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  “We were just married,” Béla reassures them in Slovak. (I grew up speaking only Hungarian, but Béla is also fluent in Czech and Slovak and other languages necessary for his wholesaling business.) He shows them our passports, our marriage license, our rings, everything that can confirm our identities and our reason for being in the hotel. “Please don’t bother us.”

  The police give no explanation for their invasion of our privacy, for their suspicion of us. Are they following Béla for some reason? Had they mistaken him for someone else? I try not to register the intrusion as an omen. I focus on the smoothness of my husband’s voice beneath his stutter. We have nothing to hide. But high alert is my constant state. And I can’t lose the feeling that I am guilty of something. That I will be found out.

  My transgression is life. And the beginnings of a cautious joy.

  On the train home we have a private room. I prefer its spare elegance to the hotel. I can imagine myself into a story. We are explorers, settlers. The motion of the train unspools the apprehension and turmoil of my brain and helps me focus on Béla’s body. Or maybe it’s just the smallness of the bed. My body surprises me. Pleasure is an elixir. A salve. We reach for each other again and again as the train moves through the night.

  I have to run for the bathroom when we return to Košice to visit my sisters. I vomit over and over. It is good news, but I don’t know it yet. All I know is that after more than a year of slow recovery, I am sick again.

  “What have you done to my baby?” Klara screams.

  Béla runs his handkerchief in cool water and wipes my face.

  * * *

  While my sisters continue life in Košice, I begin an unexpected life of luxury. I move into the Eger mansion in Prešov, a five-hundred-year-old monastery, wide and long, a block of a house, horses and carriages lined up along the drive. Béla’s business is downstairs and we live upstairs. Renters occupy other parts of the enormous house. A woman does our laundry, boiling the sheets, ironing, everything white. We eat off of china made for the family, their name—my new name—in gold. In the dining room there is a button I can push that Mariska, the housekeeper, hears in the kitchen. I can’t eat enough of her rye bread. I push the button and request more bread.

  “You’re eating like pigs,” she mutters to me.

  She doesn’t disguise her unhappiness that I have joined the family. I am a threat to her way of life, to the way she manages the house. It pains me to see Béla hand her the money for groceries. I am his wife. I feel useless.

  “Please teach me to cook,” I ask Mariska one day.

  “I don’t ever want you in this kitchen,” she says.

  * * *

  To launch me on my new life, Béla introduces me to the Prešov elite, the lawyers and doctors and businessmen and their wives, beside whom I feel gangly and young and inexperienced. I meet two women about my age. Ava Hartmann is a fashionable woman married to a wealthy, older man. She wears her dark hair in a side part. Marta Vadasz is married to Béla’s best friend, Bandi. She has reddish hair and a kind, patient face. I watch Ava and Marta intently, trying to see how I should behave and what I should say. Ava and Marta and the other women drink cognac. I drink cognac. Ava and Marta and the other women all smoke. One night after a dinner party at Ava’s house—she made the best chopped liver I have ever tasted, with green pepper in addition to onions—I remark to Béla that I’m the only one who doesn’t smoke, and the next day he brings me a silver cigarette case and silver cigarette holder. I don’t know how to use it—how to insert the cigarette into one end, how to inhale, how to blow the smoke out through my lips. I try to mirror the other women. I feel like an elegant parrot, nothing but an echo dolled up in nice clothes that my father did not make for me.

  Do they know where I’ve been? Sitting in parlors and around ornate dining tables, I gaze at our friends and acquaintances and wonder. Have they lost the same things Béla and I have lost? We don’t talk about it. Denial is our shield. We don’t yet know the damage we perpetuate by cutting ourselves off from the past, by maintaining our conspiracy of silence. We are convinced that the more securely we lock the past away, the safer and happier we will be.

  I try to relax into my new privilege and wealth. There will be no more loud knocks on the door disrupting sleep, I tell myself. Only the comfort of eiderdowns and clean white sheets. No more starvation. I eat and eat—Mariska’s rye bread, spaetzle dumplings, one batch made with sauerkraut, another with bryndza, a Slovakian sheep’s milk cheese. I am gaining weight. The memories and loss occupy only a little sliver of me. I will push and push against them so they know their place. I watch my hand lift the silver cigarette holder up to my face and away. I pretend it’s a new dance. I can learn every gesture.

  * * *

  The weight I’m putting on is not just due to rich food. In early spring I discover that I’m pregnant. At Auschwitz we didn’t get our periods. Perhaps the constant distress and starvation were enough to stop our cycles, or maybe the extreme weight loss. But now my body, the body that was starved and emaciated and left for dead, houses a new life. I count the weeks since I last bled and calculate that Béla and I must have conceived on our honeymoon, maybe on the train. Ava and Marta tell me that they are pregnant too.

