standing in the group, too. Hidden behind Chaim; I don’t see him until I’m nearly there. He and the young woman next to him are playing some kind of word game on a scrap of paper, passing it back and forth between them. He looks up and sees me, and his face breaks into a smile.
Ruffle his hair, a voice inside me instructs, so I do. I tousle his hair and say, “Do you even know how to comb it anymore?” because that seems like the kind of sisterly thing I would say to Abek.
He laughs and turns back at his game.
Is this my brother or isn’t it? When he first arrived, showing up at this very spot, I’d noticed things about him that looked different. He was taller, but of course he was taller. His hair was darker, but of course it was darker.
But could I take that same information and use it to reach different conclusions?
For the hundredth time, I wish I had a photograph. Something I could analyze to make comparisons. A photograph, or the cuts of hair my mother kept from our first hair trims, tied with ribbon and tucked in her wardrobe. I wish I had my mother here, who could talk about this with me, who could surely look at this boy and say for certain whether he was her son.
There’s nothing, though. Everything was taken away from us, and so there’s nothing left to compare the present with the past. Nothing that can help me measure how crazy I am. Is it crazier to believe someone is your brother who really isn’t, or to find a person you’ve been trying to find for years, only to convince yourself they’re not the right person after all? To throw away your chance at happiness?
The dining hall doors open. A mundane sigh of relief rises from the crowd. So hungry, people murmur. Hope the cabbage is better today. I walk in with everyone else, line up in front of the giant vats, accept the food ladled onto my plate, sit down at the place at the table that has somehow become mine. Put my napkin on my lap.
I didn’t even think to arrange it so I could sit next to Josef. He’s kitty-corner from me, still eyeing me, certain now something’s wrong but not sure what it is.
If this boy isn’t Abek, what could he possibly want? Money? I don’t have any. If he’s hoping I’ll take him back to a house filled with nice furniture and comfortable rugs, he’s about five years too late.
What else could he want? Passage somewhere? A first-class ticket somewhere? I don’t have that, either. I have Breine’s offer of a rickety boat, but I didn’t even have that when Abek first arrived.
Does he just want to torment me? Because that’s the only explanation I can imagine right now. He’s a con artist who takes pleasure in seeing a gullible, crazy girl parade him around, stupidly happy to have found him.
“How was your day, Zofia?” Esther, to my right, asks pleasantly as she passes me a water glass.
“I went to the library.” I eye Abek to see if he has any reaction to this. But his focus is on his plate, slicing the potato in front of him.
“I was going to go there later,” a boy at the other end of the table offers. “I was going to see if they had an—”
“I went to the library and I found a book of Polish fairy tales,” I continue loudly.
“Oh, really? That sounds—”
“The book had lots of ones my family used to tell when we were little,” I say even louder.
Around me, the previously cheery conversation settles into an awkward quiet as people exchange glances, wondering if something’s wrong with me.
Beside me, Esther also looks concerned but responds carefully. “That’s nice,” she says. “Do you want to tell us about them? I wonder if there are any stories all of us would recognize.”
“The book looked like someone else had been reading it,” I continue, plowing over Esther’s attempt to guide my unhingedness. “It was sitting there, open, like someone else had just been reading it before me.”
“Well. That is the way libraries work,” Breine says. She’s laughing, but now she has to work harder to make the laughter sound like a joke and not a bundle of nerves. “Unless the ones where you’re from are a lot different from mine. Right?”
She addresses the question to the whole table, and almost everyone takes