by Monica Hesse
“Well?” I ask when I’m finished explaining my concerns. “Does it sound like something I should be worried about?”
He bites his lip, thinking. “I’m not sure you’re listening to yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re worried that Abek doesn’t remember things. But isn’t that one of the first things you told me, the first day we talked? Your memory has holes. You don’t remember things you should. You get confused about what really happened, and you’re not sure what’s real and what’s not. Maybe he’s just a little confused, too. The way you were.”
“Do you think that’s it?”
“I don’t know. Does it sound like it could be right to you? People’s brains don’t work in the same way. Just because his memory lapses don’t look exactly like yours, it doesn’t mean they’re not real.”
Josef’s theory could explain what’s happening with Abek and also why I feel so viscerally concerned by it. Is he like me, a victim of the same memory holes? Do they run in our blood, all our lapses and blank spots traveling through our veins? Are we both sick; are we both broken?
My own memory has holes in it. Why should his be perfect?
“Zofia, Buchenwald is a horrible place,” Josef says.
“We were all in horrible places.”
“I know,” Josef says. “But Buchenwald—I’ve heard there was a patch of woods called the ‘singing forest.’ It was called that because they would torture men there. Tie prisoners’ hands behind their backs and then hang them from their wrists and leave them there. From the camp, you could hear the men screaming. The singing forest.”
My stomach turns. Is this what my brother had to witness? Were these the sounds accompanying him to sleep every night? The sounds of tortured men begging to die?
Suddenly I’m ashamed. I’ve just spent this conversation worrying over whether Abek remembered the right things from before the war, and I’ve been ignoring everything that could have happened during it. Everything that could have torn him apart.
“I think you’re right,” I say slowly. “Thank you.”
“Is there anything else you wanted to talk about?”
“No,” I say. “I want to go find Abek again. I’ll leave you to your work, and maybe see you later?”
“Wait. I was wondering something, too.” Josef has stopped what he’s doing. His hands lie loosely by his sides, and I notice he’s turning pink around the collar.
“Oh?”
“I was wondering… if I could eat dinner with you tomorrow. If you’d rather I didn’t, that’s fine, of course, but if there was room, I wondered if I could eat dinner with you.”
His shyness feels backward, just as everything about my interactions with Josef have felt backward, and for a brief second, I think about saying no—I don’t want to risk disrupting what we have. But then, what I have is always changing, anyway. What more is there to disrupt?
“We meet at five thirty,” I tell him. “And none of us will wait for you if you’re late.”
Abek isn’t back in the cottage. I find him instead in the courtyard, just behind the administration building. In the twilight, he’s watching a group of men play a soccer game, knees curled up to his chest, chin resting on top of them. I sidle up slowly, prepared to open my mouth and apologize, but he speaks first.
“Dobrotek.” Abek still isn’t looking at me; he must have spotted me out of the corner of his eyes. This word comes out of his mouth like a begrudging bark.
“What?”
Now he turns to look at me. “In the story you used to tell me. The one with Princess Ladna. His name was Prince Dobrotek.”
It still takes me a moment to place what he’s talking about: the conversation from his first night here, when he told me about staying with an old woman named Ladna, and when I reminded him that Ladna was also the name from a fairy tale we used to tell.
“That’s right,” I say. “The king told the prince that if he couldn’t find his kidnapped daughter, he would be put to death.”
“But Prince Dobrotek did find her,” Abek adds. “And they inherited the kingdom and lived happily ever after. I remembered it.”
He raises his eyebrows, as if to say, Are you happy now?
And I am happy. I’m relieved in a way that doesn’t even fully make sense. Problem solved, my brain tells itself. Calm down; you are worried about nothing.
“Abek, I’m sorry.” I carefully slide onto the bench with him but make sure to leave space, several inches, so he doesn’t feel crowded. “I really am trying. I’m sorry if it feels like I’m trying to force something. It’s just that I wanted to find you for a really long time. But in my mind, you were always exactly who you were before. And I should have realized you would be different. Because I’m different, too.”
He fiddles with the hem of his pants. Twenty meters away, I hear the thud of a soccer ball, the cheer of a team scoring a goal. “I know you wish we could go back to how we were before,” he says. “I know it’s disappointing.”
“No.” I start to reach for his arm and then think better of it. “I mean, of course I do. I want the world to go back to where it was before. But not because of you. I’m so happy you’re here. Are you? Aren’t you happy you came here?”
He pauses long enough that I don’t know what will come out of his mouth. I worry he’ll say he’s not glad, or he’s leaving, or that I’m a disappointment to him. But finally he hunches his neck down into his shirt collar and says, “I am. I think I am.”
You are worried about nothing, I repeat to myself. See, everything is fine.
THE NEXT MORNING, ONE OF THE FOEHRENWALD OFFICE workers brings me a note: Could I stop by the administration building that afternoon to talk about housing?
I can already anticipate the conversation. In the front room of the cottage, Miriam has left, but she was replaced almost immediately by two more girls, in a space that is now so filled with cots it’s nearly impossible to maneuver around them. I know it’s this crowded all over camp. Esther and I have been allowed such relatively luxurious accommodations because of Abek’s presence. Esther has been kind enough not to complain about sharing her space with a boy, but they wouldn’t assign other women into this situation. The administration probably wants to know what our plans are, whether they should reassign us to family housing or make different arrangements.
