I scan the dining hall. Esther and Abek have given up on dancing. But someone has produced a deck of playing cards, and they’re sitting back at the table with Ravid and a few others. I catch Esther’s eye and nod toward Abek. She nods back. He’s fine; everything’s fine. I’ll keep an eye on him for a while.
I hesitate again, just in case, paralyzed for a moment at the idea of letting my brother out of my sight. But Abek is laughing; he seems to be having fun.
Outside the dining hall, Josef and I are suddenly shy, walking side by side like strangers. Josef apologizes for bumping against my hip, and I say nonsensical things about the stars. I say, “The stars are really bright tonight,” even though they look like they do all the time. When we walk into Josef’s cottage—when we pass Ravid’s room in the front and go into Josef’s in the back, and when I see the neat hospital corners on his bed—I’m suddenly even more aware of what I’ve done.
“That’s Chaim’s bed,” he says unnecessarily, pointing to the mattress stripped of sheets. “I can sit there, or I can go find a chair if you’d be more comfortable.”
“No.”
“Should I offer you some water?”
“No.”
“I haven’t been inside a girls’ cottage. Do they look—”
I cut him off before he can say more, putting my arms around his waist, crushing my lips against his. We’re kissing again, only now we’re breathing harder; I can feel his body start to respond to mine, feel the way my hands start out trembling but grow more certain, and then more certain than they’ve ever been about anything. I slide my hands under his shirt and then up against the bare skin of his chest, where his heart crashes against my palm. He gasps against my lips and then reaches for the buttons on my dress, lingering at the top one, near the nape of my neck.
“Can I—”
“Yes,” I say, but then I have to do it myself when he can’t work the button out of its hole. When I’m finished, he gently pulls my chin up using the tips of his fingers, and then he touches his tongue to the now-bare hollow of my neck.
My whole body shudders as he manages the next button on his own, and then the button after that.
I forgot that pleasure could feel this strong. After years of feeling nothing but perpetual, insistent pain, my body had begun to feel like an instrument of it. Like it was built to withstand things rather than experience them. And then when the war was over, when I was safely in the hospital, what I mostly felt was numbness, a protective anesthetization against my own feelings. I forgot that I could want something because I wanted it and not just because I was starving or cold.
“Zofia,” Josef whispers, and his voice brings me back to this moment, to the gritty reality of this moment and of my body. How the door is thin, and unlocked, and could be opened any minute. How Aunt Maja told me what happens on wedding nights, but it was always put like that—what happens on wedding nights—and not what happens with a boy you’ve known only a few weeks.
I close my eyes, trying to block Aunt Maja’s face, but now my body is warring with itself.
“Wait.”
“What?” Josef says in between kisses on my neck, soft, slow kisses that make me melt.
“Josef, wait.”
This time my arms move before my brain can think, and I push Josef away. He looks back at me, confused, raising his palms.
“I’m so sorry. I thought you were all right with—I must have misunderstood.”
“I have only eight toes,” I blurt out.
“What?”
“Eight. At the hospital, two of them were too frostbitten to save. If my shoes come off—I didn’t want you to be repulsed if you saw my feet.”
Josef steps back and studies me and then turns his back. I think this must mean he’s disgusted, until he flips up the back of his hair. “Do you see it?” he asks. And I do; it’s hard to miss: a bald spot the size of an apricot. “One winter, I got sick. My hair started falling out, and in this spot it didn’t grow back,” he continues. “And I don’t think it ever will. I will be bald there forever until the rest of my hair falls out, too.”
“Is that why you never comb your hair properly?” I ask, and start to laugh.
“That’s exactly why. If I properly combed my hair, everyone would see how little hair I have left.”
I roll up my sleeve: a spidery scar, running from my forearm up past my elbow. “A shuttle flew off the loom at my second camp,” I tell him. “It didn’t heal right. I thought if I reported the injury, they would send me to the sick barrack, and I would never come out.”
“I’m missing my right molars.” He pries his mouth open with his fingers, nodding at me to look inside, where two black holes replace what used to be teeth. “A soldier hit me with the butt of his rifle, and they flew out of my mouth.”
“I have scars from flea bites,” I tell him.
“You think you have flea bites? I itched mine until they bled; I couldn’t leave them alone. Pockmarks, all up and down my legs.”
He lifts one corner of his trousers. It’s dim enough that I can barely see these alleged pockmarks, but I am laughing anyway, laughing and crying as we continue this tour of our bodies, of the secret, hidden things that are broken in them. Josef is laughing, too, as he lets go of his pant leg and puts his hand on the sleeve of his shirt.
“My shoulder was dislocated, and it didn’t set right,” he says. “I can’t do even one push-up anymore. I have trouble holding myself up on my arms if I’m in a certain position. If I’m…”
He trails off. He’s not laughing anymore. By the lamplight, I can tell that his face has turned red, and then I feel myself blush, too, because I can tell what he’s trying to say: If I were on my back, and he was above me, it might not work, he might not be able to hold himself there.
“I don’t mind,” I say.
Josef hesitates. “Do I need to… should I go get—”
He doesn’t finish, but I know what he was about to say. Should he go get protection? Could this have consequences?
“No.” I’m overcome by a wave of tenderness and then one last wave of nerves. “I haven’t—I haven’t bled in a long time. Josef, when my clothes are off, you can count my ribs. Even after months in the hospital, I don’t look very… womanly.” My breasts are gone, is what I mean to tell him. My cycle is dried up. I am shriveled; I am a nothing-girl.
“I don’t mind,” he says, and reaches to turn off the lamp.
My final confession and this final darkness have liberated me. He knows every embarrassing thing about my body.
Outside, far in the distance, I can still hear music from the wedding.
I am thinking of Breine, having a wedding now to prove she is alive, to remind herself to never again wait on things that might make her happy. I am thinking of Aunt Maja and her wedding-night advice. But Aunt Maja isn’t here to give me advice anymore; nobody is.
I reach down toward the button of Josef’s pants, but before I can unfasten it, he grabs my hand.
“Don’t,” he says. “There’s something else.” Josef’s voice is low and husky.