else would I have expected him to find what I’d buried?
“I didn’t have anything to leave in return, so I used the stick to draw my initial so you’d know I found it.”
I close my eyes, trying to sort through my confusion. I understand the story he’s telling, but it’s hard for me to remember it myself. It’s like Abek’s version is a loose scrap of cloth, but if I can sew it into a quilt, then it will stop being a story and start being one of my memories.
The last time I saw Abek, I practice telling myself. The last time I saw Abek, he was eating a turnip that I managed to get for him. He was leaving me a drawing he’d made in the dirt.
“Was it raining that day?” I ask him.
“I think so.”
The last time I saw Abek, it was raining. I didn’t speak to him, but I came back to the spot where I had buried a turnip. On the ground there was an A. I looked at the dirt drawing until the rain rinsed it away.
Sitting here at the table in Foehrenwald, a cautious little voice inside me is asking, Is that really how it happened?
I’m so used to that voice, so used to mistrusting myself. It will take me a while to figure out what I can believe now.
“I’m almost finished,” I tell him, nodding at Breine’s dress. “You can go and wash up.”
“You don’t need my help to finish? I don’t have to wash up.”
“We’re going to a wedding tonight. You actually do need to. And stop by the donation boxes, and see if you can find a clean new shirt.” I will myself to be okay with the fact that he’s going to leave now and that I won’t see him for an hour. “But come right back to the cottage when you’re done, all right? Right back, and wait outside for me. We can keep talking later. We have plenty of time now.”
After I finish my work, I take the dress to the communal laundry building and spread it out over the ironing board. In my family’s factory, the irons were electric. They plugged in; their temperatures could be controlled by tuning a dial. Here, they’re a heavy, cast metal, and heated over hot coals. I’ve barely ever used this kind before; it would be easy to heat them too high and leave scorch marks on the dress. I wonder, at first, whether it’s better to leave Breine’s dress unironed.
But it’s her wedding. It’s her wedding and my handiwork, and I can’t let her get married in wrinkles. I pluck a still-damp bath towel off the laundry line stretched across the room and lay it across the dress to make a barrier between the hot iron and the fragile silk.
PRESSING THE DRESS WITH THE OLD-FASHIONED IRON TAKES longer than I expected, but when I race back across the camp, out of breath and worried Breine will be upset with my lateness, I find that I’ve beaten her home. She rushes in a few minutes later, skin still pink from a bath, fingers still pruned, laughing and apologetic.
The wedding is scheduled to start at dusk because Breine and Chaim wanted to work a full day before the ceremony. Esther had told her that was crazy, that there was no need for Breine to weed plots of land on her wedding day, but Breine insisted. Her relationship with Chaim was about building new things, she said. What better way to build something new than to tend to tender sprigs?
Esther arrives shortly after Breine, hands spilling with silver-colored tubes and compacts. Makeup—she must have gone around the camp and borrowed everything she could.
“I don’t need all that!” Breine protests. “Chaim wouldn’t even recognize me. He might not even recognize me as is, without dirt under my fingernails.”
“Breine,” Esther protests.
“Esther.”
While they debate the rouge and lipstick, I unwrap the dress from the bath towel and lay it on Breine’s bed, holding my breath. There hasn’t been time for Breine to see my work, much less time for her to try the dress on. Now, she breaks off in the middle of a sentence. She looks over to me, and her mouth drops.
“Oh, Zofia.”
“Do you like it?”
“Do I—I can hardly believe it’s the same dress. I can’t believe it. It’s marvelous. It’s completely, completely—” She turns back to Esther. “Maybe a little lipstick.”