new person here, sleeping in a new bed, trying to figure out what to do next. We all have. And we’ve all been helped by the people who came before us. It can be strange to be here, and it’s good to have something to—”
“Oh, just come out with us,” Breine breaks in. “If you don’t want to get muddy with me, go to Esther’s stenography class. One hundred and sixty words a minute!”
Esther gives her a look; the bluntness of Breine’s invitation is not how Esther was trying to communicate. But then she turns back to me. “I could help you catch up on what you’ve missed.”
“I already have something to keep busy,” I say. “Thanks for your concern, but I already have something to do.”
Breine looks as though she wants to say something else but doesn’t.
They have so much energy, Breine and Esther, in constant motion in our small bedroom. It’s early yet, not even fully light, but I hear the noises of a morning routine happening on the other side of the door, too, from Judith and Miriam, who must have been up like me, writing her letters.
I feel a hundred years older than all of them. The four of them are nothing like we nothing-girls, with the vacant, tired way we moved and sat and talked.
But then again, we were still in the hospital three months after the war ended. We, who had trouble keeping track of the days, who sometimes needed gentle reminders not to wander in the hallways with our blouses half-buttoned, who laughed and cried at inappropriate times.
Bissel, the woman with the gashed, angry holes in her legs, the one from Ravensbrück, swore she would one day go to her daughter living on a farm. She sat on the windowsill one morning and laughed and laughed, and then suddenly she hurled herself outside, and we heard screams from passersby when her body hit the pavement.
But last night at dinner, I learned Breine was at Ravensbrück, too. And Esther was made to disassemble batteries with her bare hands in a camp somewhere in Austria. How have some of us healed so much faster than others? How are some of us better?
Esther finishes brushing Breine’s hair and separates it into three plaits. I worry I’ve offended them by declining to go along to any of their training programs.
“Have you taken the stenography class?” I ask Breine, trying to find my manners. “The one Esther’s doing?”
She laughs. “I’m going to be a lovely, docile farmwife. I am going to grow onions and make cakes and ask Chaim to impregnate me immediately. I won’t have use for stenography.”
Esther smiles indulgently, twisting Breine’s hair into a braid. “Does Chaim know these plans?”
“This is the benefit of marrying someone who’s known you for only five weeks. I’ll make Chaim docile and content, too, before he has a chance to know these plans.”
“Five weeks?” I blurt out.
Breine cranes her head to face me, while Esther pivots around to finish the braid. “Five weeks tomorrow.”
I try to keep the shock off my face. I’d assumed Breine and Chaim had met as teenagers, and then somehow found each other after the war. Or even that they met in a camp. There was love in the camps. It seems impossible, but I saw it; I saw love poems composed in lice-filled barracks.
Five weeks is nothing. Five weeks ago, I was still in the hospital.
“We met here,” she continues. “Plowing a field. Isn’t that romantic?”
“But—I don’t mean to make judgments—but you barely know each other.”
I’m afraid Breine will be angry with me for puncturing her happiness, but instead she leans forward in her chair, stretching out a hand until I take it. “Chaim and I have known each other for five weeks. I knew my last fiancé, Wolf, for two years. We didn’t have a wedding because we wanted to wait until the war was over, and every day I think about how I’d change that if I could. So now I’ll have a wedding, and it will be with Chaim and not with Wolf. And I’m certain a part of Chaim wishes his wedding would be with the girl he loved in Hungary before me, who died and whose picture he keeps that he thinks I don’t know about.”
I start to apologize, but she cuts me off with a shake of her head. “Today I am choosing to love the person in front of me. Do you understand? Because he’s here, I’m here,