“Abek,” I say, and then immediately qualify it in my mind. The boy I keep calling Abek. The boy who cannot actually be Abek. I don’t have anything else to call him.
That’s what I should ask him: What should I call you? Where did you come from? What is your real name?
He looks up at me with dull, heavy eyes. “I thought about leaving,” he says. “After you said you’d come here and found the book, I thought maybe it would be better if I just left right away.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know. I should, though, right? I should just go?”
Now is when I should say yes. He should go. This boy should go away and leave me. But I am exhausted by so much unspeakable sadness. And so, when I open my mouth, what comes out is, “Tell me a story.”
He looks at me, confused. “From the book of fairy tales?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
I pull up the other chair, sit down in it, scrape it to the table. My first impulse is to fold my hands so they won’t shake, but I worry that will look too businesslike. Instead, I lay them flat on the table. Palms up. I have nothing left to hide.
“Tell me a story you make up,” I say. “One that I haven’t heard before, a new fairy tale. Tell me—tell me a story about a little boy that has a happy ending.”
We stare at each other. I think he can tell what I’m asking, but I’m not sure. I think I know what I’m asking, but I’m honestly not sure of that, either.
“Once upon a time,” he begins, but his voice is thin and wavering, so he clears his throat and starts again. “Once upon a time, there was a boy who lost everyone.”
He looks up at me. Is this what you wanted? his eyes ask, and I nod. Go on.
“The boy saw everyone he loved die in front of him. A mother and a grandfather who were killed as soon as they got to Birkenau. An uncle who one day couldn’t get up to work and the next day didn’t get up at all. A father who screamed in pain for days before he finally closed his eyes. And the boy wondered, was bringing his father water while he was sick the right thing to do, or did it only keep him alive longer; did it only make his suffering last?
“And finally—and finally, the boy lost his sister.”
He tries to blink back tears, and his voice catches, and then he doesn’t try to hold back the tears, he just lets them come.
“He lost an older sister. Before she died, she still managed to send notes to him from the other side of camp. She still tried to save rations for her little brother, even when keeping them might have saved her. She stayed alive so much longer than it seemed possible, so long it seemed like she might survive. But she couldn’t survive. In the end, she just couldn’t. The last note he got was from her bunkmate saying she was gone.”
My own eyes are prickling because it’s not my story but it is my story. It’s unfamiliar and familiar all at once. He starts again.
“Once upon a time, that boy, who was all alone, heard of another sister, and he wondered if maybe two people could be family again. He read a story about the Lederman family. He read it, and he thought it sounded like his own family. And the whole time he was in the camps, he would think of the Ledermans. He would take out their story and read it, again and again. He would pretend that maybe they had survived even though his family hadn’t, and he could go be a part of them. Maybe what he realized is that all families are very similar, the ones who love one another. He thought, the Lederman sister who had written the story must love her brother very much.
“And so once upon a time, after all the rest of his family died, that boy decided that if he lived through the war, he would try to find this family.”
“So he did,” I whisper.
“So he did.” He furtively wipes a tear from the corner of his eye.
“If that sister had found her own brother, he would have left her alone,” he continues. “If the Lederman family already had one another, he wouldn’t have bothered them. He didn’t even expect it to work. It was just a quest, just a reason to keep going.
“And then, as soon as he succeeded, he started to realize what a mistake he’d made. How dangerous it had been, and how stupid, and—and how unfair it had been. But then he didn’t know how to tell the truth without making things worse, because for such a long time, thinking about finding a new family is what had kept him going. And he thought that the sister might feel the same way. She might have been as alone as he was.”
This boy wasn’t trying to torment me. He wasn’t trying to get money from me. He wasn’t trying to get a passport from me. He was trying to get a family from me. He was trying to grab onto something small that would make his days the smallest bit more bearable.
I look at the defeated boy, sitting on his chair in the library, and I see choices spreading out in front of me.
The muslin cloth from Abek’s jacket is tucked in my pocket. I could pull it out now. I could shake it at him, angrily, or throw it in his face. I could get up and leave, or I could tell him to.
But as we are sitting here at this table, two desperately, desperately lonely people, what I keep thinking is this: It is its own kind of miracle. For the boy who found my muslin letter, years ago, to have managed to keep it all this time. And for him to then come and look for me, after the war. And for him to then hear about another letter that I wrote, three years later and hundreds of miles away, that I pinned on a board in the middle of a camp where all the children were looking for something.
For me to have met the nun in a convent who happened to be in charge that day, who happened to remember a boy that sounded like my brother. For me to have met a Russian commander who told me about the existence of Foehrenwald. For me to have invited an old family friend to that dinner, who spoke Russian and could help translate.
To bring me to this moment, a hundred things had to happen in order, and they all happened.
None of these are the miracles I was looking for. But they’re miracles nonetheless.
The boy in front of me looks at me with such desperate, hungry eyes.
I swallow. “What was the boy’s name? In your story, what is his name?”
His mouth sets in a firm line; he barely hesitates before he answers. “His name is Abek.”
“Before that. Before that, what was his name?”
“His name used to be Łukasz. But only at the beginning of the story. By the end of the story, it is Abek.”
“It’s not really a happy story,” I tell him.
“You didn’t say it had to be a happy story. You just said it had to have a happy ending.”
“A happy ending,” I repeat.
The boy in front of me is still waiting for an answer, and here is what I find myself thinking:
I am thinking, I have done it, without even meaning to. I thought after the war was over, I would find my brother and we would find a new home, and only then, after all that, would we begin to build our family again, we would complete our alphabet.
But I ended up building it on the way. Most of it, I completed along the way.
A is for Abek.
B is for Baba Rose. No. B isn’t for Baba Rose any longer. Baba Rose is gone. B is for—B can be for Breine, effervescent and hopeful, planning her beautiful wedding inside a refugee camp. And C is for Chaim, her timid Hungarian groom.