They Went Left

by Monica Hesse

  I’ve kissed someone before. The first time was at a birthday party when I was thirteen, when a boy named Lev and I were dared to go behind a dining room curtain. Lev and I spent the next two months occasionally sneaking off, him waiting for me after school with wilted bouquets of picked flowers. But this is different. It doesn’t feel like kissing Lev did, like a pantomime or a rehearsal for the real thing. I can feel this kiss rushing through my entire body.

  “Oops!” The coatrack moves—a man searching for his hat—and we both jump apart. “Oops!” the man exclaims again, cheerfully drunk. “Everyone is having fun tonight!”

  The drunk man paws through the rack, giving me enough time to sober up and think about what I’m doing. Now is when I should suggest going back to the dance floor or getting a drink of water. Josef is looking at me, waiting for me to suggest that; he knows it’s what should happen, too.

  “Do you want to leave?” I ask instead. “Find another room where it’s not so loud?”

  He hesitates only a second. “Yes.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Where do you want to go, Zofia?”

  “Let’s go to your cottage.”

  This sentence carries a lot of things. I could have said, Let’s go see the new library room in the administration building. I could have even said, Let’s go to my cottage, where Abek will return at some point tonight, and Esther, too, shoes in her hand, tipsy from wine. But I know that Josef shares a room only with Chaim and that this afternoon Chaim did what Breine did: moved her belongings into a marital room they’ll live in together. Josef’s room will be empty all night.

  I scan the dining hall. Esther and Abek have given up on dancing. But someone has produced a deck of playing cards, and they’re sitting back at the table with Ravid and a few others. I catch Esther’s eye and nod toward Abek. She nods back. He’s fine; everything’s fine. I’ll keep an eye on him for a while.

  I hesitate again, just in case, paralyzed for a moment at the idea of letting my brother out of my sight. But Abek is laughing; he seems to be having fun.

  Outside the dining hall, Josef and I are suddenly shy, walking side by side like strangers. Josef apologizes for bumping against my hip, and I say nonsensical things about the stars. I say, “The stars are really bright tonight,” even though they look like they do all the time. When we walk into Josef’s cottage—when we pass Ravid’s room in the front and go into Josef’s in the back, and when I see the neat hospital corners on his bed—I’m suddenly even more aware of what I’ve done.

  “That’s Chaim’s bed,” he says unnecessarily, pointing to the mattress stripped of sheets. “I can sit there, or I can go find a chair if you’d be more comfortable.”

  “No.”

  “Should I offer you some water?”

  “No.”

  “I haven’t been inside a girls’ cottage. Do they look—”

  I cut him off before he can say more, putting my arms around his waist, crushing my lips against his. We’re kissing again, only now we’re breathing harder; I can feel his body start to respond to mine, feel the way my hands start out trembling but grow more certain, and then more certain than they’ve ever been about anything. I slide my hands under his shirt and then up against the bare skin of his chest, where his heart crashes against my palm. He gasps against my lips and then reaches for the buttons on my dress, lingering at the top one, near the nape of my neck.

  “Can I—”

  “Yes,” I say, but then I have to do it myself when he can’t work the button out of its hole. When I’m finished, he gently pulls my chin up using the tips of his fingers, and then he touches his tongue to the now-bare hollow of my neck.

  My whole body shudders as he manages the next button on his own, and then the button after that.

  I forgot that pleasure could feel this strong. After years of feeling nothing but perpetual, insistent pain, my body had begun to feel like an instrument of it. Like it was built to withstand things rather than experience them. And then when the war was over, when I was safely in the hospital, what I mostly felt was numbness, a protective anesthetization against my own feelings. I forgot that I could want something because I wanted it and not just because I was starving or cold.

  “Zofia,” Josef whispers, and his voice brings me back to this moment, to the gritty reality of this moment and of my body. How the door is thin, and unlocked, and could be opened any minute. How Aunt Maja told me what happens on wedding nights, but it was always put like that—what happens on wedding nights—and not what happens with a boy you’ve known only a few weeks.

