by Monica Hesse
“There’s nothing on that name, either. I’m sorry.”
“I was calling to add something, too,” I hurry before he hangs up. “It’s possible he might have gone to the Kloster Indersdorf. Just for a few days after liberation. Could you add that?”
“We can add that to the file.”
I hear the faint sound of a pen scratch, so I know he’s doing it. “We encourage you to try back in a few weeks,” he says when he’s done. “We do hear from more people every day.”
As I’m preparing to say goodbye, there’s a knock on the door behind me, the next person waiting in line to use the telephone. I cover the receiver with my hand. I’ll be out soon, I mouth. But then I realize it’s not just anyone, it’s Miriam. Her face is white as a sheet.
“Miriam?”
“My sister,” she whispers, a mixture of stunned and elated. “I think I have found the right hospital.”
“You found… oh, Miriam, that’s wonderful!”
“Can I, when you are finished?” She reaches her hand out toward the telephone. “Outside, they say I could skip the line.”
“Yes, yes, of course!” I exclaim. “I’m hanging up right now!” I grab her outstretched hand, and she takes mine and jostles it in excitement.
“My sister!” she says again, now holding my hand with both of hers as we jump up and down.
“Miss Lederman?” The tinny, distant voice of the clerk in Berlin reminds me that I still have the phone pressed to my ear. “Miss Lederman, are you still there?”
“I’m still here, I’m still here,” I assure him. “I’ll try calling back next week, just as you said. Thank you.”
When I hang up, I pass the telephone to Miriam. She takes a deep breath before picking up the receiver, calming herself, smoothing down her red hair. Her index finger shakes as she starts to dial. I think about staying, but then remember how when I’d returned to Sosnowiec, I’d wanted my reunion with Abek to be private. Miriam gives me one last terrified, joyful look as someone picks up on the other end.
“Good luck,” I whisper, slipping out the door.
When I leave Mrs. Yost’s office, I don’t leave the building. Instead, I walk down the hall to the empty room that is going to become the library. What I’d really love is a fashion magazine, a thick one, with advertisements from ladies’ clothing stores to give me ideas for Breine’s dress or at least confirm that my own ideas aren’t hopelessly out of date. I haven’t worn a new dress in five years. I haven’t set foot in a decent shop in longer, not since the Germans took over our factory. I would like to sit down the way I once did with my father, turning pages slowly, learning how to anticipate trends, what kinds of fabrics we might need to order more of.
But the library isn’t finished yet: There’s a drop cloth on the floor, the acrid odor of fresh paint clinging to the walls. Boxes, of books I assume, are piled in the middle of the room, but I don’t feel I should open them.
I step outside and hear the clicking of footsteps: Breine rushing toward me. “There you are!” She grabs my hands. Hers are still dirty under the nails; she hasn’t been to the room yet to wash them. “I have good news. My uncle’s train hasn’t had as many delays as we expected. I just got a telegram; he should be here tomorrow!”
“Tomorrow?”
“Isn’t that amazing? In a few days, I’ll be married!”
“Breine, your dress.” I panic. “I’m not very far on it yet. I was just going to look for a magazine to get ideas, but I have hours’ worth of work left.”
“I know you’ve been busy.”
And I have been busy, but that’s not the only reason I’m behind. The few times I’ve sat down with the material, my hands have been wooden. I think part of me doesn’t want to. Sewing a dress is moving forward with my life. Sewing a dress would be healing, which is why the nurses tried to get me to pick up a needle and thread when I was sitting in my hospital bed. Sewing a dress would be a betrayal. Wouldn’t it? Should I be allowed to move forward before I’ve found my brother?
“I’ll go start it again right now,” I tell her.
“You don’t have to go right this very second. Come eat first.”
“No, I don’t want to put it off any longer, and I also wanted to ask around for a better needle.”
“We’ll ask the other girls at dinner,” she insists, pulling me toward the door. “However good you are, I bet I’ll thank myself later for not letting you sew on an empty stomach.”
