by Monica Hesse
The newcomer has scooped their belongings back into the bag but still lingers near the door, scanning the room. A Feldafing straggler, probably, one who missed the last car.
A male volunteer finds his way over and asks if he can be of help. Now that the new arrival is obviously cared for, I think Josef will have to turn back to me, but he continues to pretend to be deeply interested in the exchange by the door. Frustrated, I try to focus on Breine’s dress. I try to tell myself that his lack of an answer is an answer in itself.
“I’m so sorry, but we only have places for adults and families,” the volunteer is saying to the new arrival. A boy—I can tell it’s a boy now from the straight-hipped way he hoists the bag over his shoulder. “Of course you can stay for the night, but tomorrow we’ll have to find the camp director and figure out the best way to get you resettled at one of the homes for people your own age. The nearest one is less than a day’s drive, and we have—”
“I’ve just come from there,” the boy interrupts.
“Did they say they’re full?” the volunteer interrupts sharply. “They know they’re not supposed to do that.”
The boy shakes his head. He fishes into his satchel and pulls out a folded piece of paper. “There was a letter left for me there.” He traces his finger to the bottom and points to where the signature must be. “I’m here to find her.”
I’m standing without even realizing it. I’m dropping the pins without even realizing it. Breine’s dress is clinging to my skirt with static; I’m pulling it off the table along with the scissors and tape measure.
I feel like I’m in a dream because it turns out nothing that’s happened in my waking life has prepared me for how this feels right now.
The scissors have clattered to the ground, and the boy finds my eyes.
“Zofia, is that you?” he says.
“Abek?” I say, and my world falls into place.
Part Three
Foehrenwald, October
MY BROTHER IS ALIVE. HE IS ALIVE, AND HE HAS RECOGNIZED me. He’s spoken my name out loud.
Other people heard him, too. This is the second thought to come to mind, and it’s such an odd thought to have in this moment that I first can’t figure out why.
Because it means you’re not imagining things, I answer my own question. If other people in this room have also spoken to Abek, it means I’m not crazy and I’m not seeing ghosts. Ghosts are spirits, and my brother is flesh, and he is alive.
Abek is faster than I am; he’s run across the room while I’ve barely moved from the table, and now he throws his arms around my waist. The way he used to, I think, when he was too short to reach any other part of me. Now he’s grown. I’m still taller than him, but not by much; the downy-soft of his head hits at my nose instead of my rib cage.
My own arms are still at my sides, which I don’t even realize until Abek whispers something.
“What?” I ask, my voice sounding hollow to me and like it’s coming from far away.
“A to Z,” he repeats. “Abek and Zofia, A to Z.”
And then I throw my arms around him and start to sob.
Standing in the middle of the dining hall, we’re surrounded by an audience. Someone has run for Mrs. Yost, and she’s here, crying. I see Esther and Ravid and the others I normally eat with. And then people I haven’t even met come over to touch my hair, or Abek’s hair, as if good news can be absorbed through proximity.
We are possible, their touches say. All things are possible. Someone shoves a cup of tea in my hand. Someone else appears with a tin of meat for Abek, an extra from dinner. My brother holds it awkwardly under his arm because he still has his satchel in one hand and I won’t let go of the other.
Josef. He was just standing here. I scan the room, sure he must still be in the crowd, but by the time I catch him, it’s in profile. He’s already turning to slip out the door.
“Sit down. Are you hungry? Sit down,” I babble to Abek, too emotional to think about Josef. “Or stand, if you’ve been sitting in a wagon all afternoon. Or maybe we should go somewhere?” I ask. “Mrs. Yost, can he come to my—”
“Of course, don’t be silly.”
I offer to take his satchel. He doesn’t let me, holding it close to his chest as he follows me past the happy, envious residents.
In the cottage, I realize how incomplete my imagination has been. The part that I pictured a thousand times is the part that’s already over: the first minutes of our finding each other, the first joyful tears.
