They Went Left

by Monica Hesse

  WE WAKE THE NEXT MORNING TO A KNOCK ON THE cottage door, the outer door first, where Judith answers, and then on our bedroom door. Esther stumbles into her dressing gown to answer this knock while the rest of us blink our eyes open. Me, with my arm still dangling off the side of the bed, and Abek, with puffy eyes and a look of confusion as he remembers where he is.

  It’s Breine’s uncle, a tiny man named Świętopełk, who looks like Breine in the jaw. He has an old-fashioned, courtly manner—an elegant way of removing his hat—that seems both out of place in this camp and appropriate to his name, which is an old one I’ve only ever seen in history books.

  Breine hurdles out of her bed, and then she and her uncle cling to each other. She told me that before the war, she’d seen him only twice in her life; he lived far away and wasn’t close to his brother. Now they are each other’s only family, and the old rifts don’t matter.

  “Our wedding,” she announces, wiping away happy tears. “We can have our wedding tonight.”

  I’m apprehensive, at first, that Abek’s first day here will be so busy. He deserves time to rest, not to be thrown into chaotic wedding planning. We both deserve time to settle in. I watch his reaction to Breine’s announcement, worried that he’ll be too overwhelmed. But, unless I’m imagining it, what I see on his face is mostly relief.

  “Don’t worry about the dress; I’ll wear a potato sack,” Breine tells me, but keeping Abek’s expression in the corner of my eye, I shake my head.

  “Of course I’ll finish. Nobody in my family would ever let a bride look anything less than beautiful. Isn’t that right, Abek? Can you imagine how angry Baba Rose would be?”

  He smiles and shakes his head. I decide it will be good to have this distraction. Busyness can be a relieving antidote to a lot of things: grief, awkwardness, confusion. A wedding will be welcome.

  Word spreads quickly that Breine’s uncle has arrived, and all through the day it seems as if the whole camp is helping to prepare for the wedding. Men gather wood and fashion a chuppah, and women in the kitchen try to turn rationed food into a celebratory feast. A friend of Breine’s, whose ancestors are from Spain, produces a small bag of walnuts, which she says she kept with her in hiding all through the occupation, determinedly saving them for a special occasion. This seems miraculous to me, that on the brink of death and starvation, she could keep walnuts. But she did, and now she grinds them to make wedding cookies.

  And, while dining tables are moved and rearranged around me, and mismatched tablecloths are produced and smoothed over them, I spread Breine’s half-finished garment on the same table I worked at before. The same pins by my side, the same thread, only now instead of Josef, I have Abek beside me.

  “Come and help,” I instruct him, nodding to the seat beside me.

  We’re formal, at first. Being around my brother—my brother—in the daylight hours is different, even, from knowing he’s sleeping on a mat near my bed in the dark. So we’re behaving around each other in the polite, distant way we used to behave if company was coming. When I ask him to pass me scraps of material or buttons or thread, I make sure to add a careful please and then a careful thank you at the end. And he makes sure to say, “You’re welcome,” just as effusively. After fifteen or twenty of these exchanges, it starts to feel absurd. Before we were separated, I would have just nodded toward something and grunted; he would have passed it to me while barely looking up from his toy cars.

  “Are you bored?” I ask him, finally. “They may be done with the new library. You could go see if it’s open yet and if there’s anything interesting to bring back and read.” I’ve chosen this phrasing carefully; I don’t want to suggest something that would take him away for very long. “Have you had a chance to read much? Do you even like to read?”

  “I don’t mind staying,” Abek says, and hands me another pin. “I like to read some. In one of my camps, there was a book. Someone had smuggled it in. A translation of Charles Dickens. I was trying to read it. But I don’t need to get any books right now.”

  Charles Dickens. It’s nearly impossible for me to square this idea, of my brother being old enough to read complicated novels by himself. He went through so much without me. There’s so much of him now that is without me.

  I finish the stitching around Breine’s collar and turn my attention to the hemline, pointing to a wrinkle in the silk. Abek grabs the fabric where I’m pointing, pulling it flat against the table.

