The Choice

front of Dickie and Barbara, her American cousins. Her disapproval
stings. I have done what I have promised myself never to do. I have
made her feel ashamed. e phone rings and I escape the table to
answer it.
“Edith,” the man says. “Mrs. Eger. This is Dr. Larry Gladstone.”
He speaks in English, but his voice is the same. It brings the past
into my kitchen, the sting of the wind from the top of the train. I am
dizzy. I am hungry, as I was then, half starved. My broken back aches.
“Laci,” I say, my own voice far away, as though it is coming through a
radio in another room. Our shared past is pervasive yet
unmentionable.
“We meet again,” he says. We switch to Hungarian. He tells me
about his wife and her philanthropic work, their three daughters, I tell
him about my children and Béla’s aspirations to become a CPA. He
invites me to visit his office, he welcomes my family to join his family
for dinner. So begins—again—a friendship that will last the rest of our
lives. When I hang up the phone, the sky is turning rose and gold. I
can hear my family’s voices in the dining room. Bob’s son Dickie is
asking his mother about me, am I really an American, why is my
English so bad? My body tenses, the way it does when the past is too
near. It’s like a hand thrown out in front of my children when the car
brakes too fast. A reflex to protect. Since my pregnancy with Marianne,
when I deĕed the doctor’s warning, when I chose that my life would
always stand for more life, I resolved not to let the death camps cast a
shadow over my children. at conviction has hardened into a single
purpose: My children can’t ever know. ey will never picture me
skeletal with hunger, dreaming of my mother’s strudel under a smoke-
thickened sky. It will never be an image they have to hold in their
minds. I will protect them. I will spare them. But Dickie’s questions
remind me that while I can choose my own silence, and I can choose
the kinship or camouĘage of others’ silence, I can’t choose what other