The Choice

snuck it into the bathroom and read it in secret. If I die tomorrow, I
will die a virgin. Why have I had a body at all, never to know it
completely? So much of my life has been a mystery. I remember the
day I got my ĕrst period. I rode my bike home aer school, and when
I got there I saw blood streaks all over my white skirt. I was frightened.
I ran to my mother, crying, asking her to help me locate the wound.
She slapped me. I didn’t know it was a Hungarian tradition for a girl to
be slapped upon her ĕrst period. I didn’t know about menstruation at
all. No one, not my mother or sisters or teachers or coaches or friends,
had ever explained anything about my anatomy. I knew there was
something men had that women didn’t. I’d never seen my father
naked, but I’d felt that part of Eric pressing against me when he held
me. He had never asked me to touch it, had never acknowledged his
body. I had liked the feeling that his body—and my own—were
mysteries waiting to be uncovered, something that caused an energy to
shoot between us when we touched.
Now it was a mystery I would never solve. I had experienced little
stars of desire but would now never feel their fulĕllment, the whole
promised galaxy of light. I cry about it now, on the Stairs of Death. It is
terrible to lose, to have lost, all the known things: mother, father,
sister, boyfriend, country, home. Why do I have to lose the things I
don’t know too? Why do I have to lose the future? My potential? e
children I’ll never mother? e wedding dress my father will never
make? I’m going to die a virgin. I don’t want this to be my last thought.
I should think about God.
I try to picture an immovable power. Magda has lost her faith. She
and many others. “I can’t believe in a God who would let this
happen,” they say. I understand what they mean. And yet I’ve never
found it difficult to see that it isn’t God who is killing us in gas
chambers, in ditches, on cliff sides, on 186 white stairs. God doesn’t
run the death camps. People do. But here is the horror again and I