Miri had a gift for me, which she presented with her ever-trembling hands. When I saw this gift, the fact struck me with all its finality. She was not coming with me — not then, and perhaps never.
Like us, the tap shoes were a mismatched pair. One was bigger, younger than the other.
All I knew was that one shoe was blush, the other white. I am not sure how she missed these differences. Maybe she hated the exaltation of symmetry after following Mengele’s orders. I couldn’t know. Both were kissed by the necessary metal at heel and toe. She shined them for me and caressed the laces with pride. She placed the shoes in my hands. She said she’d see me again.
“In Italy?” I asked.
“If I am well by Italy.”
“And what if you aren’t well then?”
“I will be well someday,” she promised.
We would have a dinner, she said, and I could wear my new shoes. I wanted to point out that they were dancing shoes, and I could not walk, let alone dance, but she looked so pleased at the prospect of this reunion that I said not a thing. I put the shoes in the box and did not look at her as she continued to swear that this was not the end for us.
Her form, as the truck trundled off — first, distance diminished her, then the fog swept away her face. I tried to memorize Miri as the expanse between us grew, her eyes, nose, mouth, chin. Wordlessly, I said good-bye to each, until there was nothing left of her to be seen, and I told myself to be happy for this, this chance to say good-bye, to say that I loved her. My affections had found a home in her; she was not my mother, my father, my sister, my Someone, but she was who I wanted to be, she was born kind, but hardship kindled it, and her vulnerabilities did not live apart from her bravery. Miri knew what suffering was and still, she wanted to know restoration too.
I don’t know if she ever truly believed that our reunion would come to be. What is more, I don’t know if she thought she might live even an hour past my departure. But I believe she knew that she had to become well so that I could see her again, alive and restored. She could not do this with me at her side, as much as she would have loved to have me near. This was not abandonment, I told myself, years later. This was love, her dream for my future.
I’m not sure she thought much of her own future. She couldn’t have dreamed of her triumph, I am sure. That she would be allowed a haven in America, that she would be permitted to resume her practice in the halls of a hospital, that she would enter thousands of rooms with her soft step, eyes fixed on the expectant patient.
Dear God, she’d pray as she washed her hands and pulled on her gloves and turned to the waiting mother. You owe me this — the chance to deliver a true and vital life, a child that will never have to be known as a survivor. And thousands would take their first breaths in her hands.
No, she couldn’t have even dreamed of that, not then. We don’t always know ourselves, who we can become, what we may do, after evil has done what it likes with us.
A decade later, we would find each other in a waiting room at a Manhattan hospital where I was to see a specialist. I recognized her as soon as I saw her back, those dark curls tangling at her shoulders, and her usual stance — a slight tiptoe, as if ready to tend to a new disaster at any moment. And though she’d been well prepared for our meeting, she could not help but call me Stasha when she saw me, and I spent the next minute or so begging her not to apologize for this error, which remained in my mind as a sweetness that I couldn’t experience enough.
Stasha, she’d whispered, as if in memoriam.
And like the mother-sister she’d become, she remained with me as I was led to an examination room, as I was undressed and poked. She bossed the nurses a little, and she directed the doctor to be as gentle as he could, and when this inquiry of my insides were over, after I’d spent an hour reliving my girlish selves, all two of them, one the chosen sufferer, the other an intact half, I laid myself down on a couch in a private waiting room, and when the results were declared to be in, and the doctor took a seat to address me, I put my hand in Miri’s.
Miri sat by my side as I was told the details of what he’d done to me, all the undetectable troubles that had begun to plague my health. Together, we learned that parts of me had never fully developed — my kidneys remained the size of a small, starving child’s, a child caught on the cusp of adulthood, her growth interrupted by the fact that there’d once lived a man who had no soul, and he’d collected children and those he found odd, acted as if he loved them, marveled at them, and destroyed them. The insides that he’d tampered with — they did not meet the demands of my grown life.
Miri wept for me then. She took on the tears that couldn’t pass from my own eyes. She did so as if there were some unspoken pact between us. She looked at me, so still, and wondered aloud after my feelings, and when I didn’t answer, she said my name, and Stasha’s too. She didn’t care who saw her cry, she wanted all to know what he had done to me — she was so different then from the woman who’d forced herself to be stoic during our journey out of Auschwitz.
At our parting, I thought those tap shoes were all she had left me with. But when I was forced to enter the coffin while crossing a border, I found, in the toe of one of the tap shoes, a note. Opening it, I expected to see her say good-bye. I thought she might say that she was sorry, that she might detail how her burdens kept her from joining me in my flight.
But this long-ago letter, the one that wept in her blurred script?
It was not about her life, her loss, her sorrows. It was about mine.
And when we children were waylaid, when the roads clogged with tanks made us travel to the wrong city, and then the wrong village, I’ll say this — it was not my will that kept me alive, it was not the canteen of water, the provisions of bread, the company of Sophia beside me or the other twins that rattled in their boxes in the bed of our truck. It was not even our system of communication as we knocked on the linings of what held us whenever we crossed a border or had to hide — one knock to say I’m here, two to say I’m here, but there is little in the way of air, three to say I’m here, but I’m not sure I want to be.
It was only what Miri told me about the Someone who had loved me. All the details she wrote about this person — all her games, her fondness for a knife, the way she’d made me dance — those details kept the breath in me for three days of travel, till our truck was detained by a pair of Wehrmacht deserters so desperate for transit that they were not above forcing Jakub from the driver’s seat. Seeing their approach, Jakub had warned us to take cover in our boxes. Whether he knew this was the end of his life, I don’t know. All I knew was the sound of the pistol, and then the sound of a body hitting the ground beside the truck. I heard, too, the whimpers of Sophia as she lay beside me, and as we sped away, I told her that we had only to bide our time till the soldiers paused in their travels, and as soon as the vehicle stopped, we would slip out, the lot of us, head for the nearest village, and find another rescue. She pointed out that I was on crutches. I pointed out that we were twins, the both of us, even though we’d had our share of loss. I assured her that freedom was something we might achieve together, that my Someone had always said so.