And, while dining tables are moved and rearranged around me, and mismatched tablecloths are produced and smoothed over them, I spread Breine’s half-finished garment on the same table I worked at before. The same pins by my side, the same thread, only now instead of Josef, I have Abek beside me.
“Come and help,” I instruct him, nodding to the seat beside me.
We’re formal, at first. Being around my brother—my brother—in the daylight hours is different, even, from knowing he’s sleeping on a mat near my bed in the dark. So we’re behaving around each other in the polite, distant way we used to behave if company was coming. When I ask him to pass me scraps of material or buttons or thread, I make sure to add a careful please and then a careful thank you at the end. And he makes sure to say, “You’re welcome,” just as effusively. After fifteen or twenty of these exchanges, it starts to feel absurd. Before we were separated, I would have just nodded toward something and grunted; he would have passed it to me while barely looking up from his toy cars.
“Are you bored?” I ask him, finally. “They may be done with the new library. You could go see if it’s open yet and if there’s anything interesting to bring back and read.” I’ve chosen this phrasing carefully; I don’t want to suggest something that would take him away for very long. “Have you had a chance to read much? Do you even like to read?”
“I don’t mind staying,” Abek says, and hands me another pin. “I like to read some. In one of my camps, there was a book. Someone had smuggled it in. A translation of Charles Dickens. I was trying to read it. But I don’t need to get any books right now.”
Charles Dickens. It’s nearly impossible for me to square this idea, of my brother being old enough to read complicated novels by himself. He went through so much without me. There’s so much of him now that is without me.
I finish the stitching around Breine’s collar and turn my attention to the hemline, pointing to a wrinkle in the silk. Abek grabs the fabric where I’m pointing, pulling it flat against the table.
“Now that I know where you’ve actually been,” I say, only a little shyly, “I’ll have to revise my imagination. I never pictured you on a farm, for example. And I’m realizing how many times my mind must have played tricks on me, putting you in places where you couldn’t have been.”
“What do you mean? What kinds of places?” He obligingly holds the fabric where I point next. I take my time answering his question because I want to do it in a way that doesn’t scare him or make him worry.
“I—I wasn’t well. For a lot of the war. My mind wasn’t working. I kept getting more confused. There are a lot of holes I filled in or other things I was afraid I made up. But I thought I saw you all these times.” I force a small laugh. Now that Abek is safely in front of me, it seems simpler to act like I had merely been confused, occasionally vague like a dotty aunt, and not like I’d been very ill.
“One time, I thought I saw you through the window in Neustadt,” I tell him. “Another time, I thought I saw you in line for soup in Gross-Rosen and then again walking into the men’s barracks. In Birkenau, I thought I saw you while I was working in a garden. I buried a turnip for you, but when you didn’t get it, I realized that either you couldn’t get to it or I hadn’t seen you. I was so disappointed. It was really hard for me to organize a whole turnip.”
Abek has been watching me closely as I tell this story. I worry he’ll be afraid of me or worried about me, but he seems reassured, actually, to know how much he was on my mind.
And now, when I get to the part about the turnip, he starts to shake his head. “No. No, I did find it,” he says. “The turnip.”
“You did?”
“Remember?” he says excitedly. “You buried the turnip in the ground, and you stood a stick in the ground so I would know where to dig for it.”
“I did?” I don’t remember the stick, but it sounds like a reasonable detail. How else would I have expected him to find what I’d buried?
“I didn’t have anything to leave in return, so I used the stick to draw my initial so you’d know I found it.”
I close my eyes, trying to sort through my confusion. I understand the story he’s telling, but it’s hard for me to remember it myself. It’s like Abek’s version is a loose scrap of cloth, but if I can sew it into a quilt, then it will stop being a story and start being one of my memories.
The last time I saw Abek, I practice telling myself. The last time I saw Abek, he was eating a turnip that I managed to get for him. He was leaving me a drawing he’d made in the dirt.
“Was it raining that day?” I ask him.
“I think so.”
The last time I saw Abek, it was raining. I didn’t speak to him, but I came back to the spot where I had buried a turnip. On the ground there was an A. I looked at the dirt drawing until the rain rinsed it away.
Sitting here at the table in Foehrenwald, a cautious little voice inside me is asking, Is that really how it happened?
I’m so used to that voice, so used to mistrusting myself. It will take me a while to figure out what I can believe now.
“I’m almost finished,” I tell him, nodding at Breine’s dress. “You can go and wash up.”
“You don’t need my help to finish? I don’t have to wash up.”
“We’re going to a wedding tonight. You actually do need to. And stop by the donation boxes, and see if you can find a clean new shirt.” I will myself to be okay with the fact that he’s going to leave now and that I won’t see him for an hour. “But come right back to the cottage when you’re done, all right? Right back, and wait outside for me. We can keep talking later. We have plenty of time now.”
After I finish my work, I take the dress to the communal laundry building and spread it out over the ironing board. In my family’s factory, the irons were electric. They plugged in; their temperatures could be controlled by tuning a dial. Here, they’re a heavy, cast metal, and heated over hot coals. I’ve barely ever used this kind before; it would be easy to heat them too high and leave scorch marks on the dress. I wonder, at first, whether it’s better to leave Breine’s dress unironed.
But it’s her wedding. It’s her wedding and my handiwork, and I can’t let her get married in wrinkles. I pluck a still-damp bath towel off the laundry line stretched across the room and lay it across the dress to make a barrier between the hot iron and the fragile silk.
PRESSING THE DRESS WITH THE OLD-FASHIONED IRON TAKES longer than I expected, but when I race back across the camp, out of breath and worried Breine will be upset with my lateness, I find that I’ve beaten her home. She rushes in a few minutes later, skin still pink from a bath, fingers still pruned, laughing and apologetic.
The wedding is scheduled to start at dusk because Breine and Chaim wanted to work a full day before the ceremony. Esther had told her that was crazy, that there was no need for Breine to weed plots of land on her wedding day, but Breine insisted. Her relationship with Chaim was about building new things, she said. What better way to build something new than to tend to tender sprigs?