I know—of course I know—and I feel a moment of wonder that Breine doesn’t immediately realize that I’m also in this category, of those who are here and not all there. But she doesn’t wait for me to answer, turning away from me and relacing her boots.
“Let’s go eat,” she says when she’s finished. “I’m famished; are you?”
I’m not. The bone-weariness I felt earlier has returned; I want to lie on this soft bed under this clean quilt. Breine’s friendliness is kind but also overwhelming.
But I haven’t eaten anything for most of the day, so I let Breine lead me back to the dining hall, where she introduces me to Esther, a small, spectacled woman reading a book as she waits in line. She’s less chatty than Breine, but no less kind, smiling at me shyly and asking where I’m from.
“Sosnowiec?” Breine exclaims when I give the name of my hometown. “I had cousins in Sosnowiec. Distant ones. Did you know any Abramskis? Or maybe, never mind. I think the Abramskis lived in Sochaczew.”
“Breine,” Esther sighs. “You walked her all the way here. Didn’t you ask her before this where she was from?”
“I did,” she insists. “I thought I did.” I shake my head. “I didn’t?”
“Did you ask her any questions, or did you just talk?” Esther asks.
“I talked,” Breine says. “I fully admit it; I just talked.”
“Breine.” Esther shakes her head, but there’s love in the gesture: she as the sensible nanny and Breine as her flighty charge.
The cafeteria is the building I’d seen before, long and low. We line up for mushy meats and vegetables from cans: C rations, Breine explains, provided by the occupying American soldiers.
After our plates are filled, she and Esther lead us to a round table in the corner where Breine’s fiancé is saving seats. Chaim, a thin, light-haired man with a stutter in his consonants and a Hungarian accent in his German, introduces me to his housemates, whose names I almost immediately forget.
There must be hundreds of people in here. Breine said she and Esther liked to go early to avoid the crowds, but a long line still snakes almost to the door. I wonder if everyone comes early; I wonder if all of us still fear the food running out.
I follow my eyes to the end of the line, where the last person waiting is Josef. Hair still wild. Trousers still skimming over his lean hip bones. Hand running over his jawline, where he must have been injured in the fight.
It’s peculiar: I assume Josef is at the end of the line because he’s just arrived, but as I stare at him longer, I see that he’s not moving forward. Every time a new person walks through the door, Josef gestures them ahead so he’s always the last one in line.
Eventually, when nobody else comes through the door, Josef gets his own plate and takes it, as Breine predicted, not to us but to an unoccupied table. He eats quickly, shoulders hunched over his plate, eyes down.
Whatever familiar thing I thought I saw in him has disappeared. He’s just a boy now. But I’m trying to square the excessively polite boy keeping himself to the back of the line with the one I saw earlier, viciously punching another man’s throat. I would wonder if I’d imagined it, but he’s wearing the same shirt, rust-colored bloodstain on the hem.
Breine notices me watching all this and nudges Chaim. “Zofia says Josef got in a fight.”
“He d-did. B-but it was with Rudolf.”
The rest of the table groans; this information means something to them it doesn’t to me.
“Who is Rudolf?” I ask.
Breine squeezes Chaim’s arm. “Tell her,” she encourages.
“Y-you can.”
“I like your voice better.”
Chaim shakes his head, but he’s smiling. I see him reach for Breine’s hand under the table. She waits another beat to be sure Chaim isn’t going to speak. “All right. Nobody cares if Josef got in a fight with Rudolf, because he’s a collaborator. He volunteered his house to the Gestapo. They kept him fat the whole war. He’s only here now because his street was bombed when the Allies came. Honestly, that’s the thing about Josef’s fights. You know they’re terrible. But then you find out whom they were with, and you wish you’d done it first.”
I’m confused. “The Germans let Rudolf stay in his house? They didn’t just take it over? Did he bribe them?”