In the dining hall, our regular corner doesn’t look as it usually does: Instead of one small table, several have been pushed together, with twelve or fourteen people sitting elbow to elbow.
“Meeting night,” Breine apologizes. “I forgot; I’m sorry. You’ll just have to sit through our talking for a few minutes at the beginning.”
I recognize a few of the new occupants, vaguely, as the ruddy, healthy-looking people Breine and Chaim work with in the fields every day. Chaim’s front-room housemate Ravid, strong and sunburned, stands at the head and taps his water glass on the table to get everyone’s attention.
“I don’t want to impose,” I whisper to Breine as we approach. The table is full; Chaim has saved a place for Breine, but there’s no place for me to sit without making others move.
“Really, nobody will mind.”
Breine settles into the spot Chaim has saved for her and then playfully elbows the man on her other side until he slides farther down to make room for me. Ravid raises one eyebrow at Breine’s disruption—the squeaking chair, the clattering of silverware as she passes fork and spoon to the man she’s just displaced. “Do you think I’m allowed to continue?” Ravid asks dryly. Breine makes a face at him.
“As I was starting to say,” Ravid continues. “We’re almost ready to move into the next phase of Aliyah Bet.”
Around the table, nobody else seems as confused as I am about the phrase Ravid has just used. Aliyah means immigrating to Eretz Israel. I know that; it’s meant that for centuries. But I’ve never heard of Aliyah Bet.
“Breine,” I whisper. “What is Aliyah Bet?”
Ravid breaks off again, and this time he looks straight at me. “Is there a question?”
My face turns red, but his tone wasn’t angry, just firm. “I don’t know that phrase,” I admit.
“Do you know about Britain’s immigration quotas to Palestine?” he asks before launching an explanation. “The few people who can go there legally, they are part of Aliyah Aleph. Plan A,” Ravid continues. “Aliyah Bet, however, isn’t permitted under the laws. Plan B.”
“Entering illegally?” I ask.
“Plan B,” Breine corrects me. I marvel that Breine is going to be a part of this. She didn’t farm before the war. She told me her father was the president of an insurance company. She told me she spent her days learning how to manage a household, hire good servants, and set a nice table. A different dress for every day of the week. A different hat and gloves for every dress.
“What happens if you’re stopped?” I ask. “It’s illegal; what happens if you’re caught?”
“We’ve heard that if the ships are stopped, then the passengers will be taken to a refugee camp,” Ravid says. “But we’re in a refugee camp now anyway.”
“Do you want to come with us, Zofia?” Breine teases.
“Come with you? I’m going home.”
“We’re all going home,” she says. “Just a new home.”
“I’m going to my home in Poland,” I say firmly. “That was Abek’s and my home, and after I find him, it will be again.” I wriggle my way out of my seat. “And now I’m going to go work on your dress.”
AFTER A FRUITLESS HOUR OF TRYING TO WORK ON BREINE’S dress in our cottage, I finally decide there’s just not a large enough flat surface for the project, and I end up carrying the heap of unflattering yellow back to the dining hall. By then, the tables are mostly empty, aside from the volunteers for cleanup duty. I fan the dress out on a table that’s been wiped down. Smoothing the silk
with the flat of my palm, I sit and again assess what I have to work with.
In front of me: A makeshift sewing kit, as much as I could assemble after asking around camp. Thread wasn’t a problem to locate, but finding the right color was—the two best candidates are either more orange than the dress fabric or too white. I also have a frayed measuring tape, a collection of needles in need of sharpening, handfuls of loose buttons, and some pins gathered in a butter dish. Nothing looks new, which means everything in front of me was secreted away in camps, or scavenged immediately after. Hidden in pockets, tucked in straw mattresses. Small acts of defiance—to own a useless button that the Nazis didn’t know about, to hold a spool of thread in the middle of a frozen night. But now the women gave them to me willingly.
Normally, I might layer a piece of muslin behind the silk to make the silk behave better with the scissors. I don’t have any of that, though, so instead, I’ve gathered a pile of newspapers. I remember my mother using this trick a few times when she was trying an experimental design and didn’t want to waste expensive supplies, but I’ve never done it myself. I worry about the ink of the newsprint rubbing off on the pale, delicate material.