Before I can make it inside the administration building, though, I spot Breine on the edge of the courtyard, repotting some of the plants from the herb garden. She’s proudly wearing her new ring, even as her nails and hands are caked in dirt. Chaim is just a row over; they work in unison. They already look like a matched set, and she waves when she sees me.
I owe her an answer about whether Abek and I will go with them. She told me I needed to think quickly; she told me there wasn’t endless time.
The idea that there’s not endless time seems crazy to me. For years, it seemed as if there was nothing but time, stretching out like a nightmare, days that felt like years as we all prayed for an ending and for reunification with the people we loved. Nothing happened at all, and now everything is happening at once.
I owe Breine an answer, but I can’t give her one yet, so instead of stopping to talk to her, I return her wave from a distance and call out, “I promise I’ll talk to you soon.”
Inside the administration building, I pass Mrs. Yost’s office, and the door is ajar. I hear paper rustling inside, and I step inside to say hello, but she’s not at her desk. The rustling is coming from Mr. Ohrmann, the caterpillar-eyebrowed man from the aid organization. The desk in front of him is again piled with ledgers and composition books.
“Mr. Ohrmann! I’m sorry to disturb you; I’m here for an appointment with someone else, and I thought I’d just say hello to Mrs. Yost.”
“She told me she’s just running a few minutes late—a small fire to put out.”
“I’ll come see her another time,” I say, already retreating through the door. “I did
n’t mean to disturb your work.”
“Miss Lederman—it’s Miss Lederman, isn’t it? Wait a moment. Mrs. Yost tells me you have been reunited with your brother.”
There’s nothing accusatory in the statement, but it still makes me feel guilty. Mr. Ohrmann tried to help me with my search, and I can’t even imagine how many cases he must be juggling. He looks exhausted, eyes red-rimmed. I should have found a way to leave word with him that he could take me off his list.
“I know; I need to contact organizations—yours, especially—and tell them they can close my file,” I apologize. “It’s just… it happened fast, barely a week ago.”
He’s already waving me off, unbothered. “I don’t get to hear nearly as many happy stories as I’d like, much less in person,” he says. “I’m just glad this is one of them. Have you decided what you’ll do next?”
“We’re trying to figure that out now. That’s partly why I’m in the building.”
“I wish you the best. I’ll tell Mrs. Yost you stopped by.”
I’ve already walked through the door when I hear Mr. Ohrmann calling my name again. When I step back into the office, he’s holding aloft a single sheet of paper with just a few typewritten paragraphs on it.
“Miss Lederman? If I’m going to close your file, I don’t suppose any news relating to Alek Federman is relevant now, is it?”
“Alek Federman? I suppose not. Thanks for checking.” I start to leave again, but this time it’s me who stops myself. “Why do you ask?”
Mr. Ohrmann is already sliding the letter back into a folder. “We found some news about him. But obviously not news that concerns you. The name similarity must just be a clerical coincidence.”
“Just out of curiosity, though, what is the news? Is he… alive?”
“I believe he is,” Mr. Ohrmann affirms. “It turns out he wasn’t in any of the records—death, transfer, or liberation—because he’d actually escaped a few months before liberation. He and another boy.”
“So you’ve talked to Alek?”
“My colleague talked to the other boy. They didn’t stay together after the escape—it hadn’t been planned, and they didn’t even know each other before it. They were both assigned to work outside the camp, and the truck left them behind. They thought splitting up would give them each a better chance of surviving. The other boy didn’t know where Alek is now, but it answers the question of why he wasn’t in any records.”
“I didn’t know anyone escaped,” I say.
Mr. Ohrmann nods. “It’s incredibly rare.”
“How did you learn about it?”
“I happened to be talking to a colleague about your search, and he remembered an interview he’d conducted months ago. The notes were still in a file. The young man—Alek’s escape partner—mentioned Alek’s name. The young man was looking for him, too.”
“But his name was really Alek,” I confirm. “It wasn’t a misspelling; his name was really Alek after all, not Abek?”
Mr. Ohrmann looks pained. “We believe so. It’s a little complicated. The interview was conducted through an interpreter. The boy was Romanian, a language none of us speaks. He was getting confused by the foreign names.
“Anyway. This isn’t your concern now,” he finishes brightly. “Yours is a file I can close.”
“But it sounds like Alek Federman’s is one you’ll have to open? Will you still find him? Is anyone looking for him?”
“You can’t get caught up in everyone else’s searches,” Mr. Ohrmann warns me.
“I know; I’m just wondering. Will anyone find out where that boy is?”
“Believe me, this is a lesson I have to employ myself.” Mr. Ohrmann shuffles more papers, a stack that never seems to get tidier despite his attempts to organize. “You just have to tell yourself: Yours is a file I can close.”
THE HOUSING OFFICE IS EMPTY WHEN I STOP BY TO ASK ABOUT my note. There’s time for me to go back to the cottage before dinner, but I find I don’t want to do that. I’m having trouble concentrating after my conversation with Mr. Ohrmann; I feel unsettled.