  “Now that I know where you’ve actually been,” I say, only a little shyly, “I’ll have to revise my imagination. I never pictured you on a farm, for example. And I’m realizing how many times my mind must have played tricks on me, putting you in places where you couldn’t have been.”

  “What do you mean? What kinds of places?” He obligingly holds the fabric where I point next. I take my time answering his question because I want to do it in a way that doesn’t scare him or make him worry.

  “I—I wasn’t well. For a lot of the war. My mind wasn’t working. I kept getting more confused. There are a lot of holes I filled in or other things I was afraid I made up. But I thought I saw you all these times.” I force a small laugh. Now that Abek is safely in front of me, it seems simpler to act like I had merely been confused, occasionally vague like a dotty aunt, and not like I’d been very ill.

  “One time, I thought I saw you through the window in Neustadt,” I tell him. “Another time, I thought I saw you in line for soup in Gross-Rosen and then again walking into the men’s barracks. In Birkenau, I thought I saw you while I was working in a garden. I buried a turnip for you, but when you didn’t get it, I realized that either you couldn’t get to it or I hadn’t seen you. I was so disappointed. It was really hard for me to organize a whole turnip.”

  Abek has been watching me closely as I tell this story. I worry he’ll be afraid of me or worried about me, but he seems reassured, actually, to know how much he was on my mind.

  And now, when I get to the part about the turnip, he starts to shake his head. “No. No, I did find it,” he says. “The turnip.”

  “You did?”

  “Remember?” he says excitedly. “You buried the turnip in the ground, and you stood a stick in the ground so I would know where to dig for it.”

  “I did?” I don’t remember the stick, but it sounds like a reasonable detail. How else would I have expected him to find what I’d buried?

  “I didn’t have anything to leave in return, so I used the stick to draw my initial so you’d know I found it.”

  I close my eyes, trying to sort through my confusion. I understand the story he’s telling, but it’s hard for me to remember it myself. It’s like Abek’s version is a loose scrap of cloth, but if I can sew it into a quilt, then it will stop being a story and start being one of my memories.

  The last time I saw Abek, I practice telling myself. The last time I saw Abek, he was eating a turnip that I managed to get for him. He was leaving me a drawing he’d made in the dirt.

  “Was it raining that day?” I ask him.

  “I think so.”

  The last time I saw Abek, it was raining. I didn’t speak to him, but I came back to the spot where I had buried a turnip. On the ground there was an A. I looked at the dirt drawing until the rain rinsed it away.

  Sitting here at the table in Foehrenwald, a cautious little voice inside me is asking, Is that really how it happened?

  I’m so used to that voice, so used to mistrusting myself. It will take me a while to figure out what I can believe now.

  “I’m almost finished,” I tell him, nodding at Breine’s dress. “You can go and wash up.”

  “You don’t need my help to finish? I don’t have to wash up.”

  “We’re going to a wedding tonight. You actually do need to. And stop by the donation boxes, and see if you can find a clean new shirt.” I will myself to be okay with the fact that he’s going to leave now and that I won’t see him for an hour. “But come right back to the cottage when you’re done
, all right? Right back, and wait outside for me. We can keep talking later. We have plenty of time now.”

  After I finish my work, I take the dress to the communal laundry building and spread it out over the ironing board. In my family’s factory, the irons were electric. They plugged in; their temperatures could be controlled by tuning a dial. Here, they’re a heavy, cast metal, and heated over hot coals. I’ve barely ever used this kind before; it would be easy to heat them too high and leave scorch marks on the dress. I wonder, at first, whether it’s better to leave Breine’s dress unironed.

  But it’s her wedding. It’s her wedding and my handiwork, and I can’t let her get married in wrinkles. I pluck a still-damp bath towel off the laundry line stretched across the room and lay it across the dress to make a barrier between the hot iron and the fragile silk.

  PRESSING THE DRESS WITH THE OLD-FASHIONED IRON TAKES longer than I expected, but when I race back across the camp, out of breath and worried Breine will be upset with my lateness, I find that I’ve beaten her home. She rushes in a few minutes later, skin still pink from a bath, fingers still pruned, laughing and apologetic.

