His response throws me off guard, and I ball up my little piece of thread to toss at him. “Thanks.”
He puts his hand up in mock defense. “I didn’t mean to offend you; I’m just saying that I don’t think you have the same laugh. Yours is more sly. I’ve seen it; you snort sometimes.”
“Thanks.”
“I mean it in a good way. You laugh like everything is a secret.” He glances up at me, his mouth twisting a little in embarrassment, I think. “You laugh, and I’m never sure what’s going to come out of your mouth next.”
He’s nearly done cleaning this bicycle chain, so I go to where the second bicycle is still leaning against the wall of the stables and walk it back. This one’s chain is even more mangled than the first; it’s why Abek and I didn’t choose it to begin with. Laying it on the grass, I protect my hands with a clean cloth and remove it from the gears.
“Breine is trying to get me to come with them,” I say.
His hand falters.
“They’re in contact with someone who has a boat. It will leave from Italy, and there are still slots on it. They’re going soon.”
“You never talked about—I always thought you were going to—” He collects himself and begins again. “Do you want to go?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve barely had a chance to think about it. Do you want to go?”
He presses his lips together. “I’m not a part of that group.”
“Neither am I. Breine just said they had some unexpected openings.”
He’s silent for long enough that I begin to think he won’t answer at all. “I’m not going to go,” he says finally.
“Why not?”
“I’m just not. It’s not the place where I belong. I don’t want to take a spot from someone who really wants it.”
“Okay,” I say. “Then what do you really want?”
“What do you mean?”
I know I’m treading into personal territory, but I press on anyway. I’ve been in this man’s bed; it’s not out of line for me to ask these questions. “Well, Breine and Chaim are here because they’re learning to run a farm. Esther is learning stenography. And I’m here because I was looking for my brother. But, when we were in the wagon on the way to the Kloster Indersdorf, you said you were trying to leave as quickly as possible. Only, I haven’t seen you trying to leave.”
He tenses. “I take care of the horses.”
“I’m not saying you’re not being useful. I’m only saying that it sounded like you wanted to collect yourself and move on, but I’ve never heard you mention what you want to do next. I don’t even know what you did before.”
“Before, I lived with my family and learned to take care of horses.”
“During, then. I have no idea what happened to you during the war.”
He clenches his teeth. “During the war, I lost my teeth and gained a bald spot on my head.”
“Josef. You know that’s not what I—”
“I would be sad if you left,” he interrupts.
“What did you say?”
He finishes with the chain and wipes his hands off on the rag. “I want you to go with Breine and Chaim if you want to. I know that I just met you, and I wouldn’t ask anything from you. But if any part of you was telling me about Breine’s invitation because you wanted to know my reaction… my reaction is, I would be sad.”
I chew the inside of my cheek, trying to keep from grinning at what Josef just said. “I think I would be sad, too.”
“So maybe until you decide,” he says, “you can keep leaving little pieces of leftover thread in my room that I can keep finding excuses to return to you.”
I retrieve the thread from the grass where it landed after I tossed it at him. “Do you want to just take this with you so you can give it back to me tomorrow?”
“I do.” Solemnly, he takes the thread. “Can I kiss you now?” Josef asks.
“You can.”
WITHIN A FEW DAYS, ABEK AND I HAVE COBBLED TOGETHER a routine. Breakfast in the morning. An hour or two of his trying to teach me to ride, an activity at which I’m relentlessly hopeless. And then after that—my alterations on Breine’s dress have had an unexpected result. The evening after the wedding, a woman I’ve never seen before stops by the cottage with a skirt in her hand, asking if I can hem it. The next day, her friend brings in a jacket that needs to be nipped in at the waist, and a trickle of men bring in shirts with loose buttons, pants with dragging legs, suits needing patches at the elbows.
It’s not difficult or inspirational work, but it’s work. It’s useful; it’s something that makes me feel useful and normal. People have hardly any money to pay with, so I end up with other things: Resoled shoes for Abek. Candles, kerosene, a carved wooden box to keep supplies in.
And then, one evening I sit in my room and finish the delicate embroidery on a handkerchief for a going-away gathering planned for that night. Miriam. She finally came back to our cottage a few nights after the wedding, but she soon realized that her reason for staying at Foehrenwald had disappeared. Now that she knows her sister won’t ever be coming, she’s decided to go back to Holland. She thinks she still has friends there. Breine and Chaim organized the gathering and asked me to make the gift. I stitched flowers around the edges, and then, in the middle, all our initials.
