The Choice

back this new pain; I can be a selective mirror, I can shine back at her
the things she wants to cultivate and leave everything else invisible.
In the end, I don’t have to decide what to do. She begins to speak.
“Before I leave this house, I will get my revenge,” she vows.
We rarely see the family whose house we occupy, but her quiet,
bitter anger compels me to imagine the worst. I picture the father
coming into the bathroom while she undressed. “Did he ...” I
stammer.
“No.” Her breath is jagged. “I tried to use the soap. e room
started spinning.”
“Are you ill?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.”
“Do you have a fever?”
“No. It’s the soap, Dicu. I couldn’t touch it. A sort of panic came
over me.”
“No one hurt you?”
“No. It was the soap. You know what they say. ey say it’s made
from people. From the ones they killed.” I don’t know if it’s true. But
this close to Gunskirchen? Maybe.
“I still want to kill a German mother,” Magda says. I remember all
the miles we walked in winter when this was her fantasy, her refrain.
“I could do it, you know.”
ere are different ways to keep yourself going. I will have to ĕnd
my own way to live with what has happened. I don’t know what it is
yet. We’re free from the death camps, but we also must be free to—free
to create, to make a life, to choose. And until we ĕnd our freedom to,
we’re just spinning around in the same endless darkness.
Later there will be doctors to help us repair our physical health. But
no one will explain the psychological dimension of recovery. It will be
many years before I begin to understand that.