  I expect my doctor, the Eger family doctor, the same man who attended at Béla’s birth, to congratulate me. But he lectures me instead. “You’re not strong enough,” he tells me. He urges me to schedule an abortion, and soon. I refuse. I run home in tears. He follows me. Mariska lets him into the parlor. “Mrs. Eger, you will die if you have this child,” he says. “You are too skinny, too weak.”

  I look him in the eye. “Doctor, I am going to give life,” I say. “Good night.”

  Béla follows him to the door. I can hear my husband apologizing to the doctor for my lack of respect. “She’s a tailor’s daughter, she doesn’t know better,” he explains. The words he speaks to protect me create another small hole in my still fragile ego.

  But as my womb expands, so do my self-confidence and determination. I don’t hide in the corners. I gain fifty pounds, and when I walk in the streets I push out my stomach and watch reflections of this new version of me glide by in shop windows. I don’t immediately recognize this feeling. Then I remember. This is what it feels like to be happy.

  * * *

  Klara and Csicsi marry in the spring of 1947, and Béla and I drive to Košice in his green Opel Adam for the ceremony. It’s another momentous occasion that our parents miss, another happy day made less so by their absence. But I am pregnant and my life is full and I will not let sorrow pull me down. Magda plays the family piano. She sings the tunes our father used to sing. Béla struggles with competing notions: to sweep me up in a dance or to make me sit and rest my feet. My sisters lay their hands on my belly. This new life inside me belongs to all of us. It’s our new beginning. A piece of our parents, and grandparents, that will continue on and out into the future.

  That is the topic of conversation as we take a break from the music, as the men light up cigars. The future. Csicsi’s brother Imre will leave soon for Sydney. Our family group is already so small. I don’t like the thought of us dispersing. Prešov already feels so far away from my sisters. Before the night is through, before Béla and I drive home, Klara pulls me and Magda into the bedroom.

  “I have to tell you something, little one,” she says.

  I can tell from Magda’s frown that she already knows what Klara is about to say.

  “If Imre goes to Sydney,” Klara says, “we will go there too.”

  Australia. Among our friends in Prešov, because of the Communist takeover under way in Czechoslovakia, there is also talk of immigrating, maybe to Israel, maybe to America, but the immigration policies are looser in Australia. Ava and her husband have mentioned Sydney too. But it is so far away. “What about your career?” I ask Klara.

  “There are orchestras in Sydney.”

  “You don’t speak English.” I am throwing every exc
use at her. As if these are objections she hasn’t already thought of herself.

  “Csicsi made a promise,” she says. “Just before he died, Csicsi’s father told him to take care of his brother. If Imre goes, we go.”

  “So you’re both abandoning me,” Magda says. “After all that work to survive, I thought we’d stick together.”

  I remember the April night, only two years ago, when I worried that Magda might die, when I risked a beating or worse to scale a wall and pick her fresh carrots. We survived a haunting ordeal—we each survived because we had the other for protection, and because we each held the other as something to live for. I have my sister to thank for my very life.

  “You’ll be married soon,” I reassure her. “You’ll see. No one is sexier than you.”

  I don’t yet understand that my sister’s pain has less to do with loneliness and more to do with the belief that she is undeserving of love. But where she sees pain, hell, deficit, damage, I see something else. I see her courage. I see her triumph and her strength. It is like our first day at Auschwitz, when the absence of her hair revealed to me with new clarity the beauty of her eyes.

  “Are you interested in anyone?” I ask her. I want to gossip as we did when we were girls. Magda always offers scintillating information, or funny impersonations—she can make even heavy things feel light. I want her to dream.

  Magda shakes her head. “I’m not thinking about a person,” she says. “I’m thinking about a place.” She points to a postcard she has tucked in the frame of the mirror on her dresser. The picture shows a barren desert, a bridge. El Paso, the script across the image reads. It’s from Laci. “He got away,” Magda says. “So can I.”

  To me, El Paso looks like the end of the Earth. “Has Laci asked you to join him?”

  “Dicuka, my life is no fairy tale. I’m not counting on a man to rescue me.” She drums her fingers in her lap as though she is playing piano. There is more she wants to say. “Do you remember what Mama had in her pocket the day she died?”

  “Klarie’s caul.”

  “And a dollar bill. A dollar Aunt Matilda had sent sometime, from America.”

