They Went Left

by Monica Hesse

  “I’m sure it’s hard for you to say goodbye to a friend.”

  I’m still not sure why we’re having this conversation. I don’t know Ravid well enough to have an opinion on whether he should go with the rest of the group.

  But Breine’s eyes are crafty; there’s a complicated look in them as she grabs my hands. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Zofia, I’m wondering if you should come with us.” She holds up a finger before I can protest. “I know you said earlier that you have your own plans, but now the invitation is real. There are two empty spots. You don’t have to take them, but—listen. I’m grateful to you for making my dress, and I’m happy that you found your brother, and, well, I’m a little older than you, and I don’t mean to sound bossy, but—it’s been really comforting for me to move forward with life, not go back. If we went to Ravid before anyone else did, I bet he would give you the slots. You and Abek.”

  “I can’t just… leave.”

  “Why not? You came here to find Abek, and you’ve found him. You’ve done what you wanted to do. Think about what happens next, though. All right? It’s only a suggestion.”

  I slip my hands out of Breine’s. Pretend I’m cold. Tuck my hands underneath my arms and look at the ground. “I’m not ready to decide anything yet. Abek just got here. I just found him. It’s only been a few days.”

  “Does this have anything to do with Josef?”

  My face burns hot that she would ask this, that she’d assume I might plan such a big decision around a boy I’d known only a few weeks.

  “I apologize,” she says in response to my silence. “I saw you dancing together and now you’re coming home at four o’clock in the morning.”

  “It’s not about Josef. It’s about the fact that I already had a plan. Once I found Abek, we were going to go back home. That was the plan.”

  “Zofia,” she says gently. She doesn’t try to take my hands again, but she somehow makes herself shorter than I am so she can look up at my eyes. “What’s there for you now? Tell me, Zofia. What’s waiting for you back there at your home?”

  “My friend Gosia,” I start, but I know that’s not an answer. Gosia would tell me to go be happy, wherever that was, and to send her postcards along the way. What else? My family’s apartment? But I could leave that for Gosia as well. That home feels like part of my history, but it was new at one point, too. At one point, Baba Rose and her husband were young and newly married, and they moved into an empty apartment and started to fill it with furniture and make a new life.

  What was special about that apartment before they moved in? Nothing. Everything special about that apartment was the family they built in it. Couldn’t it have been any apartment?

  I think about the last time I left my family’s home. In the dead of night, while sweet Dima slept, on the same day I’d seen a Nazi flag in my neighbor’s flowerpot and the same night a group of men had threatened me. My home had already been looted, destroyed, a shell of itself. I told myself that the place I’d grown up didn’t feel right because my family wasn’t there with me. What if it didn’t feel right because it’s not right anymore? Abek didn’t say he wanted to go home to Sosnowiec. He just said he wanted to go home.

  “I just think it’s better for all of us to keep moving,” she repeats. “That’s all.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I say. “I’ll talk to Abek.”

  “Think quickly,” she says. “If I tell Ravid you’re interested, he might be able to hold off other people for a week or so. So think hard, but think quickly.”

  BACK IN MY OWN BED—WHILE ESTHER DOZES ON THE OTHER side of the room, and Abek is curled up in Breine’s old spot—I toss and turn, trying to lull myself back to sleep by counting sheep, then by multiplying by twos and trying to recite countries of the world. My pillow feels hot and uncomfortable, and I can’t stop thinking that an hour ago it was Josef’s pillow my cheek was lying on. The sun is half up, filling the room with violet and then a burnt orange, and I reconcile myself to the idea that I won’t sleep any more tonight.

  Across the room, a mumble. Abek. I freeze, afraid that I’ve woken him with my tossing, but then the noise gets louder. Abek thrashes in his sheets. He’s still sleeping. It’s a nightmare: The noises he’s making aren’t words but yelps, desperate and scared. Immediately, I crawl out of bed and cross over to my brother. First, I stroke his forehead, making soothing shushing sounds, but when he doesn’t settle, I shake his shoulder roughly.