It’s a heartbreaking party, a party that’s trying to do a lot of different things. It seems odd to ask Miriam to remember her time in Foehrenwald when so much of it is defined by things she would like to forget. But I give her the handkerchief anyway, and she folds it carefully into her pocket.
“Do you know, my sister’s name is Rose?” she asks, sadly running her hand over the flowers. “I will think she knows you made this for me.”
After the dinner is over, I walk back to the cottage with Abek, thinking about Miriam going back to Holland, about beginnings and endings.
There’s no strict reason why I need to be in Foehrenwald. I could take in sewing anywhere. I could do it in Sosnowiec, and that would free up two beds for the other refugees who continue to arrive every day. This place is not meant to be permanent.
“Do you want to try riding again before it’s completely dark?” Abek asks. “Or, I think some people are going to play cards later.”
We’re about halfway to the cottage, walking down the dirt path. It’
s chilly tonight, back to normal autumn temperatures, and I fold my arms in front of my chest. “Actually, I was thinking we should talk about the future.”
“The future?”
“What to do now. You’ve been here a little while, and now that we’ve found each other, we should have a plan.”
“Okay,” he agrees. “What are the options?”
“Well, we could go back to Sosnowiec right now,” I say slowly. “That’s the first option. It’s what I’ve always assumed we would do. We could live in our old apartment, and we could try to find our old friends. Do you remember your old room? I know Gosia would like to see you, and—”
“What else?” he interrupts. “You also said we could go with Breine and Chaim on their boat.”
“We could go with them on their boat,” I continue, a bit thrown off at how quickly he seemed to dismiss the option of going home. “Or, there are ships, I suppose, to anywhere in the world. We could go somewhere else,” I blurt out. “We could go to—to Sweden. Or Argentina, or America.”
“I wanted to go to Norway,” Abek says suddenly.
“Norway? Since when?” I laugh. “Why?”
He looks down. “There was a man who was nice to me. He was from Norway. He told me there are all these—they’re not rivers, but they’re like that. And mountains.”
“Fjords,” I supply. “They’re inlets, I think. Okay, we could add Norway to our list. Anywhere else?”
Does Josef want to go to Norway? a part of my brain wonders, but I quickly swat away the thought. This conversation is about Abek and me. It’s not about Josef. “The thing that’s most important is that you need to be back in school,” I say. He makes a face. “You do. You probably haven’t had steady lessons of any kind since Mrs. Schulman, when you were eight, and you’ve never been in a real schoolhouse.”
“Can’t you teach me?”
“That’s not really a permanent solution. I need to be thinking about how to make money and take care of us.”
“I could work, too,” he offers.
“I don’t want you to work. You’re too young. I want you to still have a normal childhood. School was important to Papa and Mama; you remember.”
He rolls his eyes. “I’m not a child.” There’s a testiness in his voice, like I heard when I wouldn’t let him have the wine at the wedding.
“Well, I want you to still have a normal life,” I amend my statement. “Normal twelve-year-olds go to school.”
“Normal twelve-year-olds don’t survive Birkenau by jumping into latrines to hide from the commandant every time there was a selection. It’s too late for me to be a normal twelve-year-old.”
“I don’t care about normal twelve-year-olds,” I say exasperated. “I care about my bro—wait. Wait, Abek, what did you say just now?” In my head, I repeat back what he’s just said, trying to figure out why it sounds wrong to me.
“Nothing. Never mind.”
“But your job was to work for the commandant. That was what I worked out for you. Why would you have to hide from him in latrines?”
“I said never mind. I just misspoke. Am I allowed to misspeak?”
“Of course you are, I just—”
“I don’t like talking about the past,” he insists, angry. “And you always want to talk about it.”
“That’s not true.”
“About Papa’s taking over the business, or what Mama used to say about something when we went somewhere at some time, or why Aunt Maja wasn’t married, or what old friends would want to see me.”
A chatting couple approaches, but they both quiet as they pass. We’ve raised our voices without intending to. The woman is watching us until she sees my noticing and then abruptly picks up the conversation again, in a louder tone than normal. “I don’t mean to be doing that,” I say, lowering my voice.
“You’re always testing me to see what I remember and what I don’t. Like you think there’s something wrong with me.”
“I’m not.”
“It feels that way.” Abek turns away, shoulders hunched protectively near his ears. “Why does it matter if I remember what lies you told?”
“Because it’s our story. Because it’s important.”
“Because it’s important to you. It’s more important to you than I am.”
“Abek!” I’m taken aback by the words coming out of his mouth and by the sudden vehemence with which he’s saying them. “That’s absolutely not true.”
My first reaction to Abek’s unrest is to tell him that he’s just imagining things; of course I’m not doing what he says I’m doing. But even while I want to do that, I can’t help but be confused and alarmed.
