They Went Left - Monica Hesse Page 0,32

through watery eyes.

“For now, we’ll just talk about something else, though, yes?” She looks around the table for approval, and everyone nods. “I could, for example, tell you about my wedding.” The table groans; Breine’s joke has the intended effect of lightening the mood. “Or, we could play the happier game: What are you going to do when you leave here?” She turns to me. “Zofia, you’re newest. You start.”

“When I leave here,” I start slowly. “When I leave here, it will be with Abek, and we will go home to Sosnowiec.”

“Where I may or may not have distant cousins,” Breine supplies.

“Where will you all go?” I return the question. “Chaim and Breine, after your wedding, whose homeland will you return to?”

Breine glows as she looks at Chaim. “As soon as Britain loosens the immigration laws, we’re going to Eretz Israel. Most of us are, actually—most of us at the table.”

“Palestine?” I ask.

She fans her soil-filled fingernails in front of me. “That’s why we’re learning to farm. We want to be ready to farm our own land when we get there.”

Chaim affectionately brushes his knuckles under Breine’s chin. “She’s b-bad at it.”

“Excuse me. I had never even been on a farm until I came here.”

“I’m w-worse than she is.”

“That’s why we’re practicing now,” says one of Chaim’s roommates, the serious-looking man who introduced himself as Ravid. He clears his throat, quieting everyone down, and then turns to me, raising his glass. “I hope you find your brother soon. May we all find what we’re looking for soon. L’Chaim.”

L’Chaim.

The phrase hits me with such a sharp, unexpected pang it nearly takes my breath away.

We used to toast this way at weddings and birthdays, at happy events. One night in Gross-Rosen, a night when I couldn’t sleep from the gnawing in my stomach and the lice on my skin, one of my bunkmates, a woman I barely knew, threw her arms around me as I writhed in agony on the wooden pallet. “L’Chaim,” she whispered. “It’s my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary today.” Then she laughed bitterly.

“L’Chaim,” the table repeats now. Breine with her mouth full again, and Chaim with his shy blush, and Esther, serious and earnest.

We raise our glasses.

To life.

AFTER DINNER, INSTEAD OF WALKING BACK TO THE COTTAGE with Breine and Esther, I walk to the administration building to check the admission records Mrs. Yost has already told me will have no trace of Abek.

I try to expect nothing. I try to expect less than nothing, if it’s possible to expect that. I remind myself that Miriam’s twin sister was alive, and survived, and was still vanished without a trace, leaving Miriam alone to write endless letters.

The Missing Persons Liaison office, which I thought messy before, is now in complete disarray. Piles of papers teeter not only on Mrs. Yost’s desk but also on the floor—some handwritten, some typed with notes scribbled in the margins. She’s not alone, either. A man is sitting in the chair where I sat before. He’s slender with caterpillar eyebrows, holding some kind of heavy book.

I knock lightly on the doorframe but stay just outside the threshold. “I can come back later.”

“No, come in now,” she says, rising from her own seat and gesturing me into it. “This is Mr. Ohrmann. Mr. Ohrmann, this is Miss Zofia Lederman.”

“How do you do?”

“Mr. Ohrmann works with one of the organizations I mentioned earlier—the Missing Persons bureau in Munich,” Mrs. Yost continues. “He comes here once a week to go over open cases, and I also introduce new ones. Today I told him about yours.”

“Oh?”

“As you might expect, there are a lot of open cases,” she says. “A lot of leads that seem promising but don’t go anywhere at all.”

Mrs. Yost, so direct and frank when I spoke with her this afternoon, now seems as though she’s avoiding something. A nervous swell begins to grow in my stomach.

“Are you saying there is a lead?” I ask.

“Well,” she begins, looking slightly pained. Mr. Ohrmann clears his throat, signaling that he’ll take over.

“Frau Yost probably also told you there is no central system for locating missing persons; it’s not a scientific process. And with your case, we’ve found something that complicates the situation even further. A piece of… ambiguous information.”

My heart is already thudding. “I don’t understand. How can the information be ambiguous? Have you found my brother or not?”

He sighs. “I suppose it’s easiest to just walk you through it.”

He motions me closer to the desk and, as Mrs. Yost sweeps