us when she returns. Later she explains how she knows. When she
went for water, a man out in his ĕeld had yelled a greeting to her in
Polish and in German, telling her the name of the town and gesturing
frantically, drawing his ĕnger across his neck. “Just trying to scare us,”
Magda says.
e train moves on and on. My parents slump on either side of me.
They don’t speak. I never see them touch. My father’s beard is growing
in gray. He looks older than his father, and it frightens me. I beg him
to shave. I have no way of knowing that youthfulness could indeed
save a life when we reach the end of this journey. It’s just a gut feeling,
just a girl missing the father she knows, longing for him to be the bon
vivant again, the debonair Ęirt, the ladies’ man. I don’t want him to
become like the father with the pills who mutters to his family, “is is
worse than death.”
But when I kiss my father’s cheek and say, “Papa, please shave,” he
answers me with anger. “What for?” he says. “What for? What for?”
I’m ashamed that I’ve said the wrong thing and made him annoyed
with me. Why did I say the wrong thing? Why did I think it was my
job to tell my father what to do? I remember his rage when I lost the
tuition money for school. I lean against my mother for comfort. I wish
my parents would reach for each other instead of sitting as strangers.
My mother doesn’t say much. But she doesn’t moan either. She
doesn’t wish to be dead. She simply goes inside herself.
“Dicuka,” she says into the dark one night, “listen. We don’t know
where we’re going. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Just
remember, no one can take away from you what you’ve put in your
mind.”
I fall into another dream of Eric. I wake again.
* * *ey open the cattle car doors and the bright May sun slashes in. We