29. The Boy’s Story

THE BOY'S STORY

And this was how the boy found himself standing outside room 206 for the last time. He did not want to be here. He hadn't wanted to be here that first day. Just like you hadn't wanted to be in the alteration room of my family's store all those years ago.

But sometimes you wind up where you need to just the same.

He felt sick. His heart seemed to pound not just in his chest but his whole body. Bravery was now a distant shore across a dark and stormy sea. He wasn't sure he could get back there, if he'd ever been there in the first place.

He knocked lightly on my door. And for some strange reason, even though you'd been dead for some eighty years, I thought it was you.

"Come to me," I called with what little voice I had left in me.

It was him. But it was you, too. I saw you there. I was too overcome to speak, but it didn't matter, because he was the one with the story this time.

"It's a terrible story," he warned. "About a terrible thing." He paused again. "A terrible thing I did." His voice shook. He did not think he could say it. All this time, all the talk of judges and lawyers, and he had not said aloud what he'd done.

He needed to say it aloud. To me. To you. Maybe he felt you in that room too. Maybe he had all along.

"Tell me your story," I croaked.

The boy had not cried before. Not when the gym teacher had noticed his worrisome low weight and sent him to the guidance counselor, who'd asked him what was happening at home and then commended him for telling the truth and promised things would get better. He had not cried when that other social worker had called him to the principal's office and told him his mother was in the hospital. Or when that social worker had escorted him to his empty apartment to pack up a small bag of things, upending his life as yours had been upended, as mine had too. He had not cried when he was sent to live with strangers, or when he learned his mother had fled the hospital and by extension him, when he'd thrown the clock and dented the wall. Or when he was told of the great new opportunity to live with an aunt and uncle he scarcely knew, who, he could tell from that tight smile on his aunt's face, did not want him. Or when he'd started another new school where the teachers looked at his record and made unfair assumptions about him and assigned him a tutor in math, his best subject.

He had not cried after he saw Toby bleeding on the blacktop, or when all the kids at the baseball diamond had run over shouting, "Toby!" and "Get help!" or when he'd run all the way home, or when the police had come for him in a squad car. He had not cried through his hearings, his meetings with the social worker, through his initial days of bleach duty at Shady Glen or when Julio called him a liar or when Maya-Jade ran away from him, crying herself.

But when he finished his story, the tears were flowing down his face. His loss, my loss. My loss, his loss. Our stories, separated by generations, now inextricably connected.

And so, when he was finished, I took a breath into my failing lungs and, with the last of my strength, finished my story.

I WALKED YOU OUT OF Plaszow, Olka. You walked me out of death. We walked each other out of one future and into another. We walked silently by night, and during the day we slept in trenches we dug in the soil, shallow graves to keep us from deeper ones.

For three days we walked through the nights, stopping at daybreak to dig a new hiding spot to sleep away the day. We were headed south, up into the foothills of the Tatras. On the fourth day, I noticed something about the terrain. The familiar cleft of a cliffside. An alpine lake I had once swum in.

It was then I understood. "We're going to Babci's?"

You nodded. "You'll be safe there. Karl and Sylwia will hide you."

In spite of everything, I felt happy. We were going to Babci's cottage, the place I had imagined a different sort of life with you. We would not have that life—we had lost too much—but we would be together.

I grabbed your hand. "Let's get married," I said.

"As soon as we can," you said.

"No, now."

You looked confused. "We have no rabbi. No courthouse. No witnesses," you said. "And it's against the law."

"Our law is God's law," I said. "Let the mountain be our rabbi. The birds will be our witnesses," I told her. "In God's eyes, is that not enough?"

You pulled a silver strand out from deep in your clothes. On it was Babci's ring. You took it off and handed it to me, and there, in the presence of the moon and the stars, and, I like to think, Mother and Father and Babci, we were married.

We arrived at the cottage the following day. From the outside, the small barn Babci had used as a studio appeared derelict, boarded up, but you pried off the wood and inside was a small pallet, a jug of water, an entire loaf of bread, and the cherry jam Babci had jarred with the ten fingers on her hands. The portrait of you sat dusty on its easel. Babci had spent the last days of peacetime she would ever know finishing it.

I fell to my knees and allowed myself to weep for all that was lost: Babci, Father, Mother. Poland. My past.

You held me as I wept, loving me as I loved you.

We spent that night together as husband and wife. The next morning, I woke to see you in a fresh smock dress, wearing an apron, looking right at home as a farm girl.

"Off to milk a cow?" I joked, so drunk on love that I once again missed what was before me.

And then you started to cry.

I went to embrace you. "It's okay. We're safe. We're together."

You continued to weep. I thought it was relief or joy. And it was. But it was also regret. "I can't stay," you said. "You know that, right? I need to help Adek. And so many others. There are so many others."

"Haven't you done enough? Haven't we been through enough?" I implored you. "Don't we deserve to be happy?"

"Everyone deserves to be happy, Josey," you answered. "We are not special."

It was true. None of us was special. Except for you, Olka. You had been invited to rise to the occasion of your life, and you had accepted and accepted and accepted and you would not stop now.

As for me, what had I done? I had learned to sew. I had taught you German. Not much. Nearly nothing. The least I could do was let you go with a full and open heart, but I couldn't even manage that.

When we parted a few hours later, I didn't tell you that I loved you, would always love you, didn't tell you that asking you to teach me to sew was the best thing I'd ever done in my life, didn't tell you how fully you had saved me.

But, my love, I am telling you now.