more loud knocks on the door disrupting sleep, I tell myself. Only the
comfort of eiderdowns and clean white sheets. No more starvation. I
eat and eat—Mariska’s rye bread, spaetzle dumplings, one batch made
with sauerkraut, another with bryndza, a Slovakian sheep’s milk
cheese. I am gaining weight. e memories and loss occupy only a
little sliver of me. I will push and push against them so they know their
place. I watch my hand li the silver cigarette holder up to my face
and away. I pretend it’s a new dance. I can learn every gesture.
* * *e weight I’m putting on is not just due to rich food. In early spring I
discover that I’m pregnant. At Auschwitz we didn’t get our periods.
Perhaps the constant distress and starvation were enough to stop our
cycles, or maybe the extreme weight loss. But now my body, the body
that was starved and emaciated and le for dead, houses a new life. I
count the weeks since I last bled and calculate that Béla and I must
have conceived on our honeymoon, maybe on the train. Ava and
Marta tell me that they are pregnant too.
I expect my doctor, the Eger family doctor, the same man who
attended at Béla’s birth, to congratulate me. But he lectures me
instead. “You’re not strong enough,” he tells me. He urges me to
schedule an abortion, and soon. I refuse. I run home in tears. He
follows me. Mariska lets him into the parlor. “Mrs. Eger, you will die if
you have this child,” he says. “You are too skinny, too weak.”
I look him in the eye. “Doctor, I am going to give life,” I say. “Good
night.”
Béla follows him to the door. I can hear my husband apologizing to
the doctor for my lack of respect. “She’s a tailor’s daughter, she doesn’t
know better,” he explains. e words he speaks to protect me create
another small hole in my still fragile ego.
But as my womb expands, so do my self-conĕdence and