by Monica Hesse
Maybe Abek is already home, waiting for me. My heart flutters with the possibility as I run up the stairs. A fire on the stove. Clean sheets on the beds.
I’ve barely even touched the handle when it swings open.
ABEK!” I RUSH INTO THE FOYER. “ABEK? ARE YOU HERE?”
Straight ahead of me in the parlor is furniture, but not enough of it, and not ours. A large area rug too modern for Baba Rose’s taste. On top of it, an unfamiliar chaise lounge and a few spindly chairs.
I must be in the wrong apartment, one floor too low. I must have gotten confused again.
But no, from here I can see: The center of the floor is marked with three round water stains. Could the stains have moved, too? Five years. I haven’t been in this building in five years. I’m not in the wrong place. It’s just that this apartment has lived its own life since I was here.
I am home. I am home. A sound escapes my lips, something between a bark and a cry.
The air is the same. The heavy heat, which Mama always said was the downside of living on the highest floor. Is it possible I can still smell the leftover ghosts of Aunt Maja’s nightly cigarette? I look down, and without realizing it, I’ve slipped off my shoes. I haven’t done this in months. Even at nighttime, I’ve slept holding my shoes, to make sure they weren’t stolen, to make sure I could be ready to run. It’s because it’s Thursday. Thursday is the day Mama washed the floors.
My feet remember to take off my shoes, and my hands remember to deposit my parcel where a credenza used to be.
“It’s me,” my voice remembers to say, and is it possible that in this apartment, my voice remembers that it used to be a higher pitch? That it used to have a sharpness, a bit of wit?
Now, the only response to my voice is an echo.
Abek’s room first. I try to focus, walking toward the smallest room at the end of the hall, feet sticking to the polished walnut floors—there used to be a carpet runner—and pushing the carved door open. Sky-blue walls; the Germans kept those. White trim, curtains.
But those are the only familiar things. There’s no furniture. Even the bed is gone. A pile of rumpled bedsheets sits in the corner, but I can’t tell whether someone used them recently or whether they were tossed there by whomever stole the bed. When I bring one to my nose, soft and flannel, it smells faintly of must. His closet is empty. No picture books. No model cars, no stray sock catching on the door.
Backtracking, to my parents’ room next and then Baba Rose’s, and with each empty room I can feel my brain wanting to break into pieces.
My room, the one I shared with Aunt Maja. Dark wood panels; it had been my grandfather’s study before he died. The bed frames are gone here, too. I scan the rest of the room. I’d pasted posters on my walls, travel advertisements from train companies. Someone tried to scrape them off, but I can make out half of the Eiffel Tower.
If Abek had been back to this house, my room is where he would have left me something—a letter or a memento. I’m sure of it. Something to say, I was here. Wait for me. So I pick up a mildewed towel crumpled along a baseboard and shake it out, and I run my fingertips along the windowsill in case a slip of paper is jammed in the pane.
Inside my closet, naked wooden hangers clatter together. On the shelf above, an upholstered valise I don’t recognize. I pull it down and upturn it, but nothing falls out. It’s empty, and the clasp is broken, a beaten-up piece of luggage the previous occupants couldn’t even bother to take.
They left me trash. They left me nothing. They left us nothing. This apartment is both familiar and strange. How can something feel like too much and not enough?
On the floor of the closet sits a wooden box. It’s flush with the corner as though it was placed there intentionally, not just left at random. My heart speeds as I drop to my knees.
When I slide it out, it’s heavy; it scratches the floor. And then, from near the front door, I hear a familiar click and whir. Someone is here.
“Abek!”
I race back down the hallway and, in the foyer, skid to a stop. The figure at the door is a reed-thin woman, broom held aloft in self-defense. She startles when she sees me, looking over my shoulder to check whether I’m alone.
“Pani Wójcik?” I say, making sure to use the right honorific for my neighbor. Her face is lined in ways it wasn’t when I last saw her; her hair has turned gray. “Pani Wójcik, it’s Zofia. Zofia Lederman.”