Ahead of me, two girls carrying books emerge from the library room; it must be open now. That seems like a soothing place to be for a troubled mind—a quiet room, nothing but the sound of turning pages.
Even now, with everything unpacked, it’s apparent that “library” was an optimistic designation. Along two of the walls, just a few warped shelves contain hard-backed volumes emitting the vague scent of must and mildew. Someone has gone so far as to arrange them by language, but otherwise they’re a jumble: A bird-watching guide is tucked between a historical biography and an encyclopedia for the letter N. Mismatched chairs are pulled up to a solitary table; I’m the only one here.
I pull over one of the chairs to sit on while I look through the Polish section, which is full of mostly boring titles that make me suspect these books had sat unread in people’s attics for a long time before ending up in this camp.
I ought to try to find something, though. I used to like reading, sometimes—my mother would pass on her fantasy novels. Now, I can’t remember the last time I read a full book cover to cover. In the hospital, words swam in front of my eyes. The other girls and I would lie on our backs sometimes and listen to poems the nurses would read during rest times.
Maybe I could handle something basic now, though. I page through the only two books that look promising: a romance that turns out to be courtly and dry, and what looks like the second volume of an adventure series. Without the first volume, though, the plot is confusing, and I can’t keep track of the characters. Maybe I’m not ready to read anything yet after all.
As I pull the chair back to where it belongs, I spot another Polish book, already sitting on the table: The Good Ferryman and Other Classic Stories. This one is a children’s book, the pages are half illustrations and all dog-eared. A donation from a family, maybe, whose children had grown, who didn’t need fairy tales anymore. I open it to the table of contents.
“The Princess of the Brazen Mountain.” “The Bear in the Forest Hut.”
I page past illustrations of dragons and children turned into birds. At the beginning of the next story, a picture of a man whose beard swirls into a great cyclone, I start to read.
In a far-off country, beyond the sea and the mountains, there lived a king and queen, with a beautiful daughter. A great many princes came to woo her but she liked only one of them.
My eyes travel mindlessly over the next few sentences before I slowly register what I’m reading. It’s The Whirlwind.
It had taken me a few paragraphs to piece together what I was reading because I’ve never seen it written down before. My parents always recited it as a bedtime story when I was little, and I learned it from them. The details changed a little depending on who was telling it—Mama emphasizing the fantastical adventures, Papa the victory of good over evil, and the story transformed a little over time, as my family created a version that was all our own.
But here it is, the official version. In print. In a library just a few hundred meters from the cottage where my brother is probably getting ready for dinner.
“His name was Prince Dobrotek,” Abek told me.
Abek couldn’t remember the prince’s name. Until he could. Until out of nowhere, he said he suddenly remembered after all: The prince’s name was Dobrotek. And I was so happy. I took that memory as a sign. I took that memory to mean something important.
My fingers have grown cold. I’m still turning the pages, but I’m barely paying attention to what’s on them.
Had Abek really remembered the name? Had he remembered it out of the blue?
Is it just a coincidence this book is sitting here on the table instead of on the shelf, as if someone was only recently reading it?
Beneath my hands, the cover falls closed.
What is the real question I am trying to ask? What is the theory I am trying to prove? What is the thing that keeps nudging against my brain?
I
f this book is sitting on the table because Abek came in yesterday and was reading it, then why wouldn’t he have just mentioned to me he’d done it? He could have just said, Guess what? I went to the library and found a book of fairy tales, and it had the name of the character we couldn’t remember; isn’t that interesting?
Unless it wasn’t actually remembering the prince’s name that mattered, but showing me that he remembered. Showing that he had memories of our reading the story together. That he had memories of me before the war. Proving something.
Proving what?
This means nothing, I tell myself. This is all useless speculation. I don’t even know if Abek looked in this book, and it wouldn’t matter anyway, because this book is here to be looked at, and Abek is my brother, and he is here, and that is what means something, and this means nothing, because this is all useless speculation, and I don’t even know if Abek is the one who looked in the book, and even it wouldn’t matter anyway, because this book is here to be looked at, and Abek is my brother, and he is—
Brrrrrrr. Brrrrrrrr.
My thoughts are pierced by a loud sound, metallic and shrill. My knees give out. My brain is on fire.
Before I can process what the sound is, my body has reacted. I’m on the floor. I’m under the table on my hands and knees, and I’m shaking and can’t control myself.
You’re in the library in Foehrenwald, I tell myself, but I tell myself louder, Run.
Breathe, I instruct myself. My mind hasn’t gotten caught in a loop like that in more than a week. Not since Abek arrived. I’d hoped that meant I’d moved beyond it. I’d hoped I was better. I’m dripping with sweat.
There’s nothing to be scared of, I repeat.
From under the table, I see a pair of brown men’s shoes appear in the doorway. The shoes pause, and I shrink away from them, fighting back screams.
Then the body attached to them lowers.
The face that appears is kind. A young man I’ve never seen, watching me shake under the table. You’re in Foehrenwald. You’re safe.
