months that I have forgotten how matter-of-factly the chimneys rise.
In a way, they are reassuring. To feel death’s proximity, death’s
imminence, in the straight stack of brick—to see the chimney that is a
bridge, that will house your passage from Ęesh to air—to consider
yourself already dead—makes a certain kind of sense.
And yet, as long as that chimney produces smoke, I have something
to ĕght against. I have a purpose. “We die in the morning,” the rumors
announce. I can feel resignation tugging at me like gravity, an
inevitable and constant force.
* * *Night falls and we sleep on the stairs. Why have they waited so long to
begin the selection? My courage wavers. We die in the morning. In the
morning we die. Did my mother know what was about to happen
when she joined the line of children and the elderly? When she saw
Magda and me pointed a different way? Did she ĕght death? Did she
accept it? Did she remain oblivious until the end? Does it matter,
when you go, if you are aware that you are dying? We die in the
morning. In the morning we die. I hear the rumor, the certainty, repeat
as though it is echoing off the quarry rock. Have we really been
marched these many hundreds of miles only to vanish?
I want to organize my mind. I don’t want my last thoughts to be
cliché ones, or despondent ones. What’s the point? What has it all
meant? I don’t want my last thoughts to be a replaying of the horrors
we’ve seen. I want to feel alive. I want to savor what aliveness is. I
think of Eric’s voice and his lips. I try to conjure thoughts that might
still have the power to make me tingle. I’ll never forget your eyes. I’ll
never forget your hands. at’s what I want to remember—warmth in
my chest, a Ęush across my skin—though “remember” isn’t the right
word. I want to enjoy my body while I still have one. An eternity ago,
in Kassa, my mother forbade me to read Émile Zola’s Nana, but I