They Went Left: Part Two

When the train is still in Silesia, this annexed land that was Poland once and maybe is again, the tracks are haphazard and the route is meandering.

We stumble off the train, onto a bedraggled barley field.

They’re bawdier than when they got off the train an hour ago, enlivened by fresh air or girls.

We pass through the main reception area and into a smaller private office with a handwritten sign on the door: Missing Persons Liaison.

No amount of warm poultices or aspirin powder can ever fix pain when it comes from ghosts.

One night in Gross-Rosen, a night when I couldn’t sleep from the gnawing in my stomach and the lice on my skin, one of my bunkmates, a woman I barely knew, threw her arms around me as I writhed in agony on the wooden pallet.

“L’Chaim,” the table repeats now. Breine with her mouth full again, and Chaim with his shy blush, and Esther, serious and earnest.

“Frau Yost probably also told you there is no central system for locating missing persons; it’s not a scientific process. And with your case, we’ve found something that complicates the situation even further. A piece of...ambiguous information.”

Esther finishes brushing Breine’s hair and separates it into three plaits.

I’m going to be a lovely, docile farmwife.

Esther smiles indulgently, twisting Breine’s hair into a braid.

She must be preparing for the new influx of residents.

His voice is—not friendly, exactly, but not as brusque as it was yesterday.

Josef is still smiling, but there’s less mirth in his eyes now.

“No, thank you. As I said, I don’t want us to be beholden to each other.”

“Breine’s getting married,” she loudly admonishes. “She gets first choice of anything that could work as a wedding dress.”

There’s something so tender in the discerning, critical way these women pick through the clothes.

The gloves are impractical—they’re made of soft kid, the leather so supple it ripples like silk.

“Well, I don’t owe you anything, apparently.” This, I meant to sound like a joke, but it comes out caustic, too.

His tone of voice is serious, which I find both reassuring and frustrating for reasons that are hard to articulate.

How could I have been so stupid before? Bathing in Josef’s curtness because it reminded me of being normal?

Two boys, gangly twelve- or thirteen-year-olds, burst inside, and suddenly I’m struck mute.

I turn back to Sister Therese and prattle on.

I could tell Sister Therese that he was as tall as the armoire on the wall where my parents used to measure our height, but he would have grown.

It doesn’t even look like she’s listening; she has an odd expression on her face, somewhere between trepidation and annoyance.

I’m trying to keep my voice steady, but it’s careening.

I’m exhausted by my own body, sometimes, which feels like it might not ever be as strong or resilient as it once was.

As if on cue, the door swings open, and Hannelore walks in, her own hair braided to match her mother’s, a smattering of freckles across her nose.

I try to keep a straight face while apologizing for this crime, but her tiny voice is so indignant it’s hard to keep from laughing.

“It’s all right. You’re up now,” she acquiesces.

“She was funny. Stubborn. Like, one day when she was about eight, she was mad at me for not letting her play with my friends, so she filed down the heel of my shoe. Only the left one. A little every day, for a week. I thought I was going crazy. Or maybe that I had some wasting illness because one of my legs was shorter than the other. I don’t think many eight-year-olds have that kind of patience or that kind of, I don’t know, deviousness.”

This revelation about his parents is unfathomable to me.

They both look up at me and freeze in an awkward tableau, Breine halfway off the chair.

The problem is, my last times are inherently sad: The last time I saw my brother. The last time my family was together.

I recognize a few of the new occupants, vaguely, as the ruddy, healthy-looking people Breine and Chaim work with in the fields every day.

Nothing looks new, which means everything in front of me was secreted away in camps, or scavenged immediately after.

It’s a tedious, delicate motion that I’m terrified to mess up, so I do it slowly, my nose only a few centimeters from the material.

The grooming shears he’s lent me are unwieldy at first. The blades don’t have an angle to them, so I can’t cut the fabric directly along the table as I normally would, which makes it harder to create a straight line.

Instead, I focus on making the pins and then the needle go through the fabric, one stitch at a time. One thing that I know how to fix, one broken thing I can repair. Tiny, even, incremental.

It’s easier to stay in reality when I’m anchored by the tangibleness of fabric.