“Laci Gladstein.”
Tears spring into her eyes. “I’m his sister!” she cries. She has read
my code. Old friend. Aer the war. “He’s a doctor,” she says. “He goes
by Larry Gladstone now.”
How can I explain the way I felt in this moment? Ten years had
passed since I rode with Laci on top of a train with other displaced
survivors. In that decade, he had fulĕlled his dream of becoming a
doctor. Hearing this made no hope or ambition seem out of reach. He
had reinvented himself in America. So could I.
But that is only half the story. Standing in a park in the hot desert
sun, I was indeed at the end of the world, farther in time and space
than I’d ever been from the girl le for dead in a pile of bodies in a
muggy forest in Austria. And yet I had never, since the war, been
closer to her, either, because here I was almost acknowledging her to a
stranger, here I was meeting a ghost from the past in broad daylight,
while my daughter demanded to go higher and higher in the swing.
Maybe moving forward also meant circling back.
* * *I ĕnd Larry Gladstone in the phone book and wait a week or more
before I make the call. His wife, an American, answers the phone. She
takes a message, she asks several times how to spell my name. I tell
myself he won’t remember me. at evening, Bob and his family come
over to our house for dinner. Marianne has asked me to make
hamburgers, and I make them the way my mother would have, the
ground beef mixed with egg and garlic and breadcrumbs, rolled up
like meatballs, served with Brussels sprouts and potatoes cooked with
caraway seeds. When I bring the meal to the table, Marianne rolls her
eyes. “Mom,” she says, “I meant American hamburgers.” She wants
Ęattened patties served between tasteless white buns, with greasy
french fries and a puddle of bland ketchup. She is embarrassed in