  “Abek. Wake up. Wake up now.” His eyes slide open, out of focus at first, scrambling for purchase in the dim room, clawing at my wrist. “You’re dreaming. You’re just dreaming.”

  He shoots up, drawing in a breath. “Did I bother you? Did I say anything?”

  “I barely noticed you making any noises,” I lie, my heart breaking a little at the memory of his weak little yelps. “I was awake already, actually. And Esther—” I nod to where Esther is sleeping as she usually does, head buried beneath a pillow.

  “Oh.”

  “And—and now that you’re awake, too, let’s get up and go for a walk.”

  “A walk?” he repeats, a touch of sleep still in his voice. “Now?”

  “Yes, I wanted to anyway,” I improvise, going back to my bed and looking for my shoes. Really, I just don’t want to send him back to sleep and hear him make those noises again. “Come on, I have your shoes, too.”

  Vaguely, I know Foehrenwald is on the outskirts of an actual town called Wolfratshausen. Esther told me about it, how there are a few open shops, places to buy hard rolls or a cup of soup. I’ve never had occasion to walk through it, and now seems a good day to try. We don’t have a wedding to prepare for. I don’t have a dress to sew. I don’t have a brother to find. If I don’t plan something for Abek and me to do, the day will stretch in front of us at loose ends.

  The sun is still rising when we leave the cottage. Abek walks behind me, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes with his fist.

  “Isn’t this nice?” I try as we pass the stables and the pond. “Being out, on our own? I thought that instead of going to the cafeteria for breakfast, we could go to a restaurant and have a cup of coffee. And I think there are castle ruins. We could go to those first.”

  But when we get to the castle ruins Esther mentioned, I see her descriptions were generous. A plaque informs us that the castle was demolished two hundred years ago, when lightning struck a turret storing gunpowder. Now there’s nothing but a few loose rocks.

  “Coffee,” I say stubbornly. “Let’s see if we can find real coffee. It’s a special occasion, I can afford it this once. And maybe a pastry?”

  But this idea doesn’t work, either; we’re still too early for any cafes to be open. There’s hardly anyone else on the street. Plus, after last night’s chilly weather, I chose to wear a sweater, but now the day is unexpectedly becoming a last gasp of summer. It’s early morning, but as we dispiritedly turn back to camp, sweat pools under my arms. My dress clings uncomfortably.

  “I wonder how Uncle Tootle is doing,” I say, my voice falsely cheery, directing the comment to Abek’s sagging shoulders ahead of me as he trudges down the narrow gravel road.

  “Huh? Oh. Right. Ha.”

  But it’s not as funny in the daylight. Even I know that. I was just hoping to recapture some of the silliness from the night before.

  “Zofia.” He stops in his tracks, jamming his hands into his pockets. “I’m sorry about the wine last night. Getting upset.”

  “You don’t have to apologize,” I say, motioning us to keep walking. “It was the end of a long day, and a lot happened this week.”

  “Still, I shouldn’t have.”

  “It’s fine,” I insist. “And now I made you get up at the crack of dawn for nothing, it turns out, and it’s boiling hot. But we’re almost back to the camp; we can get some wet rags to put on our foreheads and cool off.”

  “Or,” he begins slowly, “or, I was thinking we could do something else.”

&nb
sp; “Like what?”

  “We could go for a bicycle ride.”

  “Ha,” I say—my turn now to be sardonic. “Was there a bicycle in the donation box?”

  “No, didn’t you see them when we passed? There were a few outside the stables.” We’re at the borders of the camp now. Abek points ahead toward the whitewashed stables, where two rusted-out contraptions lean against the wall.

  I realize now he hadn’t been joking. He’s excited, actually, as much as I’ve seen since he first arrived.

  “But,” I protest, laughing, “we don’t even know how to ride bicycles.” I was going to learn the summer the Germans arrived, then they made a law that Jews weren’t allowed to have them.

  “I do.”

  “You know how to ride a bicycle? When did you learn how to ride a bicycle?”

  “Ladna’s,” he says. “The farm where I was staying. She had one; I could teach you, too.”

