“Zof—”
“You’re not Jewish; you weren’t in a camp; you were in the German Army.”
I’m still edging away on the bed; he reaches out to pull me close again, and I move farther.
“Were you in the German Army? Just answer my question.”
The words are a command, but my voice comes out as a plea. I’m waiting for him to tell me it’s not true; I’m just confused. He doesn’t.
“Say it, Josef.”
“Zofia.” He says my name for the third time, a name that I have loved hearing him say before, whispered in the dark. But now my name only sounds like Josef not wanting to tell me the truth.
And I already know the truth.
I back away more quickly now, stumbling over the desk chair, nearly falling. Josef rises to help me, but before he can take half a step forward, waves of nausea roll through my stomach. I lurch for the washing basin and heave into the bowl.
“Don’t you dare come near me, you sick, sick—” I heave again, my hands tight on the bowl, and Josef finally stops in his tracks. “Why didn’t you tell me? You wanted to torture me some more? You didn’t think I’d been through enough?”
“I swear it wasn’t,” he says, stricken. “Zofia, I swear it wasn’t that.”
“You were just looking for someone to take to bed? You thought what Rudolf did when I arrived—that maybe I’d fuck for a scrap of bread?”
“I tried to stay away from you. I was going to tell you, I tried to tell you, that night in my room. I should have,” he says. “I should have told you.”
I straighten up again. “What you should have done is turned yourself in.”
A bitter bark of a laugh comes from Josef’s mouth. He spreads his arms wide and looks around the room. “Turned myself in to—where? I didn’t commit any crimes, Zofia. I was an eighteen-year-old boy who was drafted to fight.”
“And now you’re a twenty-two-year-old man.”
“And I’m different now than I was then.”
Outside, I hear a peal of laughter, a group returning from dinner. The noise rouses me enough to realize I want to get out of here. Finding my footing, I push past him toward the door. “I will tell everyone. I will tell every single person here who you are.”
“Tell them.”
My hand on the knob, I turn back to see if Josef’s last sentence was a dare, if he doesn’t believe I’ll actually do it.
“Tell them,” he says again. “Please.”
The Josef behind me is a Josef I’ve never seen before, wild-eyed and desperate. “Please, tell them. I haven’t known how to for months. Tell them; do whatever you want to do. But could you listen to me first, just for one minute?”
He rushes on, without giving me a chance to refuse. “I was in the army. But after a while, I knew I didn’t want to be. I was a deserter, do you understand? I ran away. In the middle of the night, I just left, with the clothes on my back. I slept in empty barns, in the cellars of old women. The SS would have shot me if they’d learned who I was; I was a deserter, an enemy to them, too.”
Everything is falling into an awful place. Josef isn’t Jewish. When he said he didn’t want to dance at the wedding, it was because he didn’t know the wedding dances. When he said he didn’t belong on the boat with Breine and Chaim, it wasn’t because he’d lost his faith, it was because he never had it to begin with.
I reel against the doorway, glad my hand is already on the knob, because I need it to hold me up. Is there any way this isn’t happening? That’s what I’d prefer. That this conversation we are having right now isn’t happening. That I am sitting in another room somewhere while my brain is having this delusion. I would prefer my brain spin. Let me be broken. Let me be broken; I would prefer it.
“But you showed me,” I yell at him, my voice breaking in tears. “Your injuries. You showed me where your teeth had fallen out because the soldier hit you.”
“The injuries—they’re all true,” he says quickly. “The soldier did hit me. I saw him harassing a girl, and I tried to stop him. He hit me with the butt of his rifle, and my teeth flew out. It happened; it just didn’t happen in a camp. I did have flea bites. I did lose my hair. My shoulder was dislocated because some men beat me for not handing over my food. I suffered like you did.”
“You haven’t, Josef. Suffered like I did. I nearly died. Everyone I knew was tortured and starved and beaten, every day, for years. Years.” My voice is trembling at the audacity of his comparison. “You cannot imagine suffering like that. Was your whole family ripped away from you and led to slaughter like mine? Is your whole family dead?”
“Whether or not they are dead, I would be dead to them,” he says. “They supported the Reich; they believed in it.”
Klara. He told me after his sister died, his family became something he didn’t recognize. Is this what he meant?
“They must have been so proud,” I say. “So proud of their soldier son.”
He takes a cautious step toward me.
“Zofia, I swear, I’ve thought and I’ve thought about what I could have done differently, but I did the only thing I could do—I left so I wouldn’t be a part of it. I didn’t try to refuse my conscription, and you’re right—it had to do with my parents. But I started thinking clearly almost immediately, and then I left so I wouldn’t be a part of it.”
He’s looking at me, with his deep, beautiful eyes and his hungry expression, and he’s begging me to understand.
Can I understand? Was leaving enough? Was deserting enough? What would I consider enough? Would I have asked him to shoot his superior officers before he deserted? Go into hiding rather than enlist at all? Try to spy for the Allies? What’s the minimum expectation I have for human decency in a war that was entirely inhumane?
For a minute, I’d like to rewind the clock. I’d like to go back an hour when Joseph followed me from the dining hall and kissed me. I’d like to feel that again. Or I’d like to find an entirely different timeline: one where I accept Josef’s explanation that he did the best thing he could think of in what he saw as impossible circumstances. I’d like to forgive him.
For a minute, I feel my grip loosen on the handle. Josef draws in a quick, hopeful breath.
But he never told me. I keep coming back to that.
We have lain on our stomachs in barely any clothes in the dark of his room, and we’ve talked and we’ve laughed and he never once said, I’m not who I’ve led you to think I am. The memory of these nights brings on a new wave of nausea, a new depth to my horror. This man has kissed me. This man has been inside me.
“Zofia.” He reaches a hand out to touch me, and I shrink back, my resolve steeled.
“No.”
“Please.”
“You are never allowed to touch me again,” I hiss. “You lied to all of us, to every single one of us, because you knew that would make it easier for you. And that was more important to you than—” Here, my voice begins to shake with emotion. “Making life easier for you was more important than understanding that it was hell for us.”
“You’re right. You are,” he says softly. “I was a coward.”