  The wedding is scheduled to start at dusk because Breine and Chaim wanted to work a full day before the ceremony. Esther had told her that was crazy, that there was no need for Breine to weed plots of land on her wedding day, but Breine insisted. Her relationship with Chaim was about building new things, she said. What better way to build something new than to tend to tender sprigs?

  Esther arrives shortly after Breine, hands spilling with silver-colored tubes and compacts. Makeup—she must have gone around the camp and borrowed everything she could.

  “I don’t need all that!” Breine protests. “Chaim wouldn’t even recognize me. He might not even recognize me as is, without dirt under my fingernails.”

  “Breine,” Esther protests.

  “Esther.”

  While they debate the rouge and lipstick, I unwrap the dress from the bath towel and lay it on Breine’s bed, holding my breath. There hasn’t been time for Breine to see my work, much less time for her to try the dress on. Now, she breaks off in the middle of a sentence. She looks over to me, and her mouth drops.

  “Oh, Zofia.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Do I—I can hardly believe it’s the same dress. I can’t believe it. It’s marvelous. It’s completely, completely—” She turns back to Esther. “Maybe a little lipstick.”

  “That’s right,” Esther says.

  “But only a little, and only so my face isn’t completely outshone by my dress.”

  Esther points toward the desk chair until Breine obediently sits, and then she holds up a series of lipsticks to Breine’s face, looking for the most flattering color. “This one, I think,” she decides, choosing a creamy pink. “Open your mouth a little. No—more natural, like this.”

  After Esther applies the borrowed lipstick to Breine’s mouth, she dabs a little on her own fingertip to use as rouge for Breine’s cheeks. “I’ll just do a tiny amount,” she promises in response to Breine’s grimace. “You’ll still look exactly like yourself; it will just be a bit of color in case you get nervous and pale standing up there in front of us all and knowing we’re watching you.”

  “Well, you’ve made me nervous now.” Breine laughs.

  Watching the whole exchange, I’m overcome by a memory. “Use three dots,” I suggest to Esther.

  She hovers her fingertip just over Breine’s cheek. “Three dots?”

  “My aunt Maja always told me: one dot of rouge lined up below the pupil, one about two centimeters lower, in line with the tip of the nose, and a third high on the cheekbone. You make a triangle with three dots, and then blend in between for the most flattering appearance.” I laugh. “I can’t believe I suddenly remembered that.”

  “We’ll do three!”

  Esther finishes Breine’s makeup and moves to her hair, beginning with a braid, as Breine always wears it, but then pinning it up at the base of Breine’s neck. When she’s finished, she holds up a hand mirror, and we all examine the work.

  Breine raises her fingers, lightly touching her face and elegant hair.

  “It’s not too much, is it?” Esther says. “I told you it wouldn’t be. Breine? Tell me you don’t hate it.”

  “It’s not too much,” Breine says quietly. “This is how I used to look all the time. My mother said a woman should never leave the house without wearing lipstick, and she always made sure I’d tidied my hair.” Now she smiles ruefully, and her eyes grow a little distant. “She would have wanted such a different wedding for me. She would have wanted such a different life.”

  Esther and I look at each other. Breine is usually so optimistic; I’m not sure how to respond. Esther puts a hand on her shoulder. “I hope she would be happy for you anyway. Chaim is a wonderful man.”

  Breine sucks in a deep breath and then reaches up to return Esther’s touch with a brisk pat on the hand. “Let’s get me dressed,” she says.

  We give her a towel to hold over her face to keep her makeup from smudging. And then Esther keeps Breine’s hair in place while I slide the dress over her head and button the back.

  When I’m finished doing up the back, Breine splays her palms upward, eyes quizzical. “Well?”

  Esther brings her hands to her heart. “Oh, Breine, you’re perfect.”

  Breine’s face lights up, and she motions for Esther to bring her the chair so she can get a full-length glimpse of herself in the wall mirror.

  I don’t say anything yet, instead busily walking around her in a full circle, straightening hems, critically eyeing my own handiwork.

