woman, broom held aloft in self-defense. She startles when she sees me, looking over my shoulder to check whether I’m alone.
“Pani Wójcik?” I say, making sure to use the right honorific for my neighbor. Her face is lined in ways it wasn’t when I last saw her; her hair has turned gray. “Pani Wójcik, it’s Zofia. Zofia Lederman.”
Her eyes flicker; she doesn’t put down the broom, but she lowers it a fraction. “Zofia?”
I step closer. I knew Mrs. Wójcik the least well of the other three on our floor, but I am nearly moved to tears at the sight of her now. She’s from Before. The only evidence I have yet that parts of my life from then can still exist now. “Yes. It’s me. Who did you think it might be?”
“Squatters,” she mumbles.
“Squatters? Is that who’s been here?”
“A friendly German couple lived here for a while, but…”
“They’re gone now,” I infer.
“Just before everything ended. Since then, just vagrants. I’ve had to chase them off. They make the building unsafe.” She looks at me as if she thinks I’ll explain these vagrants and then sighs a little when I can’t. “Anyway, you’re back.”
“I’m back,” I say unnecessarily.
She lets the broom drop to her side and scans the rest of the apartment, the scattered furniture and broken chairs. “There’s not a lot left in here, is there?”
“I guess the squatters must have taken things.”
She shrugs. “Or burned them. It got cold.”
“Oh,” I say as we stare at each other. I don’t know how to talk to my neighbors anymore. Are your poppies still growing well? Are your dogs still alive? The last clear memory I have of Mrs. Wójcik, she was walking them on the street as a soldier had just asked for my papers. He’d asked the man next to me, too, and the man was hoisted away by the armpits. Did you see many more people taken away, Pani Wójcik? How was the rest of your war?
Mrs. Wójcik doesn’t know what else to say, either. After a few minutes, she puts her hand on the doorknob and raises her eyebrows, a sheepish goodbye.
“Wait,” I say. When she turns back toward me, the movement is tired. “Pani Wójcik, am I the first person to be here? The vagrants, I know, but am I the first person from my family?”
I can’t make myself say Abek’s name, and I don’t want to explain why the rest of my family won’t come looking.
She shakes her head, a definitive little jerk. “Just you. And I barely even recognized you.”
“You’re certain? Not my brother?”
“I haven’t seen anyone else from your family. Frankly, I didn’t think any of you would be back.”
She pauses again, hand twisting the knob but still not walking through the doorway, as if trying to think of what else to say. “We don’t have a trash collector anymore” is what finally comes out. “If you have something to throw away, you have to carry it down yourself and burn it in the street. If you don’t burn it, the animals get to it.”
“Thank you.”
I manage to find the manners to see Mrs. Wójcik out the door, and I lock it once she’s through so nobody else can barge in.
I need to reset myself again, stop my brain from circling. The walls are buzzing with the memories of vagrants, who came in and burned my family’s things for firewood because it was cold, because they had no place to live, because they were vagrants. So they burned my family’s things, and so the walls are buzzing.
No. Stop it.
I go back to my room, stand in the doorway. I was doing something before Mrs. Wójcik came. What was I doing? Mrs. Wójcik came in, and I was—the box in the corner of the closet.
It’s a hope chest. Polished maple, a flower carved on the lid. Aunt Maja’s? I have the faintest memory of something like this tucked under her bed, filled with linens and handkerchiefs, her initials already stitched onto all the fabric next to blanks meant for her future husband’s. The latch is rusty and takes careful jostling. But eventually the lid comes off, and I gasp.
Inside is what remains of my life.
When my family was forced out of this apartment and into the ghetto, we were allowed to take only what we could carry. Only clothes that were practical, only enough dishes to eat out of. And photographs. Photographs were precious enough that we took them, slipped out of their frames and