  I close my eyes, trying to block Aunt Maja’s face, but now my body is warring with itself.

  “Wait.”

  “What?” Josef says in between kisses on my neck, soft, slow kisses that make me melt.

  “Josef, wait.”

  This time my arms move before my brain can think, and I push Josef away. He looks back at me, confused, raising his palms.

  “I’m so sorry. I thought you were all right with—I must have misunderstood.”

  “I have only eight toes,” I blurt out.

  “What?”

  “Eight. At the hospital, two of them were too frostbitten to save. If my shoes come off—I didn’t want you to be repulsed if you saw my feet.”

  Josef steps back and studies me and then turns his back. I think this must mean he’s disgusted, until he flips up the back of his hair. “Do you see it?” he asks. And I do; it’s hard to miss: a bald spot the size of an apricot. “One winter, I got sick. My hair started falling out, and in this spot it didn’t grow back,” he continues. “And I don’t think it ever will. I will be bald there forever until the rest of my hair falls out, too.”

  “Is that why you never comb your hair properly?” I ask, and start to laugh.

  “That’s exactly why. If I properly combed my hair, everyone would see how little hair I have left.”

  I roll up my sleeve: a spidery scar, running from my forearm up past my elbow. “A shuttle flew off the loom at my second camp,” I tell him. “It didn’t heal right. I thought if I reported the injury, they would send me to the sick barrack, and I would never come out.”

  “I’m missing my right molars.” He pries his mouth open with his fingers, nodding at me to look inside, where two black holes replace what used to be teeth. “A soldier hit me with the butt of his rifle, and they flew out of my mouth.”

  “I have scars from flea bites,” I tell him.

  “You think you have flea bites? I itched mine until they bled; I couldn’t leave them alone. Pockmarks, all up and down my legs.”

  He lifts one corner of his trousers. It’s dim enough that I can barely see these alleged pockmarks, but I am laughing anyway, laughing and crying as we continue this tour of our bodies, of the secret, hidden things that are broken in them. Josef is laughing, too, as he lets go of his pant leg and puts his hand on the sleeve of his shirt.

  “My shoulder was dislocated, and it didn’t set right,” he says. “I can’t do even one push-up anymore. I have trouble holding myself up on my arms if I’m in a certain position. If I’m…”

  He trails off. He’s not laughing anymore. By the lamplight, I can tell that his face has turned red, and then I feel myself blush, too, because I can tell what he’s trying to say: If I were on my back, and he was above me, it might not work, he might not be able to hold himself there.

  “I don’t mind,” I say.

  Josef hesitates. “Do I need to… should I go get—”

  He doesn’t finish, but I know what he was about to say. Should he go get protection? Could this have consequences?

  “No.” I’m overcome by a wave of tenderness and then one last wave of nerves. “I haven’t—I haven’t bled in a long time. Josef, when my clothes are off, you can count my ribs. Even after months in the hospital, I don’t look very… womanly.” My breasts are gone, is what I mean to tell him. My cycle is dried up. I am shriveled; I am a nothing-girl.

>   “I don’t mind,” he says, and reaches to turn off the lamp.

  My final confession and this final darkness have liberated me. He knows every embarrassing thing about my body.

  Outside, far in the distance, I can still hear music from the wedding.

  I am thinking of Breine, having a wedding now to prove she is alive, to remind herself to never again wait on things that might make her happy. I am thinking of Aunt Maja and her wedding-night advice. But Aunt Maja isn’t here to give me advice anymore; nobody is.

  I reach down toward the button of Josef’s pants, but before I can unfasten it, he grabs my hand.

  “Don’t,” he says. “There’s something else.” Josef’s voice is low and husky.

  “That’s enough maladies.”