  My first inclination is to tell him he’s mistaken. He doesn’t know how to ride a bicycle. I feel as I did when he told me that he’d tried to read Charles Dickens, heartsick and bewildered at the idea of a life I know nothing about.

  “It’s too hot for that.”

  “It would be hot, but the wind would make us feel cooler. Please?” he asks, looking suddenly shy. “Let’s both do it. It would be fun. To do something new together. Something we’ve never done together before.”

  “Like, a new memory?” I ask.

  His face lights up. “Yes. A brand-new thing.”

  “I suppose.”

  The bicycles by the stables are rusted-out; the rubber of the tires looks cracked and fragile, and the brakes squeak. Abek makes a show of inspecting them—for me, I think, a sweetly chivalrous gesture—and pronounces them safe, “as long as we don’t go very far.”

  “Swing your leg up,” he instructs me, holding the back of the seat firm.

  “I’m going to fall over.”

  “You’re not.”

  He’s already demonstrated for me, pedaling the bicycle with his slender, gawky legs. He’s explained that you only fall if you stop. The faster you go, the safer you’ll be, he said.

  “Are you paying attention, Zofia? You’re not going to fall over,” he reassures me again. “You’re going to start with one pedal up and one pedal down, at about eleven o’clock and five o’clock. And then you press forward on the up pedal at the same time that you push off the ground with your other foot, and catch the down pedal. Does that make sense?”

  “Can’t we start on the grass?”

  Abek shakes his head. “It’s better on hard ground. It seems scarier, but you can build speed faster there, so there’s less of a chance of your falling. Are you ready? I promise I won’t let you fall.”

  The handlebars jerk in my hand; I know all I have to do is keep them straight, but they seem to have a mind of their own as I kick off the ground in my best approximation of the way Abek demonstrated. I can sense he’s right. If I could pedal faster, I’d feel more balanced. But I can’t make my legs move like that; the old, flat tires seem to hug every piece of gravel.

  We try again and again, for short bursts at a time. Five meters, then fifteen, then twenty. Each time, Abek helps me stop the bicycle, reposition a difficult chain and then discusses what I should do next time: how I should sit farther back in the seat, how I might try starting with my right pedal up instead of my left one. He is, I realize with bittersweet pride, a good teacher. Even for someone so young. He’s patient and thorough, and he insists on trying to teach me, even when I say I’d be happy to sit and watch him ride alone.

  He’s a nice boy, I realize is what I’m trying to formulate. He grew up to be such a decent, kind boy.

  We must have been riding for an hour. Beside me, Abek has one hand on the bicycle seat and the other on the handlebars, keeping me from tipping over or steering off the road. I can see the muscles in his skinny arm tense so hard they’re quivering. His knuckles have turned white, and he’s panting harder than I am as he works harder and harder to keep up.

  “We can stop,” I start to call out.

  “No, I have it; I’m not letting you fall.”

  “You’re getting tire—”

  “Zofia, watch the road.”

  But it’s too late. When I turn to look at Abek, my body forgets it is connected to the handlebars, that turning myself will also turn the bicycle. Abek tries to right it again but can’t. For a perilous moment, the bicycle hangs in balance, deciding which way to topple, and then Abek grabs my waist and pulls me toward him so we fall toward the higher ground instead of a ditch.

  My knees skid against the grass, but it’s worse for Abek. I’ve landed half on top of him, the heel of my shoe digging into his shin.

  “Are you all right?” I ask, rolling to my knees, terrified that I’ve injured him.

  “I didn’t mean for that to happen,” he apologizes, scrambling to his feet. “I said I wouldn’t let you fall; I promised.”

  “You didn’t do it on purpose,” I assure him, relieved he’s not hurt. “Unless you did do it on purpose because I made you get up so early.”

  He shakes his head, mortified. “I promise I didn’t.”

  “Abek, I was joking. Of course you didn’t do it on purpose. I had fun.”

  “Really?”

  “I really had fun. You’re a good teacher.”

  He gallantly offers his hand, helping me up, and then we both hear the sound of someone approaching from the stables.

