“It was an iron cross.” A tall, auburn-haired woman comes through the door, sits on the bed that goes with the magazines, and begins to unlace her shoes. They’re heavy work boots, awkward-looking on her delicate calves. Her dress is a bleached, worn pink.
“Oh,” I say. “Did you—”
“They were in all the cottages. The UN tried to remove them for us before we got here, but they missed some of the ones in the back bedrooms. I took that one off the wall myself, and some boys threw a pile of them in a bonfire.”
“Are you Breine or Esther?”
She looks up from her laces. “Breine. Yes, I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to be rude. And you’ll also forgive me for not shaking your hand.” She lifts her own hands to show me her palms, calloused and covered in dirt. She was one of the girls I saw outside, planting the garden. Her face is red from sunburn, the skin peeling on her nose.
I point to my own chest. “Zofia. I was assigned to stay in this cottage. Mrs. Yost probably told you I was here.”
“I haven’t seen her since I got back, actually. But I passed Josef on my way in; he said that we had a new roommate and that I was supposed to show you around. So, I’m Breine; Esther sleeps in this other bed, and the front room is two Dutch girls, Miriam and Judith. They’re both nice; Judith speaks German better than Miriam.”
The way she says Josef’s name makes it sound as though they’re friends, or at least that she knows something about him. I want to ask her more, but I don’t want to be nosy or obvious.
“You’re planting a garden?” I ask instead.
She nods, tugging off her boots and wincing as she takes one foot into her hands, kneading the arch and wiggling her toes. “Some of us. Our own little experiment. Cabbage, carrots, potatoes, onions. If it all grows. I’ve never done anything like this before, but some of the others have.”
“That will be nice.”
“Better to not have to rely on rationing. We don’t have any fruit, or eggs, or butter, or anything fresh here, really. So we’re planting. Maybe there will be beets by my wedding.”
“You’re engaged? Best wishes.”
Breine’s face turns a satisfied pink; she was hoping I would ask after that. “I’ll show you my ring; I show everyone my ring. They’re all sick of it now.” Turning her attention from her aching feet, she unfastens the top button of her dress where a tiny satchel hangs around her neck, attached to a leather thong. She shakes the contents into her palm: a gold ring, wound with string several times the way one would to make a larger piece of jewelry fit on a smaller finger.
“It was Chaim’s mother’s,” she explains. “He managed to save it.”
She hands it to me, and I can see I’m meant to admire it. “It’s beautiful,” I say, turning it over in my hand. “I hope you have a beautiful wedding.”
“You’ll be there—the whole camp will come to the ceremony.”
“It will be here?”
“Next month, I think. We were going to have it immediately, but last Thursday I heard from an uncle I didn’t know had survived. He’s the only family we have. We’re waiting for him to travel here, and then we’ll have the wedding.” I hand back the ring, and Breine tucks it back into the purse.
“Should we have dinner?” She goes to the table in the corner of the room and begins to scrub her face and neck using water from the pitcher. “Esther and I usually go at five thirty—she should be back from her classes soon—and we meet Chaim and his roommates, except for Josef, who—oh, you already met Josef.”
I pretend to straighten my belongings in my drawer, though I did that before Breine came in, and try to keep my voice nonchalant. “Why doesn’t Josef eat with you?”
She shrugs, running a brush through her hair. “He prefers to eat alone. Chaim says he’s a perfectly fine roommate. He just keeps to himself, mostly.”
“He got in a fight. Just before he escorted me here.”
I look for surprise in her face, but instead, she just sighs. “Josef does that.”
“Josef gets in fights? Why?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think he’s all—I don’t know his whole story, and like I said, Chaim says he’s a perfectly fine roommate. But some of us aren’t all there. The war ended, and some of us are here,