I also pictured the parts that come much later. I envisioned a future life, one where we live in Sosnowiec, find our old friends, and piece together our lives.
But it’s these intermediate minutes I didn’t plan for. The ones where we are blood-related strangers who haven’t spoken to each other in years. The ones where I’m waiting for my brain to catch up with itself, to realize that I’m going to be okay now.
My brother stands in the doorway to my room, cautious, while I ramble on for the sheer purpose of filling the silence. I tell him nonpertinent information about the squeaky desk chair and cold floors; I tell him about how one of my roommates snores. I think about asking to take his satchel again but see the way he’s clinging to it, the only familiar object in a world of strange ones.
And me. I am familiar now.
“Are you hungry?” I ask again, as if I hadn’t just asked ten minutes before. He nods toward the tin in his hands, still unopened, indicating that he could eat that if he was hungry. “I could get you a fork,” I offer. He shakes his head. He’s not hungry.
I’m making him nervous. I’m making myself nervous. I force my hands to stop fluttering. Finally, I gesture for him to sit on my bed, while I lower myself onto Breine’s across from him.
His face. I feel like I’m doing with it what I did with the buildings in Sosnowiec: trying to make sense of the way it looks now and reconcile it with what I remember of then, layering Abek’s appearance over the top of the one that exists in my memory. The hazel eyes I’ve thought of so often. The brown hair, a bit darker than it was when I saw him last, the way mine got darker, too, as I got older. And there’s some on his face, I’m stunned to realize—a smattering of fuzz above his upper lip.
The biggest difference, of course, is that he’s almost a man now. I’ve missed all the connective moments of the transition between the Abek I remember and the new one before me. It’s as if I’ve been given the first page of a book and the last, and I have to use only those to make up the plot in between.
What was his story? What have I missed? What did he have to live through alone?
As I prattle on, Abek takes in the room the way I did when I first arrived. His eyes sweep over the beds, the desk, the basin. But when his eyes reach mine, his glance is wary, and he almost immediately looks away. He’s shy with me. I can’t blame him for it. It’s got to be unnerving, the voracious way I’m staring.
Finally, after what feels like a long time, I run out of things to tell him, and I fall silent. It’s only when I allow this quiet that I realize why I was trying so hard to fill it. And it’s only when I let there be stillness that I realize why I couldn’t stop fluttering around earlier: There are things I’ve needed to say for the past three years. The monsters I’ve kept trapped, the thoughts I haven’t wanted to examine. The apologies I’ve hated myself for not being able to make.
“Abek,” I begin uncertainly, because all my practiced speeches have flown out of my head.
“I want you to know, I didn’t want to leave you,” I continue. “I swear I didn’t. One day they came looking for girls who could sew. I thought it was just a work detail and I’d be back by the end of the day. I thought there might be better food or that it might be closer to the men’s side of camp.” I slide off Breine’s bed and kneel in front of him. The apology spills from my lips inelegant and raw. Each sentence feels like the opening of a wound, a reminder of all the small and large ways I’ve failed. “I didn’t know they would send us away
. If I’d known all that would happen, I wouldn’t have—I left you alone. I did the one thing I promised I wouldn’t do, and I left you alone. I abandoned you. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Tears squeeze out of my eyes, and my voice shakes heavily.
When I reach the end, the horrible end, I force myself to confront the next possibility: that Abek won’t forgive me. What if he never realized I’d volunteered for the assignment that took me away? What if he’s angry that I didn’t find a way to take him, too?
He looks down at his hands now, clearing his throat before speaking.
“It’s okay, Zofia.”
“It’s not. You must have been looking for me in the camp. You must have wondered why I wasn’t trying to sneak you food, or—” My voice breaks. “You must have thought I was dead.”
“It is okay,” he insists. “I didn’t even know you never came back to Birkenau. I wasn’t there very much longer, either.”
“Where were you?”
