I bite back frustration. Just when I congratulated myself on making it all the way to this camp, just when I dared to think I was showing progress. Why is my brain so broken and battered? Why does it betray me?
Back in the middle of the courtyard, the bigger man is on his hands and knees. The two friends he’d been standing with rush over, grab him under the arms, and hoist him to his feet.
I look up. Mr. Mueller is back in front of me again, his hand outstretched. There’s a scrape across his knuckles. His shirt is smeared with dust, two buttons have been ripped off, and his breast pocket hangs, half-ripped. He motions with his hand again.
“Your luggage.”
He’s taller than me by an inch. His eyes, which I’d thought just gray, I can now see have a pebbly mix with brown in them, too, a dark, flinty color that’s hard to read. I should be disgusted by him now, after watching him start the fight. The pull in my stomach should have disappeared. It hasn’t, though. I’m cautious around him, but I still can’t stop staring.
“My luggage?” I repeat dumbly.
“Mrs. Yost asked me. To carry. Your luggage.” He says it very slowly this time, with one eyebrow raised.
“Oh. But you don’t have to,” I start. “Not after—”
“I said I would,” he says simply, taking the bag before I can protest again. He doesn’t wait for me to follow, and when I don’t see Mrs. Yost around to provide instructions to the contrary, I quickly dart after him.
He weaves through rows of cottages, checking once to make sure I can keep up, but not again. I speed up my steps so I can walk next to him, panting a little from the effort.
“Did that man do something to you?” I ask, breathless.
Not breaking stride. “Didn’t you just see the fight? I’d say he did something to me.”
“Yes, what I meant was—”
“He bruised my chest. And he smells like piss, and he was all over me, so he probably made me smell like piss, too.” He stresses the word piss. To shock me, I think, or repel me, to get me to stop asking questions.
As we hurry, I try to pay attention to the route and everything along it: A wooden structure where women carry out baskets of laundry. A larger building, with a sign reading VOCATIONAL TRAINING. Foehrenwald is more like a town than I even realized.
“What I meant—and I think you know it—was, did that man do something to you before the fight?” I clarify. “Was there a reason you hit him? Or do you try to beat up all piss-smelling things?”
His mouth twitches. “Piss-smelling things? What is a piss-smelling thing that I could beat up?”
“A—a goat. You could beat up a goat.”
“A goat,” he repeats flatly.
“Or a latrine itself,” I say stubbornly. “A latrine would be a very piss-smelling thing for you to punch.”
“How, exactly, would I punch a latrine?”
“Wetly,” I say. I can’t explain why his indifference is making me so bold, but I feel the need to show him that I’m not cowed or intimidated by his swearing or his fight. “If you punched a latrine, it would probably splash.”
Mr. Mueller laughs, sharp and staccato, as though the sound and the act surprise him. It’s a nice laugh, wry but rich, but then it stops almost immediately. He’s arranged his mouth back into a serious expression before I even smile myself, as if he’s hoping I won’t notice the laugh at all.
“I’m sorry, but have I met you before?” I ask.
A glance from the side of his eyes. “I don’t think so.”
“You seemed familiar to me, but it was very fleeting. I thought for a second I might know you from home—I’m from Sosnowiec—but your German doesn’t have a Polish accent.”
“I’m not from Sosnowiec.”
“I thought not. You’re German? Do I know you from somewhere else? Were you in—”
“Was I in where?” He stops now, facing me, and something in his question is a dare.
I can’t finish my sentence. What was I going to ask him? Were you in Birkenau, one of the men forced to dig graves for the bunkmates who died around him every night? Did I see you working in the men’s side of Gross-Rosen, shit streaming down your legs because typhus had made you lose control of your bowels?
Not everybody wants to talk about what happened to them. In the hospital, the woman we called Bissel would talk only about “being away” from her home. As if she were at university or on an extended trip. She talked about wanting to find a present for her little daughter in hiding. She said her daughter was waiting for her in a little German farmhouse somewhere, under the care of a kind old couple. I never knew if the farmhouse or the daughter actually existed. Bissel said this while there were holes in her legs from the medical experiments the doctors performed on her at Ravensbrück; her mind was as cloudy as spun sugar from the torture she’d been subjected to. I never knew really what I could believe.
Mr. Mueller takes off again, and I start after him. He turns another corner. I’m trying to remember all the turns we’ve taken since leaving the main building. I find my words again, but careful ones. “It’s just, something about you back there seemed very familiar. Maybe it was the way you moved, or something you did—”
“I’m not from Sosnowiec, and I don’t think we’ve met before. I’m not Polish, and I wasn’t anyplace I want to talk about.” He’s lost patience. I am making him uncomfortable. I must sound crazy.
“I apologize, then,” I say. “My mind must have been playing tricks on me. I get confused sometimes. It got confused back there.”
“Anything else?”
“Anything—” At first, I think he means, will I be asking him any more questions. But then I realize we’ve stopped in front of a square white cabin with a simple wooden door to the left and a window to the right.
“This is where Mrs. Yost wanted me to take you.” He pushes the door inward and hands me my suitcase. I see he doesn’t intend to follow me in as he nods his head in goodbye. “Miss Lederman.”
“Wait,” I say, not wanting him to leave yet and not having a good reason to ask him to stay. “My name is Zofia.”
I extend my hand in case he wants to take it for a formal greeting.
“I’m Josef,” he says shortly, and when he turns to leave, my hand is still dangling in the air.
AND THEN I’M ALONE AGAIN. ALONE AND FAR FROM HOME, and left with the weight and reality of my decision. My bad foot aches from running after Josef. It’s a spidery pain, the kind that seems to still live in the toes that are no longer there. No amount of warm poultices or aspirin powder can ever fix pain when it comes from ghosts.
I survey the small cottage. Plain wooden floor. Burlap-curtained window facing the dirt path we walked up on. In the room I’m standing in, there’s a sink but no stove or icebox. Instead, two single beds, each covered in faded, neatly tucked quilts, each with a plain nightstand on which are a few personal items: a photograph, a hairbrush, a stack of blank stationery, and a fountain pen. A writing desk lines the side wall. Along the back, a door leads to a second room—three more beds and nightstands, a writing desk, a table with a basin for water on it. On one of the nightstands is a stack of magazines, old ones with yellowed, curling edges; on another is a stack of books.