Here, a nurse burst into the room, her eager step announcing an intent to distract me from the conversation in the hall.
This nurse saw my need. She took off my shoes and laid me down in Miri’s bed, so white and clean-sheeted, and there I pressed my cheek to my guardian’s. That bed suited us so well. I could have stayed there forever, stroking Miri’s hair and listening to the nurse’s stories and telling some of my own. But the nurse said that I would have to leave someday. It was not good for me, she claimed, to be so surrounded by pain, and we needed to find a place free of it that I could go to.
“A place like that is real?” I asked.
I was asking not for myself, but for Miri.
It is a particular madness, yes, to long for a cage, and for the sounds of isolation — rat-scratch, leak-drip, my fingertips drumming on the bars — but there, at least, I had some expectation of suffering. I could speculate reasonably about how I might feel pain and how I might be torn, how I could die in a flash, or slowly, bit by bit, in increments so small that I was unable to tell the difference between my life ending and my death beginning. In that space, I’d kept my hope fast. But in places like the hospital, with their white sheets and scrubbed floors and modest stores of food, I was suspended in a perpetual wait. Everything that was good, clean, and plentiful reminded me, once again, how swiftly I could be diminished, and without a single warning. I could be underfoot and powerless in mere seconds, and the anticipation of this made the struggle to remain seem utterly pointless. What work there is, I thought, in being a real person after death!
I wondered how being a real person might feel after leaving the hospital. I assumed that one of us would be leaving soon, as a nurse had given us a suitcase. I also assumed that this person would be me. I would never be ready, I confessed to the nurse after receiving this gift. Ever patient, the nurse explained — Miri was ill, she could not take care of me. Polite, I protested — it was I who would take care of Miri now.
The nurse was not convinced. She merely folded two pairs of socks and placed them neatly within the suitcase. Then she left me with that dreaded object.
How odd it was, to own a real suitcase. We had become a people of sacks invented out of threadbare jumpers or emptied potato bags. These were easily slung over the back and were well proven in their utility. But a proper suitcase! When I took it up by the handle, I felt surrounded. By people and by wall. I felt as if I were boxed in, dust-covered; sweat pooled at my ankles and my ears rang with shouts and a panic burned too bright in my chest. I dropped the suitcase at my feet like a hot piece of coal.
Miri saw what I had seen, and drew me close.
“Believe that you are safe,” she whispered, and she spent the evening scratching out the monogram—JM, it said, in silvery script — with a pin, and there was no mistaking that her efforts had such a roughness to them that she nearly put a hole in the leather.
Better a hole, she claimed, than a memory. I did not argue with this — Miri had more to forget than anyone, and it would do her good to impose large swaths of absence on her mind. But I hoped that as she pursued forgetfulness, a little memory of me might remain. Just a tiny bit, just enough so that if we were ever truly parted, she might seek me out again, someday.
I looked out my window while Jakub and Miri had one of their discussions. There were no parachutists in the sky, but the heavens were assuming a different blue, and the frost seemed soon to end. I consulted a piece of paper that one of the nurses had given me. On it, there was a series of boxes, little cages that represented days. We were halfway through the month of February. Did my Someone know this? I wondered.
Miri and Jakub spoke in hushed tones; they tried to conceal their plans. Jakub claimed that the time for worry was not ending, but it was changing a bit — the problems were different now, but so were the solutions, and he himself could escort the children toward one that was rare and brilliant. The authorities at the Red Cross confirmed the desirability of this scenario — already, they had selected eleven of Miri’s children to participate in this plan. And, of course, there was Pearl — surely she would join this exodus toward safety? The good doctor was in favor of this venture, wasn’t she?
Miri was not stirred by Jakub’s excitement. She muttered something beneath her breath, something wholly unintelligible to me aside from the mention of my name. She said it longingly, or so I believed. Perhaps I imagined this. But when I turned at the window, I caught the trail of her gaze — it was fastened on me; her eyes, they appeared fixed on my injured legs.
Palestine, Jakub continued, insistent. First, a trip to Italy, which could be dangerous — some concealment was necessary — and then a ship that did not have room for everyone but would surely accommodate the twins. Hearing this, Miri faded still further — the voice I’d not believed capable of becoming any smaller lilted softly in query.
“This flight — it is our only hope?” she asked. “Still?”
I knew the tone she used. It was the tone I heard on all the streets when people turned and asked each other if it was safe to resume living.
“Would you like to take the risk?” Jakub whispered. “Is there ever a moment when you are not looking behind your back? Yes, it is over — we are free. Until they decide that we are no longer free — the war is not over, everything remains undetermined—”
This was an argument of proponents of the Bricha, organizers of the flight. We did not know it then, but peace was still over three months away. But who was to say it would come May 8, not July or the next year? While we lived in February’s thaw, creeping toward spring, many believed that flight to another, more hospitable land was a necessary risk.
“She will be safer there than she is here,” Jakub assured her. “I will see to it.”
If there was a moment in which everything was decided, I suppose it was that moment.
Because my guardian did not increase her protest, and I did not raise one at all, and so it was assumed, by all three of us, that this was what would become of me. I would be shipped to Italy, where I would board a boat that held its own sea, a sea of numbered people like myself, young and old, survivor and refugee, and every last one a searcher seeking to purchase a new beginning.
Jakub had promised. It was to be a box quite different than the box I’d known — I was to bob within it next to Sophia, the two of us surrounded by the company of supplies: rolls of bandages, vials of medicine, tins of meats, bags of tea. But when the day came for my departure, a wooden box arrived at the hospital. It was a bit glamorous, so far as boxes go. It had a cherry-lacquered top rendered in the goyish style so as not to attract additional suspicion, and it was sized for a large adult. I could have rolled myself up like a blanket and lived in one corner. At the sight of my hiding vessel, Miri wept. Tears big as marbles rolled down her face. She tried to hide them with her hair, as was her custom.
“It’s a coffin,” she said.
“A trunk,” Jakub corrected.
“I know coffins,” Miri said.
I would only have to hide myself in order to cross the borders, he assured her. There were holes in the bottom so that I would be able to breathe. And there were other children that would be hidden alongside me, the ones that I knew so well from our journey to Krakow. We were to be quiet, but we would know we were not alone, and this, the man claimed, was a comfort.
Into the truck bed piled eleven of my thirty-two companions. While only a week had passed since I last saw them, they looked different from the children I’d known. Their faces were rounder; their eyes no longer carted hollows beneath them. Sophia had a new hair ribbon. The Blaus had gotten haircuts. One of the Rosens wore a pair of spectacles. They were ragged still, but you could tell that some hand had cared for them. I saw Miri’s face as she took in the details of their transformations and I knew that she wished she had been that hand, but she only smiled at each of them and asked if they were excited about this latest journey, and she helped seat me in a corner of the truck bed, where I could lean myself against the coffin box for comfort.