The first time was at a birthday party when I was thirteen, when a boy named Lev and I were dared to go behind a dining room curtain. Lev and I spent the next two months occasionally sneaking off, him waiting for me after school with wilted bouquets of picked flowers. But this is different. It doesn’t feel like kissing Lev did, like a pantomime or a rehearsal for the real thing. I can feel this kiss rushing through my entire body.
“Oops!” The coatrack moves—a man searching for his hat—and we both jump apart. “Oops!” the man exclaims again, cheerfully drunk. “Everyone is having fun tonight!”
The drunk man paws through the rack, giving me enough time to sober up and think about what I’m doing. Now is when I should suggest going back to the dance floor or getting a drink of water. Josef is looking at me, waiting for me to suggest that; he knows it’s what should happen, too.
“Do you want to leave?” I ask instead. “Find another room where it’s not so loud?”
He hesitates only a second. “Yes.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Where do you want to go, Zofia?”
“Let’s go to your cottage.”
This sentence carries a lot of things. I could have said, Let’s go see the new library room in the administration building. I could have even said, Let’s go to my cottage, where Abek will return at some point tonight, and Esther, too, shoes in her hand, tipsy from wine. But I know that Josef shares a room only with Chaim and that this afternoon Chaim did what Breine did: moved her belongings into a marital room they’ll live in together. Josef’s room will be empty all night.
I scan the dining hall. Esther and Abek have given up on dancing. But someone has produced a deck of playing cards, and they’re sitting back at the table with Ravid and a few others. I catch Esther’s eye and nod toward Abek. She nods back. He’s fine; everything’s fine. I’ll keep an eye on him for a while.
I hesitate again, just in case, paralyzed for a moment at the idea of letting my brother out of my sight. But Abek is laughing; he seems to be having fun.
Outside the dining hall, Josef and I are suddenly shy, walking side by side like strangers. Josef apologizes for bumping against my hip, and I say nonsensical things about the stars. I say, “The stars are really bright tonight,” even though they look like they do all the time. When we walk into Josef’s cottage—when we pass Ravid’s room in the front and go into Josef’s in the back, and when I see the neat hospital corners on his bed—I’m suddenly even more aware of what I’ve done.
“That’s Chaim’s bed,” he says unnecessarily, pointing to the mattress stripped of sheets. “I can sit there, or I can go find a chair if you’d be more comfortable.”
“No.”
“Should I offer you some water?”
“No.”
“I haven’t been inside a girls’ cottage. Do they look—”
I cut him off before he can say more, putting my arms around his waist, crushing my lips against his. We’re kissing again, only now we’re breathing harder; I can feel his body start to respond to mine, feel the way my hands start out trembling but grow more certain, and then more certain than they’ve ever been about anything. I slide my hands under his shirt and then up against the bare skin of his chest, where his heart crashes against my palm. He gasps against my lips and then reaches for the buttons on my dress, lingering at the top one, near the nape of my neck.
“Can I—”
“Yes,” I say, but then I have to do it myself when he can’t work the button out of its hole. When I’m finished, he gently pulls my chin up using the tips of his fingers, and then he touches his tongue to the now-bare hollow of my neck.
My whole body shudders as he manages the next button on his own, and then the button after that.
I forgot that pleasure could feel this strong. After years of feeling nothing but perpetual, insistent pain, my body had begun to feel like an instrument of it. Like it was built to withstand things rather than experience them. And then when the war was over, when I was safely in the hospital, what I mostly felt was numbness, a protective anesthetization against my own feelings. I forgot that I could want something because I wanted