My hands are rough and chapped, as they have been for years, but now, as I sit with the dress, I’m surprised to realize they’re not callused. Not in the places they used to be.
Baba Rose never let me use thimbles. She said that they dulled precision and that detailed embroidery couldn’t be accomplished with a thimble. Under her supervision, I let my index finger get raw and bloody and then get strong enough that I barely felt the throb of pushing a needle through even the thickest wools. But now I no longer have a seamstress’s hands; my index finger is no more or less battered than any other part of me.
“Breine said you needed a pair of scissors?”
I look up. Josef, standing a few feet away.
Shirt open at the throat, the hollow in his neck drawing my attention in a way I wish it wouldn’t. Now that he’s standing in front of me, I realize I wouldn’t have known what to say to him, anyway, even if he had been around these past few weeks. I don’t know why he keeps pulling away, but I know it exhausts me and makes me feel embarrassed.
“Scissors?” he says again, and now I see he’s holding a pair in his hand.
“You’re back,” I say.
“Just this morning.”
“I hope you had a nice trip,” I say stiffly, not allowing myself to say anything else, especially anything that would reveal how much I’d noticed his absence. “And I already have regular scissors. I was looking for pinking shears.”
“What are those?”
“They have a serrated edge that keeps the silk from fraying.”
“Ah,” he says. “She didn’t specify that.” Now I look closer at the ones he’s holding: silver-colored with narrow, tapered blades. “These are for the horses’ manes when they get burrs or tangles. I washed them,” he adds. “But it doesn’t sound like they’re what you’re looking for.”
“Let me see.” I take the scissors from him, run my finger along the blade, test the weight in my hand. “These are actually sharper than the ones I have. I’ll use them if you don’t mind.”
“Of course. I brought them for you.”
But then he doesn’t leave. He sits down at the table. A respectful distance but the seat next to me, just the same, which I try to ignore as I begin my work. First, I use a small, borrowed paring knife to pick loose the stitching on the bottom hem. It’s a tedious, delicate motion that I’m terrified to mess up, so I do it slowly, my nose only a few centimeters from the material. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Josef get up but return a few minutes later. He’s fetched a lamp to give me more light.
And then I can feel him looking at me. Not at my face, but at my hands, which somehow feels more personal.
The grooming shears he’s lent me are unwieldy at first. The blades don’t have an angle to them, so I can’t cut the fabric directly along the table as I normally would, which makes it harder to create a straight line. If I’d realized Josef was going to watch me, I would have used a ruler and penciled in where I planned to cut. But I make it around the circumference of the dress anyway, cutting to where I’d earlier marked the dress against Breine’s legs, scavenging fabric for me to fashion the sash I’d envisioned and to patch over any parts of the dress that are stained or threadbare. Now that I’ve shortened the garment, it’s time to rehem it. Before I can look for a pin, Josef has handed me one. And then he hands me another, and another after that. My hands are sure on the silk, and I’m remembering what it feels like to touch something expensive, what it feels like to do something I am skilled at and have done a hundred times.
As I work, the other tables in the dining hall start to fill again—card games and letter writers and other people just trying to get away from their cramped quarters for a little while. The dead-quiet background rises into a low, friendly hum.
The next pin he hands me, our hands brush together. I secret a glance to see if he’s done it on purpose, because I’m doing it on purpose: I reached too wide, so that instead of my fingers closing around the pin, they close around his angular knuckles. But as soon as I do that, Josef jerks his hand away. And then, while I flush in embarrassment, he slides the butter dish over to within my reach so he won’t have to hand me anything anymore.
“Did you hear about Miriam?” he asks quietly.
My face still burning from his subtle rejection, I nod. “I saw her in Mrs. Yost’s office. She found the hospital? It’s wonderful news.”
But Josef is shaking his head, his expression dark. No, he’s saying. No, that’s not what happened.
