I feel like I’m not even looking at Josef anymore. I’m looking at someone who slightly resembles someone I used to know, and I’m realizing the whole thing was a disguise.
“Go away,” I say finally, removing my hand from the doorknob, realizing something. “You should be the one to leave now; it’s my cottage.”
“Zofia—”
“Go away. Don’t ask me to forgive you.”
“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” he says bitterly. “I probably shouldn’t even forgive myself.”
“You shouldn’t,” I say. I hold the door open for him, and when he leaves, I finally cry.
THE LAST TIME I SAW MY MOTHER WAS UNSPEAKABLE AND SAD.
The last time I saw my father was unspeakable and sad.
The last time I saw Baba Rose and vivacious Aunt Maja was unspeakable and sad.
The last time I see Josef is unspeakable and sad. I think that was the last time. How could that have been anything other than the last time?
I am exhausted by unspeakable sadness, by wearing it like a cloak.
The first time I saw Abek, he was seven pounds and four ounces. My father and I paced up and down the street outside our house. He said we could walk to buy ice cream, but we never made it to the shop. Every time we reached the end of the block, he would decide we should run back, quickly, in case there was news. We would get back to our building, and then Aunt Maja or Baba Rose would lean out the window and shake their heads. Not yet.
Were you this nervous when I was born? I asked Papa. I was too young to be nervous, he said. With you, I was only excited. I couldn’t wait to meet you.
The third or fourth time we returned from our failed ice-cream mission, Aunt Maja leaned out the window and said, Don’t leave again; we think it will be soon. Then she leaned out the window again and said, It’s a boy, and then we both ran inside and all the way up the stairs, to where Abek was redder and smaller than I’d imagined his being, wailing like a kitten, wrapped in white. My mother passed him to my father, who gave Abek his pinky finger to suck on, and I watched him to figure out what to do when it was my turn.
Make a cradle with your arms, Mama told me as Papa shifted the small, hot bundle into my awkward, outstretched hands. This is your brother, she said as I stared at his wrinkled fingers and the fine smattering of hair covering his scalp. It’s your job to protect him, she said. That’s what big sisters do; they protect their little brothers and sisters from the beginning to the end.
I tried, Mama. I tried, Papa and Aunt Maja and Baba Rose. I am so sorry I failed.
The last time I saw Abek wasn’t when I left Auschwitz-Birkenau, gripping his fingers through the barbed wire fence. It wasn’t when we walked toward the showers and I told him not to worry about taking off his clothes, because he was going to be issued new ones. It wasn’t when I left him a turnip and he left me a mud drawing in return. Those things didn’t happen. They never happened.
By the time we arrived in Birkenau, the old and the sick among us had died on the trip. Baba Rose had died on the trip. She was in the car with Abek and me; my mother and Aunt Maja had been shoved into the next one, and I didn’t know if they were alive or dead.
Abek was begging me for water. I don’t have any, I kept saying. I wish I did, I wish I did. The cough he’d caught from Mama, the one that was just a tickle when we were in the stadium, had gotten worse and worse. It racked through his body—violent coughs. He coughed up bile, and then he coughed up nothing. He cried because of the pain it caused his ribs, and I knew his ribs must be broken.
And then he wasn’t begging for water with his voice, he was only begging with his eyes. He’d become too weak to talk.
A bucket of water was finally shoved in, but by the time it reached us in the back of the car, it was empty.
And then he wasn’t begging at all.
He could barely lift his head. I said his name, and he blinked, slowly. I don’t even know if he registered me. He disappeared so fast; he became unrecognizable so fast.
A second bucket was finally shoved in, but by the time I spooned some through Abek’s mouth, it dribbled back out his chin. He wasn’t able to swallow.
A hundred years passed in that moment, in realizing my brother was too weak to swallow, and I didn’t know how I could make him. I must have been thirsty myself; I must have been in pain, but all I can remember is that my brother couldn’t swallow and I lived a century in that moment.
There were slats toward the top of the car. I could see through the slats what was happening. I could see a guard line up three people, front to back, and shoot a bullet through them all at once to use only one bullet. I could see, in my mind, the memory of my own father receiving a bullet to the head, and the soft way he crumpled to the ground. How long would it be before they shot us?
I could see the future. They would finally open the door to our car. They would unload us, and I would have to carry Abek out because he couldn’t walk. And I would be carrying him to his death. I would be laying him at the feet of the Nazi guards who would separate him from me and then kill him alone.
I knew that his ending, at that point, was inevitable. He was too weak. His death was the finishing stitch on a garment that is mostly complete. The only control I had in the matter was what kind of stitch should be used.
I’d taken off Abek’s jacket to use as his pillow, and now I bunched it up in my hands. I started to tell his favorite stories. I put the jacket over his nose and mouth. He didn’t struggle. He wasn’t conscious anymore. I don’t even know if he was alive anymore. He might have gone already; he was so still, I could no longer see his chest rise and fall.
It still took away pieces of my soul with every passing second. It was still, I think, a mercy.
That’s what I told myself, what I had to believe was true. It was a mercy. It was protecting him. It was an impossible thing that was more horrible than every other choice in the universe, except for the choice of letting the guards do it. At least this way, he wouldn’t be alone.
When it was finished, I made a space for him on the floor of the train car. I kissed his cheeks. I covered him with his best jacket, because we had all worn our best clothes, and I had sewn my best message into it. It was Abek’s life story, written in my smallest, neatest handwriting: my name, and our parents’ names, and the songs we sung, and the stories we told.
But of course he wasn’t allowed to be buried in peace. Of course he wouldn’t have been allowed to go into the earth draped in an expensive-looking jacket that the Nazis could have sold or stolen or searched through. Someone would have had to undress him, to take and sort those clothes. Another prisoner.
Another prisoner who was also a little boy. My brother was gone, but in the end, his story wasn’t.
I left pieces of myself in that car. I left pieces I will never get back. I left them unwillingly, as my mind forced itself to block away those impossible, impossible minutes. I left them willingly for my own protection, because remembering that story would have demolished every reason I had to survive.
And beyond all reason, beyond any possible explanation, I still did want to survive.
He’s in the library. I wondered if he would go here. It’s where I would have gone if I were him, after what happened at dinner. The book of fairy tales isn’t out anymore. But Abek is sitting there, at the little chair at the little table, his hands tucked underneath his legs. It’s the seated position of a little boy. His face looks like it could be a hundred.