  “Not something that’s wrong. Something else about me. I haven’t been able to think of a way to—”

  “Please stop talking,” I instruct him. And he does. He sits on the edge of the bed and puts his hands on my waist while I finish unbuttoning the rest of the buttons on my new purple dress and let it slip to the floor. I take his hands, and I put them on my flattened chest. From his sharp intake of breath, I can tell I am not too flat for him.

  He puts his lips on my stomach, and I run my hands through his hair. I kiss the top of his head, and we remember that we are alive.

  HERE’S A PIECE OF MY MEMORY, OF MY DEAD-GHOST-MEMORY, come floating back to me. It seems like I should have a happier one, like doing something happy should also trigger happy memories. But that’s not how this puzzle works, it seems. The pieces don’t come in order. Each piece floats around the waste of my mind until it attaches itself to something random, obscure.

  They didn’t send my father to the left when we got to Birkenau. My father was already dead. My father was dead because, when he saw the German soldiers kick the old pharmacist, he went to help him, and so they shot him. First, one soldier viciously jammed his hand against my father’s throat, knocking out his wind, and then they shot him. Casually, like their guns were flyswatters. He fell to the ground. His arm bent ragdoll-like behind him; I remember thinking his shoulder would be dislocated.

  He wasn’t the only person to die that day on the soccer field in the rain. The soldiers shot others who disobeyed orders. People who tried to sneak from one line to the other. A woman began screaming that her son was at work, that he had a dispensation; if she’d known she wasn’t going to be allowed back to her house, she would have said goodbye to him. She tried to leave; they shot her.

  There was so much death and blood that day, happening all at once. The rest of my family, I lost when we got to Birkenau, and maybe it was easier for me to believe I had lost my father that way, too: to the left, all at once. Remembering that I had lost him a few days before then would mean that I had to have two battering rams of pain instead of just one.

  Does it really matter, in the end? He’s just as dead either way.

  WHEN I WAKE UP NEXT, JOSEF IS STILL SLEEPING, ON HIS stomach, his hair tousled like beach grass. This is the position he fell asleep in, too, the position both of us did. Side by side on our stomachs, hands curled neatly near our chins, suddenly aware of each other’s personal space and how it would be rude to impose on it. Before sleeping, my last memory is me asking him whether his shoulder hurt, him asking me whether I was too cold, me saying that I wasn’t cold, but I was nearly naked, so I was going to keep my arms where they were, protecting my nakedness. Him laughing.

  I meant to close my eyes for just a minute and then go back to Abek. But it’s clear I fell asleep for longer. It’s still dark outside, but the sky is a dark bruise instead of an inky black. Closer to sunrise than midnight. I fumble for the lamp by the side of Josef’s bed and turn it on; it’s just bright enough to see around the room and get my bearings. I’m half-dressed. Earlier, Josef wrapped a blanket around his waist while he searched in the dark for our underthings, passing mine to me before turning away to pull on his own—belated modesty that amused me. He must have gotten up again while I was still sleeping: A chair leans underneath the doorknob, safeguarding against anyone walking in. And when I went to sleep, my dress was in a pool on the floor. Now it’s folded on his nightstand, with my shoes tucked underneath. Easy for me to find if I wanted to leave while it was dark.

  His own clothes hang in the open wardrobe on a wooden bar with a piece of twine tied in the middle, to partition his half from Chaim’s, I assume. Chaim’s half is empty now, and Josef’s has only one other shirt inside: the one he was wearing the day I met him, the one he’s worn every other time I’ve seen him. Even when the donation boxes come, spilling over with linen and mothballs, he apparently never takes anything from them except for his new wedding shirt.

  I tiptoe across the floor to take the shirt out of the wardrobe, cringing as the hangers clatter, but Josef doesn’t wake. The shirt is the kind of faded gray that could have once been white or once been blue; sun-starched now, but carrying the washings and weight of a hundred other days pressed on Josef’s skin. It smells clean like grass and the sun it dried in, and underneath, it smells like Josef himself, the smoky sweetness of his skin. Up close, I can confirm what I’d earlier noticed about Josef’s handiwork with the buttons: They’ve been reattached, securely but without any eye to aesthetics. The pocket is still torn. It’s not as necessary to the shirt, I suppose.

