I did not want to have a memory at all, not then.
As dusk fell on that third night, a farmer called to us from the side of the road. We saw him first by his beard, which bannered whitely in a peaceful manner. He offered us the shelter of his barn, and as eager as Twins’ Father was for us to make our way to Krakow, which was rumored to be relatively intact, he could not pass up this offer, as his troops had begun to wilt. The Kleins moaned with every step, and the Borowskis complained of cold. Peter’s toes had thrust through his shoes.
Most pressingly, David Herschlag was bent with illness — the abundant meal of pig had overwhelmed the poor boy’s shrunken stomach. His skeletal body now bore a dangerous protrusion of abdomen, a belly so puffed that it looked to be filled with poison, and for the past ten miles, Twins’ Father had taken to carrying David himself. So while our leader was always cautious in his approach to the peasants, he accepted the farmer’s offer gladly.
We entered the sanctuary of a barn, occupied only by a speckled flock of chickens and their chicken smells and, here and there, a nest of eggs. It was warm and lively — a skinny rooster stalked to and fro and chased the busty hens. None of the chickens feared us because we still had the remains of the pigs to consume, and when our second hasty meal was finished — one that David could not take part in — Twins’ Father shuffled off to a corner of the barn and attempted a fitful sleep while Miri traveled from one child to another, wrapping bandages and soothing feet and tipping canteens into mouths.
After each round, she returned to David, who lay on the straw, colored with illness, his brow thick with sweat. She looked at me with alarm and asked Peter to help her make a bed for the boy. Peter built a sturdy nest, covered it with my woolen blanket, and deposited David within it like a precious egg. David’s face stirred with a smile — he stared up into the rafters at some sight we could not see, and Miri, she reprised “Raisins and Almonds.”
Sleep, my little one, sleep.
Like a bird, she leaned over this nest, and lullabied the boy into something resembling peace.
Day Four
In the morning, we woke to the sight of Twins’ Father kneeling. He bent down beside a form in the hay, and then he took up the form and shook it, as if he were trying to wake a person who refused to be roused. We could see, from the way Twins’ Father held the boy, that David was no longer David, but a body.
“Zvi,” Miri said. “You will frighten them.” But she herself was undone by the loss. And Twins’ Father would not lay him to rest. The boy appeared changed. I recognized him only by what killed him — the stomach that rose like a hill.
Miri put a hand to the man’s shoulder; she tried to soothe him, but he would not be comforted. He fell to plucking feathers out of the still boy’s hair, and he spoke as if he’d forgotten his troop entirely, as if the dead alone could hear him.
“I must have made at least a dozen sets of false twins,” he said. He glanced at Miri for confirmation.
“Nineteen,” she said quietly. “You made nineteen sets.”
“Nineteen,” Twins’ Father repeated. “But David — and Aron — they were the first.” Miri nodded as she removed her coat. She tried to cover the boy with it, but Twins’ Father wouldn’t loosen his hold on David.
“In the beginning, they had trouble with it — the lie. They were so young — only four and five years of age. And my Dutch is very poor — they spoke no other language — it was difficult to explain to them what I needed. But every morning, before roll call, I would remind them: You are twins! And I made them repeat, over and over again, the birthdate I fabricated for them, and the fact that Aron came first, and David second. The difference between them — I shrank a year into five minutes!”
He ran a finger over the bridge of the boy’s freckled nose, in the manner of Mengele during one of his counts.
And this is where I tried not to listen to Twins’ Father. I couldn’t bear to hear him speak of the longing he’d had to be found out. How often, Twins’ Father wept, had he wanted to corner Mengele in the laboratory and reveal, with a hiss, that the doctor’s research had been tampered with, that his studies were jokes, idiocy easily undone by the lies of juveniles! He acknowledged that Mengele would have shot him on the spot. But it would have been better, he claimed, to die like that than to be doomed to save children only to watch them end like this.
Miri’s face blanched and she tried to shoo us out. Her voice took on an odd pitch as she told us that we should go see if there were any chores we could do for the farmer. Not a peep arose from us. Even the chickens hushed. I tried to trace a path from the still-open eyes of the dead boy to the rafters above. What had he seen as he left us? I had never been dead, but I’d neared it enough to know that it was likely he had focused on that tiny fissure in the barn’s ceiling, a crack just wide enough to accommodate the remote brilliance of a star.
“No need to lie to them,” Twins’ Father said stonily with a sudden, forced composure. The soldier in him had returned. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and straightened the collar of David’s torn sweater. “Let them say good-bye.”
And so it was that we gathered around the little boy who had been felled by the food he’d long been denied. His face was not peaceful. Twins’ Father gathered David into his arms and carried him out to the pasture, past all the frostbitten knots of fallow things, and though the soil was wintered and hard, it opened up to receive him. We filed past the brief grave, each bearing a stone.
But the farmer’s wife interrupted our procession with her own ritual. She scattered poppy seeds on the grave. To feed the dead that come back disguised as birds, she said. I watched the poppy seeds turn in midair and settle in the ice. I didn’t know why those seeds felt so dear to me, but I was lessened by the sight of their dark scatter. Already, the smallness of their lives were cold and stunted, and no sooner had our backs turned to depart than I heard the flap of a bird’s wings slice the air, too eager to seize upon the abundance wrought by David’s death.
In the bed of the farmer’s truck, the troop propped themselves against the wooden slats. Red-eyed, Twins’ Father surveyed us and consulted his list, dragging his finger down the weathered paper.
We waved good-bye to the farmer’s wife, who stood with the bag of poppy seeds at her side, and to the six mothers, who had decided to linger at the farm, convinced that their children were mere steps behind even as the rest of their group had fractured, each of them wandering off on her own desperate quest. Yet still they searched the faces in the back of the truck, as if they had yet to accept that their loved ones were not among us.
Then the truck roared to life, a horn honked, and as we trundled off toward Krakow, I heard Miri say David’s name into the wind — she said it softly, as if he could hear her where he lay, so deaf and cold beneath the earth.
“Forgive me!” I heard her whisper.
Miri’s plea was puzzling — she was not responsible for David’s death. She had cared for him to the end. But as mysterious as it was, it struck something inside of me.
The whole world might be obsessed with revenge.
But for my part — I knew I wanted to forgive. My tormentor would never ask for my forgiveness — this was certain — but I knew it might be the only true power I had left, a means to spare myself his grasp, the one that I felt close on me every morning when I woke. And if I could do this, if I took on this duty of forgiveness — maybe my Someone would return to me. Or at least maybe I would stop seeing my Someone’s face on every refugee we passed, the dead and the living both.