Her eyes flicker; she doesn’t put down the broom, but she lowers it a fraction. “Zofia?”
I step closer. I knew Mrs. Wójcik the least well of the other three on our floor, but I am nearly moved to tears at the sight of her now. She’s from Before. The only evidence I have yet that parts of my life from then can still exist now. “Yes. It’s me. Who did you think it might be?”
“Squatters,” she mumbles.
“Squatters? Is that who’s been here?”
“A friendly German couple lived here for a while, but…”
“They’re gone now,” I infer.
“Just before everything ended. Since then, just vagrants. I’ve had to chase them off. They make the building unsafe.” She looks at me as if she thinks I’ll explain these vagrants and then sighs a little when I can’t. “Anyway, you’re back.”
“I’m back,” I say unnecessarily.
She lets the broom drop to her side and scans the rest of the apartment, the scattered furniture and broken chairs. “There’s not a lot left in here, is there?”
“I guess the squatters must have taken things.”
She shrugs. “Or burned them. It got cold.”
“Oh,” I say as we stare at each other. I don’t know how to talk to my neighbors anymore. Are your poppies still growing well? Are your dogs still alive? The last clear memory I have of Mrs. Wójcik, she was walking them on the street as a soldier had just asked for my papers. He’d asked the man next to me, too, and the man was hoisted away by the armpits. Did you see many more people taken away, Pani Wójcik? How was the rest of your war?
Mrs. Wójcik doesn’t know what else to say, either. After a few minutes, she puts her hand on the doorknob and raises her eyebrows, a sheepish goodbye.
“Wait,” I say. When she turns back toward me, the movement is tired. “Pani Wójcik, am I the first person to be here? The vagrants, I know, but am I the first person from my family?”
I can’t make myself say Abek’s name, and I don’t want to explain why the rest of my family won’t come looking.
She shakes her head, a definitive little jerk. “Just you. And I barely even recognized you.”
“You’re certain? Not my brother?”
“I haven’t seen anyone else from your family. Frankly, I didn’t think any of you would be back.”
She pauses again, hand twisting the knob but still not walking through the doorway, as if trying to think of what else to say. “We don’t have a trash collector anymore” is what finally comes out. “If you have something to throw away, you have to carry it down yourself and burn it in the street. If you don’t burn it, the animals get to it.”
“Thank you.”
I manage to find the manners to see Mrs. Wójcik out the door, and I lock it once she’s through so nobody else can barge in.
I need to reset myself again, stop my brain from circling. The walls are buzzing with the memories of vagrants, who came in and burned my family’s things for firewood because it was cold, because they had no place to live, because they were vagrants. So they burned my family’s things, and so the walls are buzzing.
No. Stop it.
I go back to my room, stand in the doorway. I was doing something before Mrs. Wójcik came. What was I doing? Mrs. Wójcik came in, and I was—the box in the corner of the closet.
It’s a hope chest. Polished maple, a flower carved on the lid. Aunt Maja’s? I have the faintest memory of something like this tucked under her bed, filled with linens and handkerchiefs, her initials already stitched onto all the fabric next to blanks meant for he
r future husband’s. The latch is rusty and takes careful jostling. But eventually the lid comes off, and I gasp.
Inside is what remains of my life.
When my family was forced out of this apartment and into the ghetto, we were allowed to take only what we could carry. Only clothes that were practical, only enough dishes to eat out of. And photographs. Photographs were precious enough that we took them, slipped out of their frames and pressed between paper, so I already know there will be none left in this trunk.
But other things are here. Layer after layer, folded between tissue, is what we couldn’t carry and couldn’t stand to give away. Mama’s wedding gown. The dress I wore to my thirteenth birthday. All of it kept by the “friendly German couple,” who were most assuredly Nazis. Is this the kind of gesture that passes for kindness if you are a Nazi?
