And, while dining tables are moved and rearranged around me, and mismatched tablecloths are produced and smoothed over them, I spread Breine’s half-finished garment on the same table I worked at before. The same pins by my side, the same thread, only now instead of Josef, I have Abek beside me.
“Come and help,” I instruct him, nodding to the seat beside me.
We’re formal, at first. Being around my brother—my brother—in the daylight hours is different, even, from knowing he’s sleeping on a mat near my bed in the dark. So we’re behaving around each other in the polite, distant way we used to behave if company was coming. When I ask him to pass me scraps of material or buttons or thread, I make sure to add a careful please and then a careful thank you at the end. And he makes sure to say, “You’re welcome,” just as effusively. After fifteen or twenty of these exchanges, it starts to feel absurd. Before we were separated, I would have just nodded toward something and grunted; he would have passed it to me while barely looking up from his toy cars.
“Are you bored?” I ask him, finally. “They may be done with the new library. You could go see if it’s open yet and if there’s anything interesting to bring back and read.” I’ve chosen this phrasing carefully; I don’t want to suggest something that would take him away for very long. “Have you had a chance to read much? Do you even like to read?”
“I don’t mind staying,” Abek says, and hands me another pin. “I like to read some. In one of my camps, there was a book. Someone had smuggled it in. A translation of Charles Dickens. I was trying to read it. But I don’t need to get any books right now.”
Charles Dickens. It’s nearly impossible for me to square this idea, of my brother being old enough to read complicated novels by himself. He went through so much without me. There’s so much of him now that is without me.
I finish the stitching around Breine’s collar and turn my attention to the hemline, pointing to a wrinkle in the silk. Abek grabs the fabric where I’m pointing, pulling it flat against the table.
“Now that I know where you’ve actually been,” I say, only a little shyly, “I’ll have to revise my imagination. I never pictured you on a farm, for example. And I’m realizing how many times my mind must have played tricks on me, putting you in places where you couldn’t have been.”
“What do you mean? What kinds of places?” He obligingly holds the fabric where I point next. I take my time answering his question because I want to do it in a way that doesn’t scare him or make him worry.
“I—I wasn’t well. For a lot of the war. My mind wasn’t working. I kept getting more confused. There are a lot of holes I filled in or other things I was afraid I made up. But I thought I saw you all these times.” I force a small laugh. Now that Abek is safely in front of me, it seems simpler to act like I had merely been confused, occasionally vague like a dotty aunt, and not like I’d been very ill.
“One time, I thought I saw you through the window in Neustadt,” I tell him. “Another time, I thought I saw you in line for soup in Gross-Rosen and then again walking into the men’s barracks. In Birkenau, I thought I saw you while I was working in a garden. I buried a turnip for you, but when you didn’t get it, I realized that either you couldn’t get to it or I hadn’t seen you. I was so disappointed. It was really hard for me to organize a whole turnip.”
Abek has been watching me closely as I tell this story. I worry he’ll be afraid of me or worried about me, but he seems reassured, actually, to know how much he was on my mind.
And now, when I get to the part about the turnip, he starts to shake his head. “No. No, I did find it,” he says. “The turnip.”
“You did?”
“Remember?” he says excitedly. “You buried the turnip in the ground, and you stood a stick in the ground so I would know where to dig for it.”
“I did?” I don’t remember the stick, but it sounds like a reasonable detail. How