He swallows. “Five places. I kept moving, but I ended up in Buchenwald. It’s here in Germany. The Americans liberated the camp in April.”
“You’ve been here in Germany?” I repeat, trying to process this.
He wasn’t there. All those times I hated myself for leaving for Neustadt or wondered if I should try to go back. He wouldn’t have been there anyway. He’d already left. He didn’t know I never came back.
“But what about the job I’d gotten for you? The commandant?”
Abek looks down. “It didn’t work out. He was transferred to a new camp, and I guess he thought he’d find someone he liked better.”
The phrasing—someone he liked better—it’s such a little-boy phrasing, it breaks my heart. Still kneeling in front of him, I take his hand, almost unable to believe his hand is actually here for me to take.
“Abek. Why didn’t you go home? After it was over? I was in the hospital for months, but I went back to Sosnowiec as soon as I could after. If Buchenwald was liberated in April, did you try to get on a train? Where have you been?”
He shrinks back a little at my questions; I’ve been shooting them rapid fire without giving him time to answer. I can’t help it; I’m so hungry to learn everything I’ve missed.
“There was an old widow,” he begins, deciding to answer my last question first. “Outside of Buchenwald. She said she would give us room and board to help through planting season. I worked for Ladna, and on weekends I would try to travel to different camps looking for you.”
“Ladna!” I exclaim.
He looks at me, curiously. “Yes. The old woman, her name was Ladna.”
“I know, but—Ladna, like in The Whirlwind,” I explain, waiting for him to catch on, to remember our favorite fairy tale. The daughter of the king and queen who was so beautiful that many princes came to woo her. “Like in The Whirlwind,” I repeat. “Where the lovely Princess Ladna is kidnapped by a dwarf on her wedding day.”
He laughs, just for a moment, and my heart fills with impossible joy at the sound. “I don’t think this Ladna would have had a wedding day. She was very… particular. She was like Mrs. Schulman.”
“I can’t believe you remember Mrs. Schulman!” My parents hired Mrs. Schulman to teach Abek and me when we weren’t allowed to attend school anymore. She was harsh, making us repeat assignments over again until they met her exacting definitions of perfection. We hated her, but Mama encouraged us to be kind: She had no one else.
“Poor Mrs. Schulman,” I say.
“Poor us,” Abek corrects. “Our poor knuckles. How could our handwriting be perfect if our knuckles were always bruised?”
“Still. Maybe, like Ladna in The Whirlwind, she just needed her own prince in a suit of golden armor to woo her. What was the prince’s name in the story?”
“Oh, I can’t remember,” Abek says.
“He crawled into the giant’s ear, and he came out the other end, and—what was it, Abek? We heard that fairy tale a hundred times. The prince’s name, it started with a D? I’m sure you remember.”
“I really don’t.” My brother shifts uncomfortably on the bed. His face has turned red. I can tell I’ve embarrassed him, that he feels badly for not being able to remember. And he shouldn’t: I don’t even remember. I just want more of this conversation, where we’re laughing together. But in trying to achieve that, I’ve turned the conversation into an interrogation.
Abek’s eyes flit briefly toward the door, and I’m worried, irrationally, that I’ve made him uncomfortable enough that he regrets coming here and might decide to leave.
Instinctively, I stretch out my legs, creating a barrier in his path to the door. What am I doing? It’s such a bizarre, desperate gesture, but that’s how I feel. Bizarre and desperate.
“You’re so big,” I say after a few minutes. “It’s been such a long time. I’m going to have to get used to the fact that you’re not the same little brother I remember.”
A few feet away, Abek plucks at a loose thread on the quilt covering my bed, and I do the same on Breine’s.
I let another moment of silence hang in the air before speaking again. “This is strange, isn’t it? It’s wonderful, of course, but it’s also strange.”
Abek nods before I even finish the sentence, relieved I’ve said it first. “Yes. I didn’t really know what it would be like. But it’s a little strange.”
