“That’s enough maladies.”
“Not something that’s wrong. Something else about me. I haven’t been able to think of a way to—”
“Please stop talking,” I instruct him. And he does. He sits on the edge of the bed and puts his hands on my waist while I finish unbuttoning the rest of the buttons on my new purple dress and let it slip to the floor. I take his hands, and I put them on my flattened chest. From his sharp intake of breath, I can tell I am not too flat for him.
He puts his lips on my stomach, and I run my hands through his hair. I kiss the top of his head, and we remember that we are alive.
HERE’S A PIECE OF MY MEMORY, OF MY DEAD-GHOST-MEMORY, come floating back to me. It seems like I should have a happier one, like doing something happy should also trigger happy memories. But that’s not how this puzzle works, it seems. The pieces don’t come in order. Each piece floats around the waste of my mind until it attaches itself to something random, obscure.
They didn’t send my father to the left when we got to Birkenau. My father was already dead. My father was dead because, when he saw the German soldiers kick the old pharmacist, he went to help him, and so they shot him. First, one soldier viciously jammed his hand against my father’s throat, knocking out his wind, and then they shot him. Casually, like their guns were flyswatters. He fell to the ground. His arm bent ragdoll-like behind him; I remember thinking his shoulder would be dislocated.
He wasn’t the only person to die that day on the soccer field in the rain. The soldiers shot others who disobeyed orders. People who tried to sneak from one line to the other. A woman began screaming that her son was at work, that he had a dispensation; if she’d known she wasn’t going to be allowed back to her house, she would have said goodbye to him. She tried to leave; they shot her.
There was so much death and blood that day, happening all at once. The rest of my family, I lost when we got to Birkenau, and maybe it was easier for me to believe I had lost my father that way, too: to the left, all at once. Remembering that I had lost him a few days before then would mean that I had to have two battering rams of pain instead of just one.
Does it really matter, in the end? He’s just as dead either way.
WHEN I WAKE UP NEXT, JOSEF IS STILL SLEEPING, ON HIS stomach, his hair tousled like beach grass. This is the position he fell asleep in, too, the position both of us did. Side by side on our stomachs, hands curled neatly near our chins, suddenly aware of each other’s personal space and how it would be rude to impose on it. Before sleeping, my last memory is me asking him whether his shoulder hurt, him asking me whether I was too cold, me saying that I wasn’t cold, but I was nearly naked, so I was going to keep my arms where they were, protecting my nakedness. Him laughing.
I meant to close my eyes for just a minute and then go back to Abek. But it’s clear I fell asleep for longer. It’s still dark outside, but the sky is a dark bruise instead of an inky black. Closer to sunrise than midnight. I fumble for the lamp by the side of Josef’s bed and turn it on; it’s just bright enough to see around the room and get my bearings. I’m half-dressed. Earlier, Josef wrapped a blanket around his waist while he searched in the dark for our underthings, passing mine to me before turning away to pull on his own—belated modesty that amused me. He must have gotten up again while I was still sleeping: A chair leans underneath the doorknob, safeguarding against anyone walking in. And when I went to sleep, my dress was in a pool on the floor. Now it’s folded on his nightstand, with my shoes tucked underneath. Easy for me to find if I wanted to leave while it was dark.
His own clothes hang in the open wardrobe on a wooden bar with a piece of twine tied in the middle, to partition his half from Chaim’s, I assume. Chaim’s half is empty now, and Josef’s has only one other shirt inside: the one he was wearing the day I met him, the one he’s worn every other time I’ve seen him. Even when the donation boxes come, spilling over with linen and mothballs, he apparently never takes anything from them except for his new wedding shirt.
I tiptoe across the floor to take the shirt out of the wardrobe, cringing as the hangers clatter, but Josef doesn’t wake. The shirt is the kind of faded gray that could have once been white or once been blue; sun-starched now, but carrying the washings and weight of a hundred other days pressed on Josef’s skin. It smells clean like grass and the sun it dried in, and underneath, it smells like Josef himself, the smoky sweetness of his skin. Up close, I can confirm what I’d earlier noticed about Josef’s handiwork with the buttons: They’ve been reattached, securely but without any eye to aesthetics. The pocket is still torn. It’s not as necessary to the shirt, I suppose.
Quietly, I walk back to my dress and feel in the pocket. I’d tucked a needle and thread inside, just in case something went wrong at the last minute with Breine’s dress. I don’t think Josef will mind about the mismatched color.
Sitting on Chaim’s empty bed, I prop the lamp next to me and fix the buttons first, snipping off the crooked ones and aligning them with the buttonholes. For the pocket, I turn to a basic whipstitch, the first stitch I ever learned, with Baba Rose carefully guiding my hand as I dragged the needle through two practice scraps of cloth. This isn’t the fancy sewing reserved for the clothing at our factory. It’s the private, family sewing I would use to hem my father’s pants or to add a patch on Baba Rose’s sleeve.
“What are you doing?” Josef is still half asleep, his voice low and cracked, a crease of pillow imprinted across his cheek.
“Go back to sleep,” I say.
“Are you fixing my shirt?”
“Why don’t you have more than one?”
“I have two,” he mumbles.
“Well, now you have two, because you picked out a new one for the wedding. Why didn’t you ever pick out another one before?”
“Other people need them more.”
“Josef. You had one shirt.”
“I like watching you work. You’re very good.”
“How would you know? Judging from the state of the buttons before I fixed them, you’re very bad.”
“I like watching you work.” He’s fading again, slurring his words together.
“Go back to sleep, Josef.”
I wait until his breathing has steadied again, and then I make an extra fold in the fabric of the pocket. I cut off a bit of fabric from where it won’t be noticed and quickly begin to stitch.
Z is for Zofia, 1945, who fixed one of your shirts and tore the other off you.
I twist the cloth between my fingers, as small a roll as I can make it, and work it into the extra space I’d created in the pocket, then I sew it shut. I’d be both mortified and pleased if he ever found it. My family thought it was sweet when I made these messages, but the few other times I did this for friends, I never told them. I could never decide whether they would think it was sweet or strange. Maybe it is strange. I barely know Josef.
Today I am choosing to love the person in front of me, Breine said, telling me that she planned to marry a man she hadn’t even known for two months. Not that I am saying I want to marry him. Not that I am saying I love him.
But last night we were together, and even if Josef never finds this message, I like the idea of my name being close to his skin. I like even more the idea that there is a record of what happened last night, and something could happen to me, and something could happen to Josef, but there will still be that record because I wrote it down.