At the row of mailboxes, I stop. Sweeping my hand through the box, I feel a lump of brass: the spare key, taped far in the back where nobody would feel if they weren’t looking. The key falls into my hand, heavy and sculpted, Sellotape crumbling into brown flakes.
Maybe Abek is already home, waiting for me. My heart flutters with the possibility as I run up the stairs. A fire on the stove. Clean sheets on the beds.
I’ve barely even touched the handle when it swings open.
ABEK!” I RUSH INTO THE FOYER. “ABEK? ARE YOU HERE?”
Straight ahead of me in the parlor is furniture, but not enough of it, and not ours. A large area rug too modern for Baba Rose’s taste. On top of it, an unfamiliar chaise lounge and a few spindly chairs.
I must be in the wrong apartment, one floor too low. I must have gotten confused again.
But no, from here I can see: The center of the floor is marked with three round water stains. Could the stains have moved, too? Five years. I haven’t been in this building in five years. I’m not in the wrong place. It’s just that this apartment has lived its own life since I was here.
I am home. I am home. A sound escapes my lips, something between a bark and a cry.
The air is the same. The heavy heat, which Mama always said was the downside of living on the highest floor. Is it possible I can still smell the leftover ghosts of Aunt Maja’s nightly cigarette? I look down, and without realizing it, I’ve slipped off my shoes. I haven’t done this in months. Even at nighttime, I’ve slept holding my shoes, to make sure they weren’t stolen, to make sure I could be ready to run. It’s because it’s Thursday. Thursday is the day Mama washed the floors.
My feet remember to take off my shoes, and my hands remember to deposit my parcel where a credenza used to be.
“It’s me,” my voice remembers to say, and is it possible that in this apartment, my voice remembers that it used to be a higher pitch? That it used to have a sharpness, a bit of wit?
Now, the only response to my voice is an echo.
Abek’s room first. I try to focus, walking toward the smallest room at the end of the hall, feet sticking to the polished walnut floors—there used to be a carpet runner—and pushing the carved door open. Sky-blue walls; the Germans kept those. White trim, curtains.
But those are the only familiar things. There’s no furniture. Even the bed is gone. A pile of rumpled bedsheets sits in the corner, but I can’t tell whether someone used them recently or whether they were tossed there by whomever stole the bed. When I bring one to my nose, soft and flannel, it smells faintly of must. His closet is empty. No picture books. No model cars, no stray sock catching on the door.
Backtracking, to my parents’ room next and then Baba Rose’s, and with each empty room I can feel my brain wanting to break into pieces.
My room, the one I shared with Aunt Maja. Dark wood panels; it had been my grandfather’s study before he died. The bed frames are gone here, too. I scan the rest of the room. I’d pasted posters on my walls, travel advertisements from train companies. Someone tried to scrape them off, but I can make out half of the Eiffel Tower.
If Abek had been back to this house, my room is where he would have left me something—a letter or a memento. I’m sure of it. Something to say, I was here. Wait for me. So I pick up a mildewed towel crumpled along a baseboard and shake it out, and I run my fingertips along the windowsill in case a slip of paper is jammed in the pane.
Inside my closet, naked wooden hangers clatter together. On the shelf above, an upholstered valise I don’t recognize. I pull it down and upturn it, but nothing falls out. It’s empty, and the clasp is broken, a beaten-up piece of luggage the previous occupants couldn’t even bother to take.
They left me trash. They left me nothing. They left us nothing. This apartment is both familiar and strange. How can something feel like too much and not enough?
On the floor of the closet sits a wooden box. It’s flush with the corner as though it was placed there intentionally, not just left at random. My heart speeds as I drop to my knees.
When I slide it out, it’s heavy; it scratches the floor. And then, from near the front door, I hear a familiar click and whir. Someone is here.
“Abek!”
I race back down the hallway and, in the foyer, skid to a stop. The figure at the door is a reed-thin 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.”