  “At least with the horses, they look sort of guilty when they throw you,” the voice calls. I turn my head and see Josef, hands in his pockets. “That bicycle doesn’t care at all.”

  He’s wearing the shirt I repaired only a few hours ago, and thinking of this turns my stomach warm. I wonder if I was supposed to do something when I left—leave him a note or wake him again. I don’t know the protocol for leaving a man’s bed in the middle of the night.

  “Those horses never look guilty,” I say, feeling for any remaining grass in my hair.

  “You’re just not close enough friends with them yet.”

  Abek is looking back and forth between us. I’m glad I introduced them yesterday; I wouldn’t know how to now. My friend Josef? My beau? He must have seen us leave together last night.

  “The brakes squeak, right?” Josef turns to Abek. “That’s what I heard someone say yesterday.”

  “They squeak. And this chain won’t stay on.”

  Josef crouches down, and Abek kneels next to him, their heads close together as they examine the chain, hands growing greasy and dark.

  “I don’t really know anything about bicycles,” Josef is telling Abek. “But, what if we tried just cleaning the chain? The grease is caked on.”

  “I should have tried that before we even rode them,” Abek says.

  “I’m sure it wouldn’t have mattered. These bicycles are a mess.”

  They look so at ease with each other. I like how Josef talks to Abek, reassuring him that he wasn’t at fault for the malfunctioning bicycles. I like how Abek listens.

  Family? My heart asks the question before my brain can stop it. Is this what my future could look like, or some form of it?

  “There are some clean rags in a pile in the stables,” Josef tells Abek. “I can work on the chain, and then, if we wanted to try something for the brakes, the trade school building might have a kind of oil that would work. Do you want to go see? It’s the A-frame building behind the dining hall.”

  Abek wipes his greasy hands in the grass before disappearing into the stables, returning a few moments later with a couple of soft flannels. “These?” he asks, tossing them over and then setting off in the direction of the building that Josef described, eyeing me quickly to make sure it’s okay.

  As Abek disappears from sight, Josef settles back into the grass and tries to work the chain off its sprocket. “Try there,” I suggest, pointing.

  “You know about bicycles now?” he teases. “Do you want t
o do this?”

  “I know how to figure out machines when they break. I’ve reassembled sewing machines; I’ve fixed looms.”

  He colors—I told him this last night. I told him that the scar on my arm is from a shuttle flying off a loom. I told him that when I was about to be naked in his bedroom.

  Following my instructions, he works the chain off and then lays it in front of him in the clean grass.

  “I, um, was going to come and find you later,” he says, picking up one of the soft cloths and beginning to clean the chain, link by link, of its caked-on grime. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that Josef is as uncomfortable as I am, trying to figure out how to talk to me today. “You left something in my cottage last night.”

  Mentally I scroll through what I could have left; all I had with me were my clothes and shoes, and I know I didn’t walk home naked. “What did I leave?”

  “Reach into my pocket for me,” he says, nodding to his messy hands.

  It’s the note I left in his shirt, I think, mortified. Somehow he’s found it already, and now he’s going to tease me about it. Josef catches my expression, but it obviously doesn’t register to him what it means. “It’s some thread,” he explains. “Left over from when you fixed the buttons.”

  “Thread,” I repeat in relief, and now I do slide my hand into Josef’s breast pocket, skimming along his chest until my fingers wind around the tangle of silk pooled at the bottom. It’s still thrilling to touch him in such an intimate way, but I realize with embarrassment that I’ve let my hand linger longer than necessary. Quickly, I pull the thread out and stretch it in my lap, working loose the knots it’s tied itself into in Josef’s pocket.

  It’s somewhat of a fool’s errand to even bother with it. There weren’t more than four or five centimeters of thread left over after I finished the mending. I can find a use for almost anything: A slightly longer piece of thread could have been used for sewing a solitary button, or as dental floss, or for tying into a doll’s hair bow. But this piece is so uselessly short, even I could think of no use for it. I’d thrown it into a waste can in Josef’s room. Meaning, I realize with pleasure, that he fished it out on purpose so he would have an excuse to talk to me.