Vaguely, I know Foehrenwald is on the outskirts of an actual town called Wolfratshausen. Esther told me about it, how there are a few open shops, places to buy hard rolls or a cup of soup. I’ve never had occasion to walk through it, and now seems a good day to try. We don’t have a wedding to prepare for. I don’t have a dress to sew. I don’t have a brother to find. If I don’t plan something for Abek and me to do, the day will stretch in front of us at loose ends.
The sun is still rising when we leave the cottage. Abek walks behind me, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes with his fist.
“Isn’t this nice?” I try as we pass the stables and the pond. “Being out, on our own? I thought that instead of going to the cafeteria for breakfast, we could go to a restaurant and have a cup of coffee. And I think there are castle ruins. We could go to those first.”
But when we get to the castle ruins Esther mentioned, I see her descriptions were generous. A plaque informs us that the castle was demolished two hundred years ago, when lightning struck a turret storing gunpowder. Now there’s nothing but a few loose rocks.
“Coffee,” I say stubbornly. “Let’s see if we can find real coffee. It’s a special occasion, I can afford it this once. And maybe a pastry?”
But this idea doesn’t work, either; we’re still too early for any cafes to be open. There’s hardly anyone else on the street. Plus, after last night’s chilly weather, I chose to wear a sweater, but now the day is unexpectedly becoming a last gasp of summer. It’s early morning, but as we dispiritedly turn back to camp, sweat pools under my arms. My dress clings uncomfortably.
“I wonder how Uncle Tootle is doing,” I say, my voice falsely cheery, directing the comment to Abek’s sagging shoulders ahead of me as he trudges down the narrow gravel road.
“Huh? Oh. Right. Ha.”
But it’s not as funny in the daylight. Even I know that. I was just hoping to recapture some of the silliness from the night before.
“Zofia.” He stops in his tracks, jamming his hands into his pockets. “I’m sorry about the wine last night. Getting upset.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” I say, motioning us to keep walking. “It was the end of a long day, and a lot happened this week.”
“Still, I shouldn’t have.”
“It’s fine,” I insist. “And now I made you get up at the crack of dawn for nothing, it turns out, and it’s boiling hot. But we’re almost back to the camp; we can get some wet rags to put on our foreheads and cool off.”
“Or,” he begins slowly, “or, I was thinking we could do something else.”
“Like what?”
“We could go for a bicycle ride.”
“Ha,” I say—my turn now to be sardonic. “Was there a bicycle in the donation box?”
“No, didn’t you see them when we passed? There were a few outside the stables.” We’re at the borders of the camp now. Abek points ahead toward the whitewashed stables, where two rusted-out contraptions lean against the wall.
I realize now he hadn’t been joking. He’s excited, actually, as much as I’ve seen since he first arrived.
“But,” I protest, laughing, “we don’t even know how to ride bicycles.” I was going to learn the summer the Germans arrived, then they made a law that Jews weren’t allowed to have them.
“I do.”
“You know how to ride a bicycle? When did you learn how to ride a bicycle?”
“Ladna’s,” he says. “The farm where I was staying. She had one; I could teach you, too.”
My first inclination is to tell him he’s mistaken. He doesn’t know how to ride a bicycle. I feel as I did when he told me that he’d tried to read Charles Dickens, heartsick and bewildered at the idea of a life I know nothing about.
“It’s too hot for that.”
“It would be hot, but the wind would make us feel cooler. Please?” he asks, looking suddenly shy. “Let’s both do it. It would be fun. To do something new together. Something we’ve never done together before.”
“Like, a new memory?” I ask.
His face lights up. “Yes. A brand-new thing.”
“I suppose.”
The bicycles by the stables are rusted-out; the rubber of the tires looks cracked and fragile, and the brakes squeak. Abek makes a show of inspecting them—for me, I think, a sweetly chivalrous gesture—and pronounces them safe, “as long as we don’t go very far.”
“Swing your leg up,” he instructs me, holding the back of the seat firm.
“I’m going to fall over.”
“You’re not.”
He’s already demonstrated for me, pedaling the bicycle with his slender, gawky legs. He’s explained that you only fall if you stop. The faster you go, the safer you’ll be, he said.
“Are you paying attention, Zofia? You’re not going to fall over,” he reassures me again. “You’re going to start with one pedal up and one pedal down, at about eleven o’clock and five o’clock. And then you press forward on the up pedal at the same time that you push off the ground with your other foot, and catch the down pedal. Does that make sense?”
“Can’t we start on the grass?”
Abek shakes his head. “It’s better on hard ground. It seems scarier, but you can build speed faster there, so there’s less of a chance of your falling. Are you ready? I promise I won’t let you fall.”
The handlebars jerk in my hand; I know all I have to do is keep them straight, but they seem to have a mind of their own as I kick off the ground in my best approximation of the way Abek demonstrated. I can sense he’s right. If I could pedal faster, I’d feel more balanced. But I can’t make my legs move like that; the old, flat tires seem to hug every piece of gravel.
We try again and again, for short bursts at a time. Five meters, then fifteen, then twenty. Each time, Abek helps me stop the bicycle, reposition a difficult chain and then discusses what I should do next time: how I should sit farther back in the seat, how I might try starting with my right pedal up instead of my left one. He is, I realize with bittersweet pride, a good teacher. Even for someone so young. He’s patient and thorough, and he insists on trying to teach me, even when I say I’d be happy to sit and watch him ride alone.
He’s a nice boy, I realize is what I’m trying to formulate. He grew up to be such a decent, kind boy.
We must have been riding for an hour. Beside me, Abek has one hand on the bicycle seat and the other on the handlebars, keeping me from tipping over or steering off the road. I can see the muscles in his skinny arm tense so hard they’re quivering. His knuckles have turned white, and he’s panting harder than I am as he works harder and harder to keep up.
“We can stop,” I start to call out.
“No, I have it; I’m not letting you fall.”
“You’re getting tire—”
“Zofia, watch the road.”
But it’s too late. When I turn to look at Abek, my body forgets it is connected to the handlebars, that turning myself will also turn the bicycle. Abek tries to right it again but can’t. For a perilous moment, the bicycle hangs in balance, deciding which way to topple, and then Abek grabs my waist and pulls me toward him so we fall toward the higher ground instead of a ditch.