I try to force a smile. “Can I see where he slept?”
“I promise you, he didn’t leave anything. There won’t be any clues.”
“I’m not expecting any. It’s just that”—this sounds silly, but I don’t care—“it’s just that in Birkenau, we slept in crowded bunks with no mattresses. I would like to think of him sleeping someplace warm.”
“Of course.”
She leads me up a narrow set of stairs, wooden and squeaking, to the wing where children are already asleep. At the second room, she lowers her voice to a whisper. “This was my room at the time; now we’ve given the space to the children.”
She opens the door just wide enough for us to slip through, and I blink to adjust to the light. Four single beds line the walls. Plain, but the bedclothes look clean, and each has a spare blanket folded at the foot. It looks like a fine place to sleep. Warm and tidy. Why wouldn’t he stay and wait for me to find him? Or if he left, why wouldn’t he come home, as I told him?
In the dim shadows, I recognize the boy in the bed closest to the door. It’s the little one from supper, the one who had been sneaking extra food. He sleeps with his knees tucked to his chin and his arms wrapped around them.
Quietly, so as not to disturb the sleeping boy, Sister Therese lifts up a corner of his quilt and shows me the mattress below. It’s been sliced open, and inside, what at first look like rocks are actually lumps of bread.
“He’s afraid there won’t be more,” she whispers. “They’re always afraid there won’t be more.”
AS JOSEF AND I CLEAR THE TOWN AND DRIVE DOWN A DARK road through its outskirts, the wooden bench seat digs into my bony buttocks in a vicious way that it didn’t before; every rock sends a pain through my back and down my phantom toes.
“So do think it was him?” Josef says quietly after I’ve told him what happened. “The boy who came to the convent?”
“I don’t know.”
“It seems like good news, though.”
When I don’t respond, Josef turns to face me. “Good news, right? If it was him, you missed each other by only a few months. Or, do you not think it’s him?” He cranes his head to try to look at me. “Zofia?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say, unable to find the words to explain my complicated feelings.
Do I think it was him? He was a boy from Sosnowiec’s region who had been through Birkenau and was looking for his sister. Could there have been many boys like that?
But… I can’t picture Abek stealing money from people who needed it, people who had been kind to him.
I stole Dima’s money. I stole money from someone who had been kind to me, because it was the only way I could think of to find my brother. It’s the only circumstance in which I could imagine myself a thief. Was it the same for Abek? Is the theft actually the best sign that it was Abek?
I can’t figure out how to articulate everything in my head. How my hope is eaten by guilt that I wasn’t able to get there sooner. How hearing about someone who might have been Abek is not the same as finding Abek. How arriving a few months too late feels the same as never arriving at all.
The situation with my brother is not the kind of thing where there are compromises or half measures. Either it is Abek or it isn’t. Either I’ve brought him home or I haven’t.
“But if she saw someone who might be him a few months ago—you’re being ridiculous,” Josef insists, breaking my train of thought. “Do you have any idea how lucky some people would feel with that news?”
“I will feel lucky,” I blurt out, “when the person riding next to me in the wagon is my brother and not you.”
It was a rude thing to say, but I’m so exhausted and so confused. And most of all, I feel I’m owed a rude thing to say after the things Josef said earlier. When I see him wince at the insult, I almost apologize. But I don’t want to open up the conversation again, and I would rather him be hurt if it makes him stay quiet.
Neither of us say another word. He drives, and I sit like a statue; the road is