“Josef, what about Miriam? She didn’t find her sister?”
He swallows. “She found her sister. But it was too late.”
The fabric falters in my hand. “What do you mean, it was too late? Her sister is… dead?”
“She heard this afternoon.”
“But this afternoon is when I saw her. She was about to make a call.” I cut myself off, realizing. When I saw her, she was about to call the right hospital. She was minutes away from receiving the worst news of her life.
Yellow silk swims in front of my eyes, blurry and nonsensical. Miriam and her letters. Her hundreds and hundreds of letters. Miriam and the hope on her face when she peered into Mrs. Yost’s office a few hours ago. Should I have offered to stay with her when she made the call? Instead, she had to receive the news alone.
“But her sister was alive,” I protest. “She was alive after the war. She was taken to a hospital.”
“She was too sick,” Josef says. “It happened just a few weeks after liberation. She couldn’t get better.”
“But still, Miriam could have had a few weeks. A few extra weeks with a person is a lifetime.”
“I know.”
“And the only reason she didn’t get it was because of some, some clerical error that told her the wrong hospital.”
“I know,” Josef repeats.
I’m filled with fury and anguish. She survived the war. Miriam’s sister survived torture, she was alive, she was rescued, and she died anyway. Meanwhile, Miriam sat in our cottage and wrote hundreds of letters.
“Anyway, I didn’t know if anyone had told you,” Josef says. “And I thought you’d want to know. She won’t be back in your cottage for a few days; she asked administrators if she could have a private room in the infirmary so she could grieve alone.”
I nod, unable to find the right words. Instead, I focus on making the pins and then the needle go through the fabric, one stitch at a time. One thing that I know how to fix, one broken thing I can repair. Tiny, even, incremental. I focus on my work and hold my brain in place, something I’ve gotten better at doing these past few weeks, something that sewing helps me do. It’s easier to stay in reality when I’m anchored by the tangibleness of fabric.
“You’re very good at your work,” Josef whispers finally, rising from the table.
/> “You don’t have to go.”
“I don’t want to disturb you.”
“But I just invited you to stay,” I protest.
“I know you have only until tomorrow to finish Breine’s dress.”
“Josef, that’s bullshit.” Now I lay down my work and glare up at him, fueled by my anger over what happened to Miriam’s sister and the injustices we’re all still feeling every day. “If you want to leave, you should leave. Fine. But you can’t tell me that I need you to leave when I just told you to stay. You can’t hold my hand in the wagon and tell me about your family and then ignore me. It’s not fair. I can’t tell whether you like me at all, or don’t like me, or want to be my friend, or want to be something—I can’t tell how you feel at all.”
He’s standing very still. “It’s not that simple.”
“It’s not that complicated, either.” The back of my neck is sore from bending over the table. I forgot that Baba Rose made everyone stand up and stretch every fifteen minutes. I rub it, irritated.
“Zofia,” he says, pleading.
“Josef.”
My voice has an edge to it, but I can’t even tell what I’m asking, what I want from him. If he said right now that he did like me, would I want that? And what would it mean? Would I want something like what Breine had—a marriage proposal from a person I barely know?
I wouldn’t; I know that. I wouldn’t want a wedding dress, I wouldn’t want to arrive back in Sosnowiec with another strange man the way I did with Dima. But then, touching Dima’s hand always felt more like gratefulness than desire. I never wanted to raise my face to Dima, to linger a little too long in the hopes he would lean down, slowly.
“What’s not simple, Josef?” I demand. “If you don’t like me, you need to just say it.”
Josef opens his mouth, a struggle on his face. “It would be easier if I didn’t—but I do, and…”
“What are you talking about?” I start to say, but then I’m interrupted.
Behind Josef, a clatter—the heavy door to the dining hall has opened, and the person responsible for it has dropped something. A satchel or a half-filled pillowcase, it looks like; I can only see in silhouette. A few people look up briefly, then return to their card games, but Josef looks over in elaborate concern. An act. He just wants an excuse to leave the conversation.