“We don’t have to figure it all out now.”
“I know.”
“You must be exhausted,” I say, noticing the dark circles rimming his eyes. “I’ll sleep on the floor, and we’ll borrow some extra—”
“I don’t want you to sleep on the floor,” he interrupts, flustered. “I’m sure there are men’s cottages.”
“No,” I protest. “It’s late; we’d have to disturb the staff and wake people up to get you an assignment. The floor is fine, or I could squeeze in with Breine, or Breine could with Esther. Those are my roommates; I’m sitting on Breine’s bed. They’re probably waiting somewhere to give us privacy.”
I’m babbling again, the way I was when we first came into the room. But now it’s not nerves, now it’s me not wanting to let my brother out of my sight. Tonight I want to fall asleep knowing where my family is, and my family is the two of us.
“Abek,” I say, suddenly thinking of something. “How did you end up in Munich to begin with? I came here because I thought all the prisoners from Birkenau were sent to Dachau. But Buchenwald—I know that city. It’s hundreds of kilometers from here. How did you end up here?”
“Because I also heard the prisoners from Birkenau were sent to Dachau.” He sees that it still hasn’t registered for me and continues to explain. “I didn’t know you never came back to Birkenau, so I thought you must have come to Munich.”
“Were you the boy Sister Therese told me about?” I ask. “The boy who stole the food money from her room?”
He flushes a deep red and nods. “I know it was wrong,” he begins.
“It wasn’t wrong; it’s what helped me find you! I mean, it was wrong, but…”
“But I did it anyway,” he finishes. “Because you said we would find each other. You said we would find each other no matter what.”
I sleep that night with my hand dangling off the bed, onto the mats and blankets we’ve set up for Abek. I want to be sure of—I don’t know what. That he won’t be taken again, I suppose. That he won’t vanish into thin air.
It still feels like a fairy tale, almost. Like the dust of a fairy godmother sprinkled over a town to lull it to sleep. Something too good to be true, something that could dissolve any moment. But it doesn’t dissolve. And for once, I don’t go to sleep fearing my own nightmares. For once, I know they won’t come. The last time I saw Abek doesn’t matter now that I have a first time: the first time we were reunited.
I wake in the middle of the night, once because my arm is cold, untucked from the covers; once because it has fallen asleep; and once more because Abek turns over and his hair tickles my fing
ers. But he is there; that’s the point. Every time I wake up, he’s still there.
The third time, I see he’s awake, too, his eyes glinting in the dark, looking up toward my bed.
“Can you not sleep?” I whisper. “Are you thirsty?”
He shakes his head.
“Should I tell you a story? Should I tell you our story?”
I begin the alphabet story, quietly in the dark. I begin with the letter A, with his name, with the great-uncle Abek who died a few days before his birth. I move on to Baba Rose, and to Chomicki & Lederman and the busy hum of the sewing machines, and I whisper and whisper until my throat is sandy.
“O is for—” I begin, and then I cut off, because I can’t remember what O is for. I haven’t had to go this far into the alphabet in a long time. I’m out of practice and full of holes. Below, I see Abek shift in his blankets. “O is—” I start again.
“O is for Lake Morskie Oko,” Abek whispers. “Where there was the cabin.”
“Oko,” I repeat in wonder. “That’s right! We had the cabin. The water there was so deep and green.”
That’s where we used to go every summer, where we were on holiday before the Germans came. The clear, frigid water; Papa walking about in his undershirt; Mama reading novels on the porch, a half-eaten apple resting on her stomach as she let the dinner hour pass without putting anything on the stove. I’d forgotten completely. Abek has given me such a gift, to remind me of it. The gift of memory, the gift of our past. The gift of something I hadn’t been able to complete on my own.
I continue on, but only get through a few more letters before hearing Abek’s breathing even out, realizing he’s fallen asleep.
“Good night,” I whisper.
