“Still the baby here,” Fred speaks out.
“I’m from Prague,” Eli adds. “I’m sixty-two—not quite as elderly as your friend described, and I arrived by a dark train crammed with a thousand other people. It wasn’t the most comfortable trip I’ve taken.” I see Eli is sarcastic and poking fun at this awful situation.
“I might have only come a short distance, but it felt longer in the back of a dark truck, alone with a skeleton.” The memory of falling onto a body sends a chill down my spine.
“A skeleton?” Eli asks. “They don’t get much more creative than that, I tell ya.”Creative?
“They do like to disorient us,” Hans says. “I take it you didn’t arrive with anyone from home then?”
I shake my head. “No, I’ve been taking slow steps toward my ultimate destination for a year and a half now. I thought I was being heroic, leaving my mother and brother behind in search of my father, but that didn’t end well as you can see.”
With a sullen grimace, Hans palms my shoulder. “Even if you had done everything differently, you’d still be here, as would I, I’m afraid. Don’t blame yourself for any decision you’ve made.The last thing we need is to live with guilt. I left my mother and sister behind because I had a chance to hide somewhere. My mother forced me to leave, despite it being an unthinkable decision I couldn’t bear to make on my own. She wanted me to go if there was even the slightest chance I could be spared from what might come, especially for all the men where we were. I ended up hiding in a crawlspace of an attic, protected by the love of my life. Her father found out and called the authorities. Having known him most of my life, it’s still a hard bullet to bite, knowing he handed me over the way he did.”
“That’s unimaginable,” I tell him. Though nothing seems quite unimaginable these days.
“Poor lovesick kid,” Eli adds. “She slept in the attic with him sometimes.” Eli chuckles as his eyebrows dance around his forehead.
“At least he knows what love is. Life would be meaningless otherwise,” Fred says, his words more serious than the last comments he made.
“I miss Matilda, every day, my heart just bleeds for her, praying she’s still okay wherever she is. It kills me being away from her. We grew up together, never spent much time apart at all. We were best friends, and there wasn’t enough time. There’s never enough time,” Hans says, staring through me. “Anyway.” He shakes his head as if to push away his thoughts. “Did you leave a special woman behind?”
I think about the question, knowing there’s only one woman I’ve ever considered special, but there would never be an opportunity in this lifetime to have what I wish we could have had together. Me as a Jewish man, and she as a German with Aryan roots…there was no hope for anything more than friendship.
“There was, but it was never meant to be.”
“See, he’s a smart man who wasn’t looking to have his heart broken,” Eli says, pointing at Hans.
I’m not sure about that, but I suppose I’d be in much worse shape now if I had been with her.
Hans hums with thought. “What’s her name?”
The corners of my lips pucker into a small smile at the thought of her.
“Emilie.”
Her name feels distant on my tongue, but I can imagine her beautiful face as if it were just yesterday when I said goodbye. I knew that was the end for us—I could feel it in my chest, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her I didn’t think I would ever see her again.
THIRTEEN
EMILIE
JULY 1942
Dachau, Germany
Over the last five months, I’ve become the silent housewife, the one waiting at home with a warm meal for whenever Otto decides to walk in through the door. Though he leaves his belongings scattered about in every room, he eyeballs every item if I don’t tidy up fast enough. He must think his work clothes iron themselves because he always just walks up to the closet and pulls out what he wants to wear. The thank yous have stopped, not that I need one for keeping a clean house or cooking the meals, but I thank him for earning a paycheck to keep us afloat. It’s the same difference in my mind.
The job he’s doing has changed him over the course of the five months we’ve been here. It’s been a slow progression, but a noticeable one. The frown lines along his cheeks have deepened and his brow sits low all the time, not just with certain expressions. His smiles are rare, and when I ask what I can do to cheer him up, he only shrugs.
As much as I don’t have a desire for the role of a housewife, I should be able to look forward to my husband coming home atthe end of a long day, happy to see me, happy to have a clean house, and a meal on the table. That was my only reward for putting my endeavors aside in favor of his.
Today, I didn’t prepare dinner, or pick up his laundry, the newspapers scattered along the coffee table, his dirty bourbon glass on the side table, the envelopes from the mail he tore through last night, ashes from his cigarettes that didn’t make it into the ashtray. There are dishes in the sink from breakfast this morning. Even the washroom is as he left it—toothpaste stuck to the drain cover, the cap left off the top of the tube, clippings from his shaven face peppered along the sink basin, spattered spit marks on the mirror, and a wash towel crumpled up on the ground.
My stocking covered feet are up on the coffee table. I have a magazine spread open on my lap and the gramophone is playing much louder than usual. If only it could drown out my anger.Anyone would call my behavior unusual, unconventional, and absurd, but something needs to change. We need to find our way back to where we were a few months ago when everything was still fresh and new.
While there’s no definitive routine in which I can depend on him to walk through the front door every night, the time has narrowed down to between seven and eight.I’ve been reading and rereading a letter I received from Gerty, my one link to home aside from Mama and Papa. Or shewasmy link to home, before receiving this letter. She sent me a photograph too.
My Dearest Friend, Emi,
