The Choice

Sydney too. But it is so far away. “What about your career?” I ask
Klara.
“There are orchestras in Sydney.”
“You don’t speak English.” I am throwing every excuse at her. As if
these are objections she hasn’t already thought of herself.
“Csicsi made a promise,” she says. “Just before he died, Csicsi’s
father told him to take care of his brother. If Imre goes, we go.”
“So you’re both abandoning me,” Magda says. “Aer all that work
to survive, I thought we’d stick together.”
I remember the April night, only two years ago, when I worried
that Magda might die, when I risked a beating or worse to scale a wall
and pick her fresh carrots. We survived a haunting ordeal—we each
survived because we had the other for protection, and because we
each held the other as something to live for. I have my sister to thank
for my very life.
“You’ll be married soon,” I reassure her. “You’ll see. No one is
sexier than you.”
I don’t yet understand that my sister’s pain has less to do with
loneliness and more to do with the belief that she is undeserving of
love. But where she sees pain, hell, deĕcit, damage, I see something
else. I see her courage. I see her triumph and her strength. It is like
our ĕrst day at Auschwitz, when the absence of her hair revealed to
me with new clarity the beauty of her eyes.
“Are you interested in anyone?” I ask her. I want to gossip as we
did when we were girls. Magda always offers scintillating information,
or funny impersonations—she can make even heavy things feel light. I
want her to dream.
Magda shakes her head. “I’m not thinking about a person,” she
says. “I’m thinking about a place.” She points to a postcard she has
tucked in the frame of the mirror on her dresser. e picture shows a
barren desert, a bridge. El Paso, the script across the image reads. It’s