“Then she wanted to get you false papers. She wanted you to go into hiding with your school friends. But I dismissed that idea, too. I was so sure we were best off staying together.”
“I wouldn’t have gone anyway, Samuel. The only blessing in our current situation is that we are together.” We were still scurrying along the streets, both studiously avoiding eye contact. “I don’t blame you for any of this,” I said unevenly. “I could never blame you.”
“You could have escaped, Roman. You don’t deserve to be here.”
“No one deserves to be here!” I exclaimed, stopping abruptly as my hands curled into fists. Samuel turned back to me, first to look around in alarm that I might have drawn attention to us, and then to give me a pained, miserable frown.
“I just meant...” Samuel, so wise and calm and hardly ever lost for words, trailed off. He raised his hands in defeat, then shrugged sadly. “I just meant to say that you could have avoided all of this. You could have hidden in plain sight outside of these walls.”
For once, the ghetto seemed silent all around us. I stared at him, desperately trying to figure out both how to end the conversation and how to resolve it. I hated talking about this, almost as much as I hated that Samuel had been suffering from this incorrect assumption.
“It breaks my heart that you think I...” I drew in a sharp breath, then, almost squirming with awkwardness, I said, low and fast, “I love you. I do hate, but it’s not directed at you. Never at you.”
“You are my first son, Roman. You are the boy who taught me how to be a father. I love you, too.”
My eyes were stinging with unshed tears. We were late, and we needed to run, but after a moment I’d been squirming through and desperate to end, I found a moment I was desperate to linger in. I wished I had the words to express so much to Samuel—how much he meant to me, how grateful I was to him—but my throat felt tight, and I knew that if I tried to say those things, I’d wind up weeping. Instead, I kept my gaze fixed on the pavement ahead of us as I admitted hoarsely, “I don’t know how to keep going sometimes. This is all too much. I worry that I’m not strong enough.”
“We just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other, son. When everything else has been taken from us, all we have left is each other, so we remain true to ourselves and look after one another.” He cleared his throat. “What else is there to do? The bitterness would kill us, otherwise.”
Bitterness. I tasted it on my tongue even as he said the word. That captured the toxic feelings in my gut perfectly, but the worst thing was Samuel was more correct than he knew.
The bitterness was killing me, and every day the poison became more potent.
* * *
My mother met Florian Abramczyk in a park on a hot summer’s day when she was nineteen, and the way she told the story, she laughed in his face when he asked her out on a date. She was certain her parents would kill her for dating a Catholic boy, but Florian was charming and persuasive, and by the time she and her friends left the park that day, she’d agreed to meet him the following weekend.
Their romance bloomed over summer, and by the time her parents found out about Florian in early autumn, Mother was already besotted. But my grandparents were every bit as horrified as she had feared they would be, and they threatened to throw Mother out of the family home. The story goes that she broke up with Florian but fell into such a black mood that after several weeks, her friends convinced her to reconnect with him. My father proposed the minute he saw her again. They married soon after, and I was born twelve months after that.
My grandparents were livid right up until they held me in their arms, at which point all was forgiven, even if it was never forgotten.
I was four years old when Florian died after a short bout with what was probably stomach tumors. My memories of him faded with time, but I always knew the legend of him—mostly because, for years after his death, my mother spoke about him so often