says. “Hannelore might still believe her mother is coming to find her, but the W?lflins know better. Herr W?lflin told me; they’re writing letters, but they already assume she’s dead.”
“They assume, but they don’t know,” I say. “And that’s the worst of all. The worst possible thing.”
“The not knowing?”
My mind is spinning. “Suppose you could learn the answer to a mystery you wanted solved. But of all possible terrible answers you’d imagined, this one was even worse. Would you still want to know?”
“Zofia, I’m not following,” Josef says, confused but not impatient. “Hannelore’s mother, Inge, reminds you of another woman named Inge, and both of them left their daughters with families who don’t know what happened to them? What are you asking?”
What am I asking?
I am asking: If my options were never being able to find my brother, or knowing for sure that something terrible had happened to him, which would I choose? What’s the line between the amount of information that brings hope and the amount that brings despair?
Do you choose the comfort of fantasy? Or do you choose real pain?
No. That’s not what I’m asking. That’s not what I’ve ever been asking.
Since the moment I woke up in the hospital, since the moment the war ended and I began trying to piece my brain back together, I have really been asking only one question.
“Josef.” My voice is barely above a whisper. “What if my brother is dead?”
I’ve said it. The thing I’ve never allowed myself to say or allowed anyone else to say, either. That is the question I want answered.
I saw hundreds of people die. Shot. Hanged. Starved. Beaten. Broken.
I came here today chasing hope and coincidences. The boy in the records from Dachau whose name looked like Alek Federman. The boy who came to Sister Therese. What if none of the coincidences go anywhere because my brother is dead?
The reins twitch in Josef’s hand. I wait for him to assure me Abek is not dead. I wait for him to tell me again that I’ve received a promising lead from Sister Therese and that I should hold on to it.
Indulgent optimism is the gift that every person I’ve met has given me. Gosia. Dima. The nurses. They all told me that it could take a long time, but I shouldn’t give up hope. Or they patted my arm and found a way to avert their eyes. Or they wrote to Bergen-Belsen and didn’t tell me when they received a response. They all found any number of ways to deal with me. With my frailty, with my pain, with my stubborn hope.
Josef stares at me. His pebbly eyes have never looked so deep or so clear. “What if he is dead?” He drops the reins now and leans forward heavily, elbows on knees.
“What if he is, Zofia? Do you think you could find a way to live the rest of your life?”
I wait to be angry at him for saying this. I want rage to unfurl in my chest and form a protective shell around my heart.
Do I think I could live the rest of my life if Abek were dead?
But instead of hot anger, I feel a chilling sort of calm.
What if? What if that’s true? What if the thing I’ve been guarding against actually happened? And what if, instead of using all my soul worrying about it, I had to devote my soul to living with it?
Could I do that? Is there any way I could do that?
Lost in thought, I’m only vaguely aware that Josef isn’t looking at me anymore. He’s staring off toward the horizon, lost in something of his own.
“I have a sister who died,” Josef says quietly. “Before the war. A long time ago. She was ten, and she was sick first.”
He deflates a little when he says this. He deflates like a balloon, and the sentence comes out raw like he’s unpracticed at delivering it. “I know it’s not the same; it’s not the same kind of thing,” he continues. “But it means I know what grief can look like when it has a chance to get old. My family had a long time to figure out what life would look like without her. How to do it.”
“How did you do it?”
“Badly,” he says, grimacing. “It wrecked my parents. It turned them into different people. Klara held the family together in ways we didn’t realize at the time.”