“Good luck,” I told her, and she said it back to me, too, in her lovely Dutch accent.
I wondered if I should apologize for earlier at dinner, for asking everyone about their families, but I didn’t know if that would make things even more awkward. “You have enough paper?” I asked instead, nodding down to the sheaf in my hand, provided by Mrs. Yost.
Miriam nodded to her own pile, and we shared the most imperceptible of smiles.
Now, my finished letters sit nearby, and I blink them into focus.
“You’re awake,” Breine says when my wooden chair squeaks across the floorboards. “She’s awake,” she says unnecessarily to Esther, and then their voices rise to a normal volume.
Last night they allowed me to keep the lantern burning until the soft orange of the morning. It’s burning still, and Esther reaches over my head to deftly turn it down. I’m sure kerosene is rationed; it was selfish of me to use so much of it. I stretch my arms and legs, cramped from my night of sitting sleep, as Breine and Esther’s morning routine unfolds around me. Breine sweeps the floor while Esther makes both of their beds. They wash their faces in the bowl, then Esther brushes Breine’s hair while Breine talks through plans for the day.
Trade school. Breine is asking me something, and I’m trying to wrap my foggy brain around her sentences. Do I want to learn a new trade? she repeats. There’s job training here.
“It doesn’t have to be farming. If you don’t want to farm, they’re adding courses,” Breine explains. “Bookkeeping, sewing. Esther’s doing a stenography course.”
“Sewing?” I repeat. My voice is thick and scratchy. As soon as I fell asleep, I had nightmares about Abek.
“Do you want to learn to sew? The supplies are terrible now.”
I shake my head. I haven’t done anything with clothes since Neustadt. Nazi uniforms, coarse and brown. The work took something I loved and poisoned it. “No, thank you.”
“It can be good to keep busy,” Esther says gently. I see Breine encouraging her; I wonder if I was screaming in my sleep again and what they heard me say. “Breine and I have both been the new person here, sleeping in a new bed, trying to figure out what to do next. We all have. And we’ve all been helped by the people who came before us. It can be strange to be here, and it’s good to have something to—”
“Oh, just come out with us,” Breine breaks in. “If you don’t want to get muddy with me, go to Esther’s stenography class. One hundred and sixty words a minute!”
Esther gives her a look; the bluntness of Breine’s invitation is not how Esther was trying to communicate. But then she turns back to me. “I could help you catch up on what you’ve missed.”
“I already have something to keep busy,” I say. “Thanks for your concern, but I already have something to do.”
Breine looks as though she wants to say something else but doesn’t.
They have so much energy, Breine and Esther, in constant motion in our small bedroom. It’s early yet, not even fully light, but I hear the noises of a morning routine happening on the other side of the door, too, from Judith and Miriam, who must have been up like me, writing her letters.
I feel a hundred years older than all of them. The four of them are nothing like we nothing-girls, with the vacant, tired way we moved and sat and talked.
But then again, we were still in the hospital three months after the war ended. We, who had trouble keeping track of the days, who sometimes needed gentle reminders not to wander in the hallways with our blouses half-buttoned, who laughed and cried at inappropriate times.
Bissel, the woman with the gashed, angry holes in her legs, the one from Ravensbrück, swore she would one day go to her daughter living on a farm. She sat on the windowsill one morning and laughed and laughed, and then suddenly she hurled herself outside, and we heard screams from passersby when her body hit the pavement.
But last night at dinner, I learned Breine was at Ravensbrück, too. And Esther was made to disassemble batteries with her bare hands in a camp somewhere in Austria. How have some of us healed so much faster than others? How are some of us better?
Esther finishes brushing Breine’s hair and separates it into three plaits. I worry I’ve offended them by declining to go along to any of their training programs.
“Have you taken the stenography class?” I ask Breine, trying to find my manners. “The one Esther’s doing?”
She laughs. “I’m going to be a lovely, docile farmwife. I am going to grow onions and make cakes and ask Chaim to impregnate me immediately. I won’t have use for stenography.”
Esther smiles indulgently, twisting Breine’s hair into a braid. “Does Chaim know these plans?”
“This is the benefit of marrying someone who’s known you for only five weeks. I’ll make Chaim docile and content, too, before he has a chance to know these plans.”
“Five weeks?” I blurt out.
Breine cranes her head to face me, while Esther pivots around to finish the braid. “Five weeks tomorrow.”
I try to keep the shock off my face. I’d assumed Breine and Chaim had met as teenagers, and then somehow found each other after the war. Or even that they met in a camp. There was love in the camps. It seems impossible, but I saw it; I saw love poems composed in lice-filled barracks.
Five weeks is nothing. Five weeks ago, I was still in the hospital.
“We met here,” she continues. “Plowing a field. Isn’t that romantic?”
“But—I don’t mean to make judgments—but you barely know each other.”
I’m afraid Breine will be angry with me for puncturing her happiness, but instead she leans forward in her chair, stretching out a hand until I take it. “Chaim and I have known each other for five weeks. I knew my last fiancé, Wolf, for two years. We didn’t have a wedding because we wanted to wait until the war was over, and every day I think about how I’d change that if I could. So now I’ll have a wedding, and it will be with Chaim and not with Wolf. And I’m certain a part of Chaim wishes his wedding would be with the girl he loved in Hungary before me, who died and whose picture he keeps that he thinks I don’t know about.”
I start to apologize, but she cuts me off with a shake of her head. “Today I am choosing to love the person in front of me. Do you understand? Because he’s here, I’m here, and we’re ready to not be lonely together. Chaim is a good man. I won’t let another wedding pass me by.”
When they leave, I make my own bed and wash my face, then I gather my pile of letters to see if Mrs. Yost can tell me how to mail them. In her office, the telephone receiver is crammed against her ear. She depresses the button on the cradle again and again, trying for an operator.
“Darnit. I just had—hello? Hello?—Darnit.”
On the desk in front of her, the Foehrenwald arrivals log is open to a fresh page, with Feldafing written at the top. She must be preparing for the new influx of residents. Mrs. Yost catches my eye, then registers the sheaf of papers in my hand.
“Put them here,” she instructs, nodding to a wire mail bin on her desk, already overflowing with other people’s problems. “Hello?” This greeting isn’t to me but to the phone receiver. “Hello?” she tries one more time before cupping her hand over the receiver and acknowledging me again. “And don’t forget to remind Josef about tomorrow.”