to get to Abek. Unless you want to stop,” I add hastily. This is the longest period we’ve ever spent together, the first time he’s seen me off the hospital grounds. But if he thinks it’s strange, he hasn’t let it show.
“No, we can drive. I want to take you there, safe. Do you need anything else? Water? Walk your legs?”
“Stretch your legs,” I correct him.
“Stretch?”
“That’s what you say. It’s an idiom. A saying, I mean.”
“You need to stretch your legs?” He’s pleased with the new phrase; he reaches over and pats my knee. Lucky, the other nothing-girls had said. Be sweet to him.
I don’t know if Dima’s posting to Sosnowiec was chance. He might have requested it. I didn’t want to ask; I thought it was best not to clarify our terms.
“No, I—could we just keep driving?” I ask. “That’s what I’d like best. Maybe you could tell me a story. Or I could try to rest again.”
His eyes immediately fill with concern. “Yes. You should rest. You rest, and I’ll take us home.”
I didn’t even mean for my eyes to close; I was looking for quiet, not sleep. But they must have closed, because suddenly I feel the car jolt to a stop.
“Zofia.” Dima’s hand is on my shoulder, gently waking me.
My eyes fly open, get my bearings. The ground is flatter. The sun is in the middle of the sky; hours have passed. Dima smiles broadly, gesturing through the windshield.
At first, I can’t tell what he wants me to see, and then I can’t believe what I’m seeing. A wooden sign with painstaking calligraphy.
“Already?” I gasp.
“I told you, this car is good. This car is fast.”
SOSNOWITZ, the sign says. The Germans had come into Sosnowiec and given it a German name.
I hadn’t meant that the car is fast, though. I meant, How can we be here? How can I be back home already? It was easier to imagine the evil things happened far away. On a different continent. But Birkenau, the first camp, was barely twenty-five kilometers from my town.
“This is it, yes?” Dima asks. He’s pulled the jeep to a stop and peers at me curiously. I’m not having the reaction he thought I would.
“This is it.”
“Tell me where I should go now?”
I swallow, get my bearings. “Home. Abek.”
“Which way?”
We’re on the edge of Sosnowiec now. Small farms, small plots of land. As we get closer to the city, the houses will cluster and turn into three- and four-story apartment buildings. In the distance, I can make out the factory district; if we were closer, I’d be able to see the soot that the factories create, hovering in the air above the power lines for the trams. Wide, paved plazas. Electric streetlights, lunch cafes filled with rushed workers.
“Zofia?”
I gather my thoughts. There are two addresses I could direct Dima to. The first is in the ?rodula neighborhood on the outskirts of town, the Jewish ghetto my entire family was forced into when I was thirteen. Trash in the streets. Crumbling walls, vacant lots. Six of us crowded into one room.
The second address is my home, my real one, which belonged to Baba Rose, where my mother was raised and my father moved after they married. Closer to the center of the city.
“Turn right,” I decide. Our real home. That was the plan, for Abek and me to meet there. That’s what I’d told him. Repeat the address, Abek. Remember the birch trees outside? What if he’s been waiting there alone for me? I tried to get better sooner, Abek. I tried.
Dima turns, and the gravel road becomes a paved one. We pass a few men in simple work clothes, and then we pass more men, but they’re in business suits and hats. Dima raises a hand in greeting; one waves back, cautiously, and the others don’t acknowledge our presence at all.
“What’s this?” Dima points through the windshield at a large expanse of green in the middle of buildings.
“Sielecki Park. Sometimes we would go here on school trips.”
“Ah!” A few minutes later, he stretches out his hand again, pointing at something else. “And this?”
He’s so excited to see this town, as if he himself were on a school trip, as if we were on holiday together. At the hospital, they tried to prepare us that it might be strange to return home, but I didn’t expect what I’m feeling now. My twisting insides, the shallow, metal taste in my mouth.