Peter, he was the only one of the names on Twins’ Father’s list that I ever saw again.
All those innocents — I didn’t wonder about their futures that day as I left the abandoned house. I couldn’t know their destinations, their triumphs, their troubles. The ones who integrated themselves into new cities and forgot themselves in new professions, either forming empires grand enough to blot out a past, or failing to thrive because they couldn’t get the sound of their own blood out of their heads. The ones who married other survivors, and the ones who wouldn’t marry because they had nothing to offer a marriage bed but night terrors. The ones who took comfort and freedom in the soil of the kibbutz, and the ones who found themselves lying on a different set of tables, granting permission to other doctors to burn the branded memories from their brains, to take away, once and for all, the misery that he had imprinted upon us.
They were children, once.
When the truck bearing a true red cross came, I hid.
I heard the attendants collect the children. Some shrieked, kicked, clung to the doorposts. All thirty-two were forced to surrender their bread knives, and the blades clanged as they joined a pile on the floor. I wished I could have hidden them with me, but I could not risk discovery. I was in the yard, behind a snowdrift, with my wheelbarrow over me. I peered around the hedge to see the children shuffle into the truck. I saw Sophia jaunt merrily, a doll given to her by the attendant beneath her arm. I saw Erik and Eli Fallinger regard the attendants skeptically, their feet rooted to the ground. The Aaldenberg triplets hid behind Miri, and she coaxed them into the attendants’ arms, her blank expression shifting with grief. And then — I watched her count the children, call their names, register my absence. I heard her cry out for me. The attendants tried to soothe her, but Miri protested that Krakow wasn’t safe, the assaults were happening every day, no one could tell her that the girl would be fine, especially after what the girl had been through, and the girl, she continued, she was crippled besides, the easiest of prey for anyone who might hunt her.
I would listen to my guardian call for me till her voice deserted her.
It was cruel to make Miri wait, especially with such dangers in her mind, but I knew I could stir only once there was no risk of the Red Cross’s return. Only without the interference of their presence could I convince her that we had to stay together. After a good hour of caution, I picked up my crutches and hobbled into the abandoned house. It was dark. I lit a candle. But I did not have a free arm to carry it. So I stood in the middle of the room and looked about at what I could see in this scant light. I wanted to tell Miri that we could start again now. But Miri was not herself; she was not even the version who sought forgiveness. This Miri was folded in the corner near the birdcage. She was awake, but absent. I thought that the game that brought me back could bring her back too, that it could make her recover from this want of death.
I dwelled on fish. I thought about species first, then genus, and then I reached the third classification, the one I truly wanted.
Family was my first thought.
But even family ends was my second. It was not a thought I wanted. I assured myself that Miri would continue to live simply because I needed her to — but when she would not shift her gaze from the thirty-two injurious reminders of all she’d lost, I recognized that she would end her world if I did not act — this possibility, it made me forget my crutches, and I stumbled forth for help. Desperation alone carried me, two steps, then three, and then I fell and cried out to the city, I cried for all of Krakow to hear.
Stasha: Chapter Nineteen The Sacred Curtain
Here and there, lost, upended things: a bird’s nest on a puddle of ice, shattered spectacles on a locket dangling from a fencepost. I opened that locket. One half held a lock of hair, the other rust. I knew how that half felt. I felt that way whenever I looked at the tree trunks and saw those many names, all of them loved and searched for, and mine not among them.
The beggars here were certain it was February 11, 1945. They wanted no payment.
We were in Wieliczka, just outside of Krakow, according to the signs I no longer trusted. Like many a place, we never should have been there at all. Leaving Poznan, we found the roads obscured by tanks, interrupting our path to Warsaw. Whether they were Russian or German, not one of us could tell; the darkness carried too much risk. We told ourselves that the roads would clear in only a moment, any moment, but we rode on Horse’s back as we waited, and soon enough, our waiting turned into wandering.
Horse was annoyed; he did not care for the circuitous nature of our travels. Feliks accused me of stalling. While I was usually eager to accept blame, I could not fault myself for this. In all three of us, I knew, there had arisen a hesitation. Our fragile army couldn’t possibly be up to such a task. Defeating Mengele! Even my new pistol had taken to mocking me, and its bullets chorused in terrible agreement.
My aim will never be true enough, the pistol said. My aim will never be sweet or accurate or good.
But you have your bullets, I pointed out. You are not alone. And you have me besides. We are family, all of us. See how much Feliks and I have accomplished already, as brother and sister?
What does it matter? the bullets murmured to one another. Stasha’s rotten eye has made her aim rot too — she is bound to miss. I wanted to tell the bullets that they couldn’t think this way, they couldn’t question me, they had to dream themselves into the heart or the head of our enemy.
Hearing this, the bullets snorted. Pistol remarked on the presence of smoke in a manner of turning the conversation.
The smoke over the city smelled as smoke should — a tang of pine, a touch of balsam. The threads of it didn’t write out a welcome, but they weren’t the red furies of Auschwitz either. Still, there was evidence that our kind had been endangered there in the days that the Wehrmacht ruled. We stumbled over this evidence while rooting for a place to sleep.
Why had no one defended it? Or had its defenders been overcome? This wooden synagogue — I could only imagine the flames it had seen. I am not sure that we would have known our shelter to be a synagogue at all if it were not for the singed parochet—the curtain of the ark; blue velvet, its lions smote by soot, its Torah crown still agleam — that lay in the snow some feet away, as if it had managed to flee the pillage under its own power. When Feliks saw the parochet, he said not a thing, he didn’t even say what his father the rabbi would have said, but he stooped and kissed it and he draped it over a singed post in the midst of the collapse to protect it from the earth. But the parochet fell once more, leaving us with no choice but to carry its sacred length with us.
Fallen rafters black as pitch thatched themselves across a floor that shimmered with broken glass. A corner of this structure remained intact, and it was into its shelter that we retreated, hitching Horse to a charred birch at the perimeter. Horse looked as if he could restore the synagogue to its former glory with his beauty alone. Though the protrusions of his ribs upheld their prominence, so, too, did the black spark of his eye, which he fixed on us with a vigilant stare, and whenever the slightest sound arose on the wind, his ears shifted with worry. In the sweet protection of Horse’s observance, we were comforted.
We huddled together beneath the blue velvet and guarded ourselves. If one were to look in our distant direction, all he might see was a thatchery of torched wood, a luminescing horse shifting from foot to foot, and the briefest field of azure that was our parochet. It felt as if no harm could ever come to us. I was about to ask Feliks what his father would think of us using the parochet as a blanket, if he would praise our endurance or curse us for blasphemy, but already, he was fast asleep.