The Choice

cleaning products door-to-door; now, in Baltimore, he sells insurance.
Everything in George’s life is bitter, fear based, discouraged. He follows
me through the rooms of the apartment, watching my every move,
barking at me to close the coffee can more tightly. He is angry about
the past—about having been attacked in Bratislava, and mugged in
Chicago in his early immigrant days. And he’s angry about the present
—he can’t forgive us for having arrived penniless, for having turned
our backs on the Eger fortune. I feel so self-conscious in his presence
that I can’t walk down the stairs without tripping.
One day as I board the bus to work, my head is so full of my own
discomfort—girding up for the rattling pace of the factory, stewing
over George’s unpleasantness, obsessing over our relentless worries
about money—that it takes me several moments to notice that the bus
hasn’t started to move, that we are still at the curb, that the other
passengers are staring at me, scowling, shaking their heads. I begin to
prickle with sweat. It is the feeling I had when I woke to hear armed
nyilas banging on our door at dawn. e fear when the German
soldier held a gun to my chest aer I picked the carrots. e feeling
that I have done wrong, that I will be punished, that the stakes are life
and death. I am so consumed by the sensation of danger and threat
that I can’t put together what has happened—that I have boarded the
bus the European way, taking my seat and waiting for the conductor to
come and sell me a ticket. I have forgotten to put my token in the
change box. Now the bus driver is yelling at me, “Pay or get off! Pay or
get off!” Even if I could speak English, I would not be able to
understand him. I am overcome by fear, by images of barbed wire and
raised guns, by thick smoke rising from chimneys and obscuring my
present reality, by the prison walls of the past closing in on me. It is the
opposite of what happened to me when I danced for Josef Mengele my
ĕrst night at Auschwitz. en, I transported myself out of the barracks
and onto the stage of the Budapest opera house. Then, my inner vision