They Went Left: Part Three–Epilogue

I tell him nonpertinent information about the squeaky desk chair and cold floors; I tell him about how one of my roommates snores.

It’s got to be unnerving, the voracious way I’m staring.

She was harsh, making us repeat assignments over again until they met her exacting definitions of perfection.

She told me that before the war, she’d seen him only twice in her life; he lived far away and wasn’t close to his brother. Now they are each other’s only family, and the old rifts don’t matter.

I’m apprehensive, at first, that Abek’s first day here will be so busy.

And he makes sure to say, “You’re welcome,” just as effusively.

Now she smiles ruefully, and her eyes grow a little distant. “She would have wanted such a different wedding for me. She would have wanted such a different life.”

All those dozens of tiny beads, those infernal tiny beads, I reattached around the scalloped edges.

Tables have been pushed to the periphery and piled with plates—dishes from Breine’s and Chaim’s home countries and all the other countries represented in the camp.

Miriam always seemed to enjoy hearing Breine plan her wedding, but making her listen to boisterous wedding festivities just the day after she learned about her sister seems unbelievably cruel.

“Uncle Świętopełk,” he finally murmurs, barely above a whisper, eyes darting to where Breine’s fastidious uncle is cutting his food into tidy parcels, dabbing his mouth with a napkin in between each bite.

I kick him under the table, such a familiar gesture it nearly makes me gasp, and Abek starts chewing the inside of his cheek as he tries to quell his laughter.

Esther is watching me, her eyes wise and appraising.

“You were only being rational,” I say magnanimously. It’s easy to be magnanimous, of course, since my brother is right now less than fifty meters away. “Most people would have agreed I was foolish.”

It doesn’t feel like kissing Lev did, like a pantomime or a rehearsal for the real thing.

“That’s enough maladies.”
“Not something that’s wrong. Something else about me. I haven’t been able to think of a way to—”

When I wake up next, Josef is still sleeping, on his stomach, his hair tousled like beach grass.

Up close, I can confirm what I’d earlier noticed about Josef’s handiwork with the buttons: They’ve been reattached, securely but without any eye to aesthetics.

A plaque informs us that the castle was demolished two hundred years ago, when lightning struck a turret storing gunpowder.

“Ha,” I say—my turn now to be sardonic. “Was there a bicycle in the donation box?”

My first inclination is to tell him he’s mistaken.

I’m glad I introduced them yesterday; I wouldn’t know how to now. My friend Josef? My beau?

He’s actually interested in my response; he isn’t just looking for something perfunctory.

There’s a testiness in his voice, like I heard when I wouldn’t let him have the wine at the wedding.

I’m taken aback by the words coming out of his mouth and by the sudden vehemence with which he’s saying them.

When the awkwardness between us didn’t seem to abate, I told him I needed to go for a walk.

Should I have thought it odd that he mixed that up? It, too, is a rudimentary detail about our family.

I don’t know why I’m being so coy, so reticent.

When I give Josef my examples now, they come out haltingly, and they sound silly, even as I’m saying them.

Josef’s theory could explain what’s happening with Abek and also why I feel so viscerally concerned by it.

This is all useless speculation. I don’t even know if Abek looked in this book, and it wouldn’t matter anyway, because this book is here to be looked at, and Abek is my brother, and he is here, and that is what means something, and this means nothing, because this is all useless speculation...

In the hospital, we would sometimes slip skeins of wool over our hands, roll them into balls of yarn.

The dining hall doors open. A mundane sigh of relief rises from the crowd.

“Zofia, I swear, I’ve thought and I’ve thought about what I could have done differently, but I did the only thing I could do—I left so I wouldn’t be a part of it. I didn’t try to refuse my conscription, and you’re right—it had to do with my parents. But I started thinking clearly almost immediately, and then I left so I wouldn’t be a part of it.”

The last time I saw Baba Rose and vivacious Aunt Maja was unspeakable and sad.

He furtively wipes a tear from the corner of his eye.

B is for—B can be for Breine, effervescent and hopeful, planning her beautiful wedding inside a refugee camp.

Because as we stand near the dock, smelling the brininess of the air while the salt chaps my lips, the ship has begun sounding its horn.

So I didn’t have to decide whether to forgive him. I only got to decide that his absolution wouldn’t be my job.

The gangway is long and zigzags up the side, and at the beginning, passengers stop and hand over papers, waiting to be checked off a manifest.