The Choice

from Laci. “He got away,” Magda says. “So can I.”
To me, El Paso looks like the end of the Earth. “Has Laci asked you
to join him?”
“Dicuka, my life is no fairy tale. I’m not counting on a man to
rescue me.” She drums her ĕngers in her lap as though she is playing
piano. ere is more she wants to say. “Do you remember what Mama
had in her pocket the day she died?”
“Klarie’s caul.”
“And a dollar bill. A dollar Aunt Matilda had sent sometime, from
America.”
Why don’t I know this? ere were so many little things our
mother did to signal hope. Not just the dollar bill, which I don’t
remember, and the caul, which I do, but the schmaltz, the chicken fat
she packed along for cooking in the brick factory, the letter to Klara.
Magda seems to mirror our mother’s practicality, and also her hope.
“Laci’s not going to marry me,” she says. “But somehow, I’m getting
to America.” She has written to Aunt Matilda, asking her to send an
affidavit of support sponsoring her immigration.
Australia. America. While the next generation stirs inside me, my
sisters threaten to Ęoat out of reach. I was the ĕrst to choose a new life
aer the war. Now they are choosing. I am glad for them. Yet I think
of the day during the war when I was too sick to work, when Magda
went to the ammunition factory without me and it was bombed, when
Magda could have run free but chose to return to the barracks to
rescue me. I have found a good and lucky life. ere is no need for
her to see to my survival now. But if there is one small piece of hell I
miss, it is the part that made me understand that survival is a matter of
interdependence, that survival isn’t possible alone. In choosing
different directions, my sisters and I, are we in danger of breaking the
spell?