they run in our blood, all our lapses and blank spots traveling through our veins? Are we both sick; are we both broken?
My own memory has holes in it. Why should his be perfect?
“Zofia, Buchenwald is a horrible place,” Josef says.
“We were all in horrible places.”
“I know,” Josef says. “But Buchenwald—I’ve heard there was a patch of woods called the ‘singing forest.’ It was called that because they would torture men there. Tie prisoners’ hands behind their backs and then hang them from their wrists and leave them there. From the camp, you could hear the men screaming. The singing forest.”
My stomach turns. Is this what my brother had to witness? Were these the sounds accompanying him to sleep every night? The sounds of tortured men begging to die?
Suddenly I’m ashamed. I’ve just spent this conversation worrying over whether Abek remembered the right things from before the war, and I’ve been ignoring everything that could have happened during it. Everything that could have torn him apart.
“I think you’re right,” I say slowly. “Thank you.”
“Is there anything else you wanted to talk about?”
“No,” I say. “I want to go find Abek again. I’ll leave you to your work, and maybe see you later?”
“Wait. I was wondering something, too.” Josef has stopped what he’s doing. His hands lie loosely by his sides, and I notice he’s turning pink around the collar.
“Oh?”
“I was wondering… if I could eat dinner with you tomorrow. If you’d rather I didn’t, that’s fine, of course, but if there was room, I wondered if I could eat dinner with you.”
His shyness feels backward, just as everything about my interactions with Josef have felt backward, and for a brief second, I think about saying no—I don’t want to risk disrupting what we have. But then, what I have is always changing, anyway. What more is there to disrupt?
“We meet at five thirty,” I tell him. “And none of us will wait for you if you’re late.”
Abek isn’t back in the cottage. I find him instead in the courtyard, just behind the administration building. In the twilight, he’s watching a group of men play a soccer game, knees curled up to his chest, chin resting on top of them. I sidle up slowly, prepared to open my mouth and apologize, but he speaks first.
“Dobrotek.” Abek still isn’t looking at me; he must have spotted me out of the corner of his eyes. This word comes out of his mouth like a begrudging bark.
“What?”
Now he turns to look at me. “In the story you used to tell me. The one with Princess Ladna. His name was Prince Dobrotek.”
It still takes me a moment to place what he’s talking about: the conversation from his first night here, when he told me about staying with an old woman named Ladna, and when I reminded him that Ladna was also the name from a fairy tale we used to tell.
“That’s right,” I say. “The king told the prince that if he couldn’t find his kidnapped daughter, he would be put to death.”
“But Prince Dobrotek did find her,” Abek adds. “And they inherited the kingdom and lived happily ever after. I remembered it.”
He raises his eyebrows, as if to say, Are you happy now?
And I am happy. I’m relieved in a way that doesn’t even fully make sense. Problem solved, my brain tells itself. Calm down; you are worried about nothing.
“Abek, I’m sorry.” I carefully slide onto the bench with him but make sure to leave space, several inches, so he doesn’t feel crowded. “I really am trying. I’m sorry if it feels like I’m trying to force something. It’s just that I wanted to find you for a really long time. But in my mind, you were always exactly who you were before. And I should have realized you would be different. Because I’m different, too.”
He fiddles with the hem of his pants. Twenty meters away, I hear the thud of a soccer ball, the cheer of a team scoring a goal. “I know you wish we could go back to how we were before,” he says. “I know it’s disappointing.”
“No.” I start to reach for his arm and then think better of it. “I mean, of course I do. I want the world to go back to where it was before. But not because of you. I’m so happy you’re here. Are you? Aren’t you happy you came here?”
He pauses long enough that I don’t know what will come out of his mouth.