What am I asking?
I am asking: If my options were never being able to find my brother, or knowing for sure that something terrible had happened to him, which would I choose? What’s the line between the amount of information that brings hope and the amount that brings despair?
Do you choose the comfort of fantasy? Or do you choose real pain?
No. That’s not what I’m asking. That’s not what I’ve ever been asking.
Since the moment I woke up in the hospital, since the moment the war ended and I began trying to piece my brain back together, I have really been asking only one question.
“Josef.” My voice is barely above a whisper. “What if my brother is dead?”
I’ve said it. The thing I’ve never allowed myself to say or allowed anyone else to say, either. That is the question I want answered.
I saw hundreds of people die. Shot. Hanged. Starved. Beaten. Broken.
I came here today chasing hope and coincidences. The boy in the records from Dachau whose name looked like Alek Federman. The boy who came to Sister Therese. What if none of the coincidences go anywhere because my brother is dead?
The reins twitch in Josef’s hand. I wait for him to assure me Abek is not dead. I wait for him to tell me again that I’ve received a promising lead from Sister Therese and that I should hold on to it.
Indulgent optimism is the gift that every person I’ve met has given me. Gosia. Dima. The nurses. They all told me that it could take a long time, but I shouldn’t give up hope. Or they patted my arm and found a way to avert their eyes. Or they wrote to Bergen-Belsen and didn’t tell me when they received a response. They all found any number of ways to deal with me. With my frailty, with my pain, with my stubborn hope.
Josef stares at me. His pebbly eyes have never looked so deep or so clear. “What if he is dead?” He drops the reins now and leans forward heavily, elbows on knees.
“What if he is, Zofia? Do you think you could find a way to live the rest of your life?”
I wait to be angry at him for saying this. I want rage to unfurl in my chest and form a protective shell around my heart.
Do I think I could live the rest of my life if Abek were dead?
But instead of hot anger, I feel a chilling sort of calm.
What if? What if that’s true? What if the thing I’ve been guarding against actually happened? And what if, instead of using all my soul worrying about it, I had to devote my soul to living with it?
Could I do that? Is there any way I could do that?
Lost in thought, I’m only vaguely aware that Josef isn’t looking at me anymore. He’s staring off toward the horizon, lost in something of his own.
“I have a sister who died,” Josef says quietly. “Before the war. A long time ago. She was ten, and she was sick first.”
He deflates a little when he says this. He deflates like a balloon, and the sentence comes out raw like he’s unpracticed at delivering it. “I know it’s not the same; it’s not the same kind of thing,” he continues. “But it means I know what grief can look like when it has a chance to get old. My family had a long time to figure out what life would look like without her. How to do it.”
“How did you do it?”
“Badly,” he says, grimacing. “It wrecked my parents. It turned them into different people. Klara held the family together in ways we didn’t realize at the time.”
“What was your sister like? Klara?”
He draws his breath in sharply. “She was funny. Stubborn. Like, one day when she was about eight, she was mad at me for not letting her play with my friends, so she filed down the heel of my shoe. Only the left one. A little every day, for a week. I thought I was going crazy. Or maybe that I had some wasting illness because one of my legs was shorter than the other. I don’t think many eight-year-olds have that kind of patience or that kind of, I don’t know, deviousness.”
“You were close?”
He shakes his head. “We weren’t, really. I thought she was immature. But I guess I also assumed we’d become better friends when we were both older. Instead, she got sick.”
“Oh, Josef. I’m sorry.”
Without thinking, I rest my hand on his forearm. He looks down, and he doesn’t pull it away. He leans into it. Almost imperceptibly, but he does. I can feel the tendons and muscles of his forearm ripple beneath his sleeve as he starts the horses up again. Slowly, he transfers both of the reins into his left hand, resting his right one open on his lap, palm up. Slowly, I slide my own hand down his arm and lace my fingers between his. This exchange takes forever, whole minutes. Only when he lets out a little breath am I sure that this is what he was hoping I’d do, and only when he gratefully curls his fingers around mine, like they’re starving, like I am safety, do I realize he was afraid I wouldn’t. His fingers are cooler than mine, and they feel solid and real.
“Josef,” I say quietly. “What if my brother is dead—but what if he’s not? I’m not ready to give up yet. Do you think that’s stupid?”
He sighs. “I don’t know. I’m not the right person to ask about stupid things. I start fights with people bigger than me, remember?”
“I get on trains and cross countries,” I say.
“That’s not stupid. That’s brave.”
The word choice surprises me; it’s not one I’d choose to describe myself. The things I’ve done I haven’t done out of braveness. I’ve done them out of necessity.
“I think I’m just doing what anyone would do to find their family,” I say. “Wouldn’t you, if your sister were alive? Or your parents. If they were.”
His hand twitches in mine, and he shifts awkwardly. “I think they are still alive.”
I gape at him. “Really?”
“As far as I know. I think so. But we can talk about something else.”
He sets his face in a mask, the same kind of evasiveness from when I offered to repair his shirt. A closed-offness.
This revelation about his parents is unfathomable to me. How could you have living family and not be doing what I’m doing or what Miriam is doing, dedicating as many waking hours as possible to finding them?
“You’re looking for them, though, right?” I ask. “You’re still looking for them? Josef?”
Instead of answering, Josef coughs and abruptly releases my hand to cover his mouth. It sounds forced, though, high in his chest. When he finishes, he takes the reins in both hands again and shifts away. There’s a gap of cool air now against my thigh.
“I didn’t mean to pry,” I try. “I just wondered about your parents.”
“That’s not it,” he insists. “It’s just that it’s late. We were at the Wölflins’ longer than I think we meant to be. I think I should focus on the horses.”
“Oh. All right.”
Nothing he says is rude or even impolite, but it’s distant, a voice that could be measured in kilometers. I don’t know what I’ve said or done, but I’ve become a stranger to him again.
It’s late evening when we get back to Foehrenwald; most of the cottages are already dark. We pass a few vehicles, khaki-colored, official-looking ones, parked in a cluster by the camp entrance. They weren’t there when we left; they must be the broken ones, now repaired, that Mrs. Yost mentioned earlier.