  The new sash at the waistline gives Breine more of an hourglass shape, and a new sweetheart neckline draws attention to her pretty neck and collarbone. All those dozens of tiny beads, those infernal tiny beads, I reattached around the scalloped edges. Clustered together this way, instead of scattered over the whole dress, they catch the light and sparkle as if Breine is carrying around her own sun.

  I’ve done a fine job. Maybe not completely up to Chomicki & Lederman standards, but a very fine job, especially given my limited resources and time frame. I wouldn’t be ashamed for my father or Baba Rose to see this dress.

  And earlier this afternoon, just before I took the dress to iron, I made one last adjustment because the garment didn’t feel complete. Along the neckline, at the lowest part just near Breine’s heart, I ripped out a few stitches of the seam, and before I repaired it, I tucked in a small square of silk:

  Choose to love, I wrote. It’s what Breine said to me when she first told me about Chaim: She was choosing to love the person in front of her.

  Choose to love.

  WE GIVE BREINE A HANDKERCHIEF TO TUCK UP HER SLEEVE, and when she’s as ready as we can make her, Esther and I throw on our own donation-box dresses—hers, pink and frilled, and mine, the color of a ripe plum, a bit short in the hemline but otherwise a perfect fit. Both of them smell faintly of mothballs until Breine douses us all in perfume.

  No sooner have we finished than Breine’s uncle knocks at the door in a borrowed suit, hair impeccably combed, and Esther and I leave to give the small family private time before the ceremony.

  Abek is waiting for me just outside the cottage, hair still damp and looking freshly scrubbed. He’s found a new shirt, buttoned with a little gap between the collar and his neck. “This is all right?” he asks.

  “I suppose I should ask if you washed behind your ears?” I tease, pretending to inspect him. “It’s all right. I’m so glad you’re here.”

  On the way to the courtyard, I spot Josef in front of us. He is also in a new donation-box shirt. His is a soft hazelnut color, a shade lighter than his eyes. I’ve only ever seen him in the gray shirt he was wearing when we first met. This one fits better. This one skims more closely along his chest and stomach. This one is a bit too short at the sleeves, but short in a way that shows off his wrists. He has nice wrists.

  “Hi,�
� I say softly.

  “Hi,” he says back, and I’m glad I went with the dress that brings out the warmth in my skin.

  “I didn’t get to introduce you to my brother,” I say, and watch proudly as Abek extends his hand to Josef in a grown-up handshake. “My brother, Abek. And this is Josef Mueller.”

  Josef returns the greeting, but his eyes stay on me. A lot passes behind them. An apology? Regret? Something sharp and rough, making my chest pang. I’m still trying to parse the expression when we’re separated by laughing wedding guests, come to celebrate, carrying us along with the crowd.

  The whole camp has been saving kerosene rations for this wedding. The courtyard is lit by lanterns, and as Abek and I approach, Ravid and his fiancée, Rebekah, pass out candles.

  The courtyard itself is still ugly, mostly dust and dirt. Any flowers once here have been ripped up to make way for the herb garden planted to feed the camp. But that’s not so visible in the twilight.

  In the middle stands the chuppah, a plain white sheet attached to rough-hewn wood. Chaim stands under it, waiting in a suit that’s too big and a haircut that’s a little too raw.

  Behind me, the chatter quiets, and I realize it’s because Breine is approaching. Her auburn hair glows with the setting sun.

  It’s beautiful, it’s so beautiful, this wedding between bold Breine and shy Chaim. In a different world, the sheet might be a fine, embroidered cloth, just as in a perfect world, Breine would be escorted by her parents. But she no longer has parents, so when she comes down the path, it is between her uncle, whose face is shining, and an old woman I’ve heard referred to as Mrs. Van Houten.

  “In pictures, it will look white, as she wanted,” says Mrs. Yost, who has appeared next to me, as she nods toward Breine’s dress.

  “I don’t think it would matter if the dress was the color of dishwater,” I whisper back. “Look at her face.”

  And it’s true. As Breine comes closer, I can look at her not as I did in the cottage, as the mannequin for a sewing project, but rather as a bride. She is radiant; she’s so much lovelier than any dress even the best seamstress could have made.