How did this conversation get out of control so quickly? I can’t mark what made Abek so suddenly angry, and I can’t help worrying that the anger is covering up something else. I don’t like the way this conversation is making me feel. I don’t like what it’s pulling at, what it’s teasing out of my brain.
Why wouldn’t Abek remember the deal I made for him to work for the commandant? It seems so basic, such a basic piece of our story. Is there something he’s not telling me? Something so awful he thinks I can’t handle it? Or something he’s not remembering? How could he not remember such an important detail of our past?
“Let’s go back,” I say, exhausted by the conversation. “Let’s just go back to the cottage.”
“You’re lost in thought.”
A hand touches my arm gently, and I jump. It’s Josef; he raises his hands in apology. “I’ve been calling your name for a few minutes. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“You didn’t—I mean, you’re right. I was just lost in thought.”
I’ve just left Abek at the cottage. When the awkwardness between us didn’t seem to abate, I told him I needed to go for a walk. My feet took me immediately to the stables, where my feet have taken me several times over the past few days. I’m standing in the doorway, too distracted to go inside.
Josef walks back to his three-legged stool and recommences cleaning out some brushes and combs. Every time I’ve come here, Josef has been in the middle of something—mucking out a stall, fixing a tool—and he always greets me as though he’s both surprised to see me and not surprised. In the beginning, I took this for indifference, but soon I realized he’s just trying not to get his hopes up and expect me. I didn’t see him at dinner. I still never see him at dinner.
I see him after dinner. I see him on midnight walks, when he stops and kisses me against the rough wall of the stables. I see him in the dark of his bedroom, when his hands no longer fumble at the buttons on my dress. But then, after, I sneak back to my own cottage. And I eat dinner with Breine, Esther, and Chaim. And what Josef and I have together seems both ill-defined and important, but he mostly stays apart from everyone but me.
Today, while Josef does his work, I take an apple from the burlap bag and hold it below Feather’s nose. Her mouth is warm and fuzzy in the palm of my hand as she takes the fruit and nudges me for another one.
“Something’s bothering you?” Josef asks.
“No, I’m fine,” I answer.
But I guess I wait a beat too long before answering, because instead of nodding and moving along with the conversation, Josef looks at me with a raised eyebrow. “Is there something in particular you wanted to talk about?” There’s trepidation in his voice. He’s worried, I realize, that what’s not fine might have something to do with him.
“I just had an odd conversation with Abek,” I say. “He’s said some things I don’t understand.”
Josef looks both relieved and concerned at the same time. “What kinds of things?”
“He was angry with me because he said I’m dwelling too much on the past. But I wonder if he doesn’t want to talk about the past because he doesn’t remember things—things that I feel he should remember. That are important to my family.”
It wasn’t only the story about the commandant, I realize. On our very first night, he couldn’t compl
ete the gaps in a story I was telling. And then at the wedding, he asked whether Papa had walked Aunt Maja to her chuppah, as if he didn’t remember Maja wasn’t married. I’d assumed it was just the glass of wine, but could it have been something else? Should I have thought it odd that he mixed that up? It, too, is a rudimentary detail about our family.
But then he was only nine when we were separated. How many strong memories did I have of the period before I was nine? Aunt Maja wasn’t the only aunt I had. My father had a sister, too. She moved to London when I was six, married an Englishman, converted to Christianity for him, lost touch. I don’t even know her married last name. But before all that, I have hazy memories of her coming over for dinner. Was she dating the Englishman at the time? Were they already married? Did she come to our house alone? I honestly can’t remember.
“Such as, Zofia?” Josef nudges my foot with his own; I’ve spent a full minute staring into space without continuing my thought. The second apple in my hand is gone, too, and I wasn’t even aware of Feather’s eating it. “You said he didn’t remember things.”
“Some things,” I correct him. “He has specific memories of some things… just not others.”
I don’t know why I’m being so coy, so reticent. When I give Josef my examples now, they come out haltingly, and they sound silly, even as I’m saying them.
“And, a few times, he’s just gotten annoyed with me. Out of the blue, for reasons I don’t really understand. And since I don’t really understand why he’s upset, I don’t know if I should apologize. It’s just… confusing.”
While Josef listens to me, he picks up the tool he’s just finished cleaning, a wooden-handled device with serrated metal teeth. If I’d seen it lying on a table, I would have thought it was a weapon or a torture device, but instead, he moves it gently over Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s flank, loosening burrs and clumps of dirt, following the path of the comb with his hand to make sure he hasn’t missed anything.