our stomachs in barely any clothes in the dark of his room, and we’ve talked and we’ve laughed and he never once said, I’m not who I’ve led you to think I am. The memory of these nights brings on a new wave of nausea, a new depth to my horror. This man has kissed me. This man has been inside me.
“Zofia.” He reaches a hand out to touch me, and I shrink back, my resolve steeled.
“No.”
“Please.”
“You are never allowed to touch me again,” I hiss. “You lied to all of us, to every single one of us, because you knew that would make it easier for you. And that was more important to you than—” Here, my voice begins to shake with emotion. “Making life easier for you was more important than understanding that it was hell for us.”
“You’re right. You are,” he says softly. “I was a coward.”
I feel like I’m not even looking at Josef anymore. I’m looking at someone who slightly resembles someone I used to know, and I’m realizing the whole thing was a disguise.
“Go away,” I say finally, removing my hand from the doorknob, realizing something. “You should be the one to leave now; it’s my cottage.”
“Zofia—”
“Go away. Don’t ask me to forgive you.”
“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” he says bitterly. “I probably shouldn’t even forgive myself.”
“You shouldn’t,” I say. I hold the door open for him, and when he leaves, I finally cry.
THE LAST TIME I SAW MY MOTHER WAS UNSPEAKABLE AND SAD.
The last time I saw my father was unspeakable and sad.
The last time I saw Baba Rose and vivacious Aunt Maja was unspeakable and sad.
The last time I see Josef is unspeakable and sad. I think that was the last time. How could that have been anything other than the last time?
I am exhausted by unspeakable sadness, by wearing it like a cloak.
The first time I saw Abek, he was seven pounds and four ounces. My father and I paced up and down the street outside our house. He said we could walk to buy ice cream, but we never made it to the shop. Every time we reached the end of the block, he would decide we should run back, quickly, in case there was news. We would get back to our building, and then Aunt Maja or Baba Rose would lean out the window and shake their heads. Not yet.
Were you this nervous when I was born? I asked Papa. I was too young to be nervous, he said. With you, I was only excited. I couldn’t wait to meet you.
The third or fourth time we returned from our failed ice-cream mission, Aunt Maja leaned out the window and said, Don’t leave again; we think it will be soon. Then she leaned out the window again and said, It’s a boy, and then we both ran inside and all the way up the stairs, to where Abek was redder and smaller than I’d imagined his being, wailing like a kitten, wrapped in white. My mother passed him to my father, who gave Abek his pinky finger to suck on, and I watched him to figure out what to do when it was my turn.
Make a cradle with your arms, Mama told me as Papa shifted the small, hot bundle into my awkward, outstretched hands. This is your brother, she said as I stared at his wrinkled fingers and the fine smattering of hair covering his scalp. It’s your job to protect him, she said. That’s what big sisters do; they protect their little brothers and sisters from the beginning to the end.
I tried, Mama. I tried, Papa and Aunt Maja and Baba Rose. I am so sorry I failed.
The last time I saw Abek wasn’t when I left Auschwitz-Birkenau, gripping his fingers through the barbed wire fence. It wasn’t when we walked toward the showers and I told him not to worry about taking off his clothes, because he was going to be issued new ones. It wasn’t when I left him a turnip and he left me a mud drawing in return. Those things didn’t happen. They never happened.
By the time we arrived in Birkenau, the old and the sick among us had died on the trip. Baba Rose had died on the trip. She was in the car with Abek and me; my mother and Aunt Maja had been shoved into the next one, and I didn’t know if they were alive or dead.