And Prince Dobrotek crept into the horse’s ear, I said, telling The Whirlwind again. I was always good at telling stories. And when he crawled out the other side, can you remember what he was wearing?
A golden suit of armor, Abek said. And then he rode the horse to the moving mountain.
Pinch your cheeks! Aunt Maja hissed to me. Zofia, pinch your cheeks and smile.
I kept Abek’s hand in mine and dragged him with me to the soldiers.
Fifteen, I told them. I can sew and run a loom. My brother is twelve.
Do you see why there isn’t enough room on this woman’s intake form for me to explain all this? It would take her hours to write it down. She would run out of ink. There are too many other Jews, millions of missing, whose information she also needs to collect.
Dima steps forward. “Zofia doesn’t have more names; she’s not well.”
“I can do it,” I protest, but I’m not even sure what I mean by it. I can keep standing in this line? I can be well again?
The official woman adds my records to her pile. Dima extends his hand, and I accept it. I fold myself into the passenger side of his jeep and allow him to arrange his coat over my lap while Nurse Urbaniak makes sure the bundle of food is secure on the floorboard.
What I should have told the official woman is this: I know I don’t need to put anyone else on my list, because when the soldiers sorted my family, they sent us all to Birkenau. And when we got to Birkenau, there was another line dividing into two. In that line, the lucky people were sent to hard labor. The unlucky people—we could see the smoke. The smoke was the burning bodies of the unlucky people.
In that line, Abek and I were sent to the right.
On this continent, I need to find only one person. I need to go home, I need to survive, I need to keep my brain working for only one person.
Because everyone else: Papa, Mama, Baba Rose, beautiful Aunt Maja—all of them, all of them, as the population of Sosnowiec was devastated—they went left.
DIMA DRIVES SLOWLY. ON WHAT LOOKS LIKE THE MAIN street of this town, an aproned woman sweeps her stoop. At least, I assume it’s hers, I assume it was a stoop. What she’s doing is sweeping pebbles into a dustpan, then emptying the dustpan into a bin, and behind her is nothing. Rubble. The waist-high remnants of a brick structure, the vaguest hint of a doorway. It could be new rubble, from the Allies, or old, from the Germans. Poland was invaded twice. Is this Poland? The boundaries keep changing. This is the farthest I’ve been from the hospital. From the window, I could make out only a half-boarded-up milliner’s shop, with no dresses in the window. What do you think we’ll buy when we’re well? the woman we called Bissel had asked dreamily. I expect we’ll buy nothing, I said. Because nothing is for sale.
Dima’s Polish is a baby’s Polish, one- and two-syllable words punctuated by points and gestures. “Hungry?” he asks when the cobblestones give way to dirt. “Candy, under your chair.”
“No, thank you.”
“Look anyway,” he says proudly. “Surprise.”
Obligingly, I feel under my car seat. A paper packet of hard candies, and next to it, something rectangular and smooth. A fashion magazine. American, it looks like. A woman in a smart red hat. The first time Dima visited and I was actually awake, he asked what he could bring to the hospital, and I told him, lipstick. I could see he was taken by this, this idea of a scabbed, wasted girl wanting to look beautiful. I didn’t tell him I just wanted something to stop the pain in my chapped lips. I didn’t think he’d know the Polish words for beeswax or petroleum jelly. Lipstick, I thought he might know.
“Comfortable?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Blanket,” he offers, nodding toward the back seat.
“I’m not cold.”
“But every day you are cold.” He frowns. He was so pleased with himself to have thought of this, and so crestfallen that I might not need it. I reach for the blanket in the back seat and arrange it over my shoulders. Dima smiles approvingly.
“Thank you,” I say. “You are very kind.”
“Exciting day,” he says. “We’ll be there soon. This car is fast. Until, you rest.”
I lean against the side of the car but don’t close my eyes. The road is dotted with debris. Broken wagon wheels, upturned yokes, milk cans with rusted-out bottoms. Each item, I think, is a family that couldn’t walk any farther before they were stopped, or taken, or just too tired to carry more. Possessions were left behind this way, the frivolous things first, like music boxes and silk shawls and then everything but what a body needs for its own survival. And since a body can survive on almost nothing, everything was left behind. Broken wagon wheels, upturned yokes, milk cans with rusted-out bottoms. Each item is a family that couldn’t walk any farther before they were stopped, or—
Stop it, I tell myself, trying to break the loop. Stop. This is what happens to my brain now. It trips. It goes in loops. It won’t let me think about some things and won’t let me stop thinking of others. Sometimes my brain is fine. Getting better. But still triggered by things that I can’t always predict, and patchy like black ice.
I look to the other side of the road, toward the rolling farmland, trying to get unstuck. No debris in that direction. But there’s a large plot of upturned earth, brown and mealy, and I can’t stand to look at that, either.
Sometimes it’s not that families got tired. Sometimes they were shot on the spot. Sometimes it was whole towns, into mass graves. I squeeze my eyes shut.
It’s over, it’s over, it’s over.
I used to like the smell of dirt. On holiday in the country, Abek and I would draw pictures with sticks; I would teach him the alphabet.
A is for Abek.
Is it possible that right now I can smell something beneath this earth, something fetid and terrified?
B is for Baba Rose.
“We stop for lunch?” Dima suggests, and I’m relieved at the sound of his voice, breaking up my thoughts.
“Do you mind if we keep driving? I want to get to Abek. Unless you want to stop,” I add hastily. This is the longest period we’ve ever spent together, the first time he’s seen me off the hospital grounds. But if he thinks it’s strange, he hasn’t let it show.
“No, we can drive. I want to take you there, safe. Do you need anything else? Water? Walk your legs?”
“Stretch your legs,” I correct him.
“Stretch?”
“That’s what you say. It’s an idiom. A saying, I mean.”
“You need to stretch your legs?” He’s pleased with the new phrase; he reaches over and pats my knee. Lucky, the other nothing-girls had said. Be sweet to him.
I don’t know if Dima’s posting to Sosnowiec was chance. He might have requested it. I didn’t want to ask; I thought it was best not to clarify our terms.
“No, I—could we just keep driving?” I ask. “That’s what I’d like best. Maybe you could tell me a story. Or I could try to rest again.”
His eyes immediately fill with concern. “Yes. You should rest. You rest, and I’ll take us home.”
I didn’t even mean for my eyes to close; I was looking for quiet, not sleep. But they must have closed, because suddenly I feel the car jolt to a stop.