In the Chomicki & Lederman clothing factory, Baba Rose was most famous for her beautiful embroidery, but I could handle a needle and thread, too. I would have been better than her in a few years. Machines assembled most of the clothes, but we sewed the labels and embroidery by hand. It made the pieces feel custom-made, Baba Rose said; it made customers feel cared for: Chomicki & Lederman, in fine, stitched cursive.
When I made my own family’s clothes, sometimes I sewed in something special. Something hidden, tucked beneath the label or in a seam. Maja’s name, in royal-blue thread, along with a line from a romance novel she wasn’t supposed to lend me. Baba and Zayde’s wedding date, stitched into the tablecloth we gave them for an anniversary.
Now, when I unpack my old school uniform, I can run my fingers over the hem, where I know the names of all my friends have been embroidered on a secret piece of cloth. Now, in the lining of my mother’s old winter coat, I know there are a few hidden lines from a poem about spring. Nobody could see it; that wasn’t the point.
When we first moved into the ghetto, Abek got lost. He wandered off and was missing for hours; he didn’t know the new address. My mother loved him, of course; she loved us both. But when Abek was born, she was sick in her room for a long time—fragile, my father and grandparents said. It was hard on her body. I took care of him when he was small. And on the day he got lost, when he was returned hours later by a helpful passerby who had wandered the streets until Abek recognized our building, it was me he ran to, crying. And it was me who promised him nobody would ever have trouble returning him home again.
I sewed his name into the label of all his shirts. His name and address, the real one and then the ghetto one, and our parents’ names and mine.
And then I started to sew more. Whole stories in the tiniest handwriting on the thinnest pieces of muslin. I folded the cloth half a dozen times and sewed it inside the label.
There was a story in his jacket the day we all went to the soccer stadium. It was a birthday gift from me to him, my best work yet. The story of our family, told in the alphabet:
A is for Abek.
B is for Baba Rose.
C is for Chomicki & Lederman, the factory we own, and D is for Dekerta, the street we attend synagogue on, even if only on the high holidays.
H is for our mother, Helena; M is for Aunt Maja; Z is for Zofia.
Something like that. I can’t remember all of it. All the way from A to Z, some of the letters given whole paragraphs, and some just a few words. At the last minute, when we were getting ready to go to the stadium to get our new identification photographs, I took that story, which had been hanging on the wall, and I sewed it into his jacket, and I made him put that jacket on.
I must have known.
I must have known what was going to happen to us.
That’s the thought I came back to later. I thought it when I was starving in Birkenau, and when I was operating the loom in Neustadt—this girl can sew, the guard said, plucking me from death, sending me to work—and when the cold ate through my toes on the 140-kilometer winter march to Gross-Rosen because the SS evacuated the factory, and when I collapsed in the women’s barracks because the Red Army had finally come to liberate the camp and the Nazis had already fled. I must have known we weren’t just summoned to the soccer stadium to have new identification made. Otherwise, why would I have made Abek wear that jacket? It wasn’t seasonal. It barely fit anymore. What kind of person sews a family history inside a coat?
Either I knew something bad was going to happen or I was already crazy.
I have to find my brother.
I have to find my brother because the war is over, but I still don’t feel safe. I don’t think he is, either.
I didn’t think any of you would be back. That’s what Mrs. Wójcik said. But she didn’t say it with gratitude in her voice. She didn’t mean it like, I am so relieved to see you. Her voice didn’t sound happy. Her voice sounded disappointed. What she meant was, I thought they killed you all.
DIMA IS TRIUMPHANT WHEN HE KNOCKS ON THE DOOR A few minutes later. Through the crack made by the latched chain, he holds up a paper parcel. “Lunch,” he says. “Sausages.”
I unlock the door but am at a loss once he’s inside. “I don’t have any fuel for the stove, though.”
“Cooked already!”
Now I can see oil leaking through the paper, and it makes my mouth water. “I don’t have anything to put them on, either,” I apologize. I meant, I don’t have a table, but as soon as I say the words, I realize I don’t even have dishes.