  Quietly, I walk back to my dress and feel in the pocket. I’d tucked a needle and thread inside, just in case something went wrong at the last minute with Breine’s dress. I don’t think Josef will mind about the mismatched color.

  Sitting on Chaim’s empty bed, I prop the lamp next to me and fix the buttons first, snipping off the crooked ones and aligning them with the buttonholes. For the pocket, I turn to a basic whipstitch, the first stitch I ever learned, with Baba Rose carefully guiding my hand as I dragged the needle through two practice scraps of cloth. This isn’t the fancy sewing reserved for the clothing at our factory. It’s the private, family sewing I would use to hem my father’s pants or to add a patch on Baba Rose’s sleeve.

  “What are you doing?” Josef is still half asleep, his voice low and cracked, a crease of pillow imprinted across his cheek.

  “Go back to sleep,” I say.

  “Are you fixing my shirt?”

  “Why don’t you have more than one?”

  “I have two,” he mumbles.

  “Well, now you have two, because you picked out a new one for the wedding. Why didn’t you ever pick out another one before?”

  “Other people need them more.”

  “Josef. You had one shirt.”

  “I like watching you work. You’re very good.”

  “How would you know? Judging from the state of the buttons before I fixed them, you’re very bad.”

  “I like watching you work.” He’s fading again, slurring his words together.

  “Go back to sleep, Josef.”

  I wait until his breathing has steadied again, and then I make an extra fold in the fabric of the pocket. I cut off a bit of fabric from where it won’t be noticed and quickly begin to stitch.

  Z is for Zofia, 1945, who fixed one of your shirts and tore the other off you.

  I twist the cloth between my fingers, as small a roll as I can make it, and work it into the extra space I’d created in the pocket, then I sew it shut. I’d be both mortified and pleased if he ever found it. My family thought it was sweet when I made these messages, but the few other times I did this for friends, I never told them. I could never decide whether they would think it was sweet or strange. Maybe it is strange. I barely know Josef.

  Today I am choosing to love the person in front of me, Breine said, telling me that she planned to marry a man she hadn’t even known for two months. Not that I am saying I want to marry him. Not that I am saying I love him.

  But last night we were together, and even if Josef never finds this message, I like the idea of my name being close to his skin. I like even more the idea that there is a recor
d of what happened last night, and something could happen to me, and something could happen to Josef, but there will still be that record because I wrote it down.

  Almost back at my cottage, I see a figure slipping out the door: Breine in a dressing gown, clutching something to her chest. She startles at my footsteps, then laughs when she realizes it’s only me.

  “What are you doing, just coming home?” She raises one eyebrow. “Someone’s been having a good time.”

  “What are you doing here at all?” I tease back. “Aren’t you supposed to live with Chaim now?”

  She shows me the item in her hand. “Toothbrush. I forgot it. Chaim said not to bother, but who wants to wake up without a toothbrush the first morning next to their husband?” Her face turns pink at the last word. “Husband! Can you believe it?”

  “It was a beautiful wedding, Breine.”

  “Wasn’t it? I really think so.”

  “It was. And now I should let you get back to your husband. If you’re away too long, he’ll think you’ve changed your mind.”

  “Yes.” She gives a little, silly curtsy, holding the edges of her dressing gown. “I’m glad I saw you, though, because I was going to look for you tomorrow anyway. I wanted to tell you something—Ravid isn’t coming.”

  “To bed with you and Chaim? I hope not.”

  She laughs. “To Eretz Israel. Ravid is in contact with someone who has a boat. It can leave from Italy. But he and Rebekah aren’t going to come with us. They told us after the wedding.”

  “Why wouldn’t he come? He’s organized all of you, hasn’t he?”

  “That’s why. Ravid is staying behind to help organize more trips; he thinks he’s more valuable this way.”