The Choice

Magda will stay at the apartment. Aer the effort of reclaiming it, on
the off-chance of an unexpected visitor, we can’t risk leaving it empty,
even for a day. Klara tends me on the journey as if I am a child. “Look
at my little one!” she exclaims to fellow passengers. I beam at them like
a precocious toddler. I practically look like one. My hair has fallen out
again from the typhoid and is just starting to grow back, baby so.
Klara helps me cover my head with a scarf. As we gain elevation, the
dry alpine air feels clean in my chest, but it’s still hard to breathe.
ere is a constant sludge in my lungs. It’s as though all the tears I
can’t allow myself to shed on the outside are draining into a pool
inside. I can’t ignore the grief, but I can’t seem to expel it either.
Klara is due back in Košice for another radio performance—her
concerts are our only source of income—and can’t accompany me to
the TB hospital where I am to stay until I am well, but she refuses to
let me go alone. We ask around at the repatriation center to see if
anyone knows of someone going to the hospital, and I’m told that a
young man staying in the nearby hotel is also going there to be treated.
When I approach him in the lobby of the hotel, he is kissing a girl.
“Meet me at the train,” he growls.
When I approach him on the train platform he is still kissing the
girl. He is gray haired, at least ten years older than I am. I will turn
eighteen in September, but with my skinny limbs and Ęat chest and
bald head I look more like twelve. I stand beside them awkwardly as
they embrace, not sure how to get his attention. I’m annoyed. This is
the man to whom I’m to be entrusted?
“Could you help me, sir?” I ĕnally ask. “You are supposed to escort
me to the hospital.”
“I’m busy,” he says. He barely breaks his kiss to respond to me. He
is like an older sibling shaking away an annoying sister. “Meet me on
the train.”
Aer Klara’s constant fawning and attention, his dismissiveness