Dima reaches into his coat and pulls out a cloth wrapped around something bulky. “Plates. Picnic.” Another bundle: “Potatoes.”
Having emptied his pockets, he looks around the big parlor, curious but polite. “This is your home?”
“It looked different when I lived here. The furniture is gone.”
“Today we sit on the floor. Tomorrow I find you some furniture.”
He raises his eyebrows in the direction of the dining room, visible through French doors, and I nod that this is where we should eat. Once there, he confidently settles onto his knees, opens the parcel, and begins to slice the sausages with a pocketknife.
“My commander says he comes for dinner?” Dima says after I’ve sunk to my own knees and accepted the plate. “He would like to meet, learn more about the city.”
“That’s fine.”
“I told him he can come tonight.”
“Tonight?” I protest. “There’s no food in the house. It’s my first day back.”
“I know the notice is short.” Dima looks at me with saucer eyes, and I bite my tongue. It’s my home, but I wouldn’t be here yet if it weren’t for Dima’s help, I remind myself.
The nothing-girls were only half right. They thought it was lucky that Dima rescued me and then grew to like me. But really it was that Dima grew to care for me because he rescued me. Because I was helpless and he could help me. Because he was lonely and I needed him. This entire time, he’s been nothing but a friend; he’s asked for nothing in return for his kindness. And I haven’t offered anything.
It can’t stay that way, though. Sooner or later, my frailty won’t be appealing, my gratitude enough to make him happy. He’ll want an actual partner.
“Your brother—” Dima pauses and looks down at his plate, keeps his eyes there while he finishes the question. “He is not here today?”
Three potatoes in a row on damp newsprint. Dima bought three potatoes, just in case.
I swallow my disappointment. “No.”
“He was here before?”
“I don’t think so.”
He reached out to stroke my cheek. “We will find him, I’m sure.”
“Yes,” I say, setting my metal plate down on the bare wood floor. Smiling. I’m trying, I’m trying so hard.
Here I am, back in my family’s home, but instead of china, I’m eating on camping tin, and instead of my family, I’m with a Russian soldier. And he wants me to talk about dinner parties. Eight months ago I slapped a girl across the face because she tried to take my holey shoes.
“Zofia?” He says my name kindly but not
quite right; the Z is too firm. “Zofia, you’re not talking. I upset you.”
“I think we should have bread with lunch.” Abruptly, I rise to my feet.
He’s stricken. “It is not needed,” he insists, nodding to where he’s split Abek’s potato between his and my plates.
“But, it’s a celebration,” I invent. “My first day back in this house.”
“I will come, too.” He sets the knife down, starts to rise awkwardly himself.
“No! No. I’ll go to the bakery around the corner and be back in a few minutes.”
Still, he’s concerned; he thinks I shouldn’t be wandering. “I can see if there are cakes to serve your commander tonight,” I continue to improvise, waving him back to the floor. “And it will be good for my health. To do things on my own in a familiar place. The nurse said.”
The nurse didn’t say, but this is what convinces him, this mention of a cake and this appeal to my healing. He hands me some money and softly kisses my forehead.
Outside, the midday heat washes over my face. But once I’ve successfully left the building, I don’t know where to go. I don’t know if a bakery is still around the corner; the ones we visited when I was a child in this neighborhood had signs appear overnight, JUDEN VERBOTEN, in the early months after the occupation.
The Skolmoskis. The name flashes through my mind. The Skolmoskis were Catholic. Though they were forced to hang that “Jews forbidden” sign in their window like everyone else, I know Mr. Skolmoski felt bad about it. A few times before we were forced to the ghetto, he stopped by with leftovers. Leftovers, he claimed. But when was the last time any of us had leftovers of anything? I’ll go to the Skolmoskis’ old shop.
The street is busier than it was a few hours ago. It’s noon, lunchtime, with people hurrying to or from their workplaces. Two blocks down, when I arrive at the bakery, one of Skolmoskis’ windows has been boarded up, but over the plywood someone has written, Still open. The words are in Polish and not German, which I take as a positive sign.