  Why don’t I know this? There were so many little things our mother did to signal hope. Not just the dollar bill, which I don’t remember, and the caul, which I do, but the schmaltz, the chicken fat she packed along for cooking in the brick factory, the letter to Klara. Magda seems to mirror our mother’s practicality, and also her hope.

  “Laci’s not going to marry me,” she says. “But somehow, I’m getting to America.” She has written to Aunt Matilda, asking her to send an affidavit of support sponsoring her immigration.

  Australia. America. While the next generation stirs inside me, my sisters threaten to float out of reach. I was the first to choose a new life after the war. Now they are choosing. I am glad for them. Yet I think of the day during the war when I was too sick to work, when Magda went to the ammunition factory without me and it was bombed, when Magda could have run free but chose to return to the barracks to rescue me. I have found a good and lucky life. There is no need for her to see to my survival now. But if there is one small piece of hell I miss, it is the part that made me understand that survival is a matter of interdependence, that survival isn’t possible alone. In choosing different directions, my sisters and I, are we in danger of breaking the spell?

  * * *

  Béla is out of town when I feel the first contractions early one September morning. They cinch and cinch, strong enough to snap me. I call Klara. By the time she arrives two hours later, the doctor still isn’t there. I labor in the same room that Béla was born in, the same bed. When I buckle against the pain, I feel a connection to his mother, a woman I never had the chance to meet. This baby I’m working to get into the world will have no grandparents. The doctor still hasn’t come. Klara hovers near me, offering me water, wiping my face. “Get away!” I yell at her. “I can’t stand your smell.” I can’t be the baby and birth a baby. I have to inhabit myself and she is distracting me. Out of the razor-sharp haziness of labor comes the memory of the pregnant woman in Auschwitz who labored in agony with her tied-together legs. I can’t stop her face, her voice from coming into the room with me now. She haunts me. She inspires me. Every impulse in her body, her heart, pointing to life, while she and her baby were both consigned to an unspeakably cruel death. The sorrow breaks across me. I am a landslide. I will break myself open on the sharp edge of her torment. I will accept this pain because she didn’t have a choice. I will accept my pain so that it might erase hers, might erase every memory, because if this pain doesn’t destroy me, memory might. The doctor finally comes. My waters burst and I feel the baby shoot out of me. “It’s a little girl!” Klara yells. For a moment I feel complete. I am here. My baby girl is here. All is well and right.

  * * *

  I want to name her Anna-Marie, a romantic name, a French-sounding name, but the Communists keep a roster of the permissible names, and Anna-Marie isn’t allowed. So we choose the inversion: Marianne, a tribute to Béla’s cousin Marianna, the one who still calls me a dumb goose for having broken up the engagement between Béla and her friend, the friend who is now dead. Béla hands out cigars. He won’t bow to the tradition of passing out cigars only for sons. His daughter will be celebrated by every ritual, every act of pride. He brings me a jeweler’s box. Inside is a gold bracelet of linked squares the size of postage stamps, made of two kinds of gold. It looks heavy, but it’s light.

  “To the future,” Béla says, and clasps it around my wrist.

  He says it and I know the direction of my life. This is what I will stand for: this child. My commitment to her will be as complete and unified as the gold circle around my wrist. I can see my purpose. I will live to ensure that she will never experience what I did. The continuity, from me to her, will grow out of our shared roots, making a new branch, a limb that climbs toward hope and joy.

  Still, we take precautions. We christen her. For safety’s sake. The same reason our friends Marta and Bandi use a Hungarian last name, Vadasz, meaning “hunter,” instead of their Jewish name.

  But what control do we really have? Marta’s baby is born dead.

  * * *

  Marianne weighs ten pounds at birth. She takes up the whole carriage.

  “Do I breast-feed?” I ask the German pediatrician.

  “What do you think your tits are for?” she says.

  My milk is an abundance. I have more than enough to feed Marianne and also my friend Ava’s baby girl. I can feed every hunger. I stand for plenty. I lean down into her when I nurse so that she never has to strain for my body, her source. I give her every drop. When she empties me, I feel the most full.

  * * *

  Marianne is so protected and cuddled and cared for and bundled up that when, in November 1948, she is fourteen months old and falls ill, I don’t believe it at first. I know how to read her fussiness. She’s hungry, I think. She’s tired. But when I go to her again in the night, a fever rages. She is coal-hot. Her eyes are glassy. Her body complains; cries come out. But she is too sick to register my presence. Or I make no difference. She doesn’t want to nurse. My arms are no comfort. Every few minutes a deep throttling cough seizes up her chest. I wake the household. Béla calls the doctor, the doctor who delivered him, who delivered Marianne, and paces the room where he was born.

  The doctor is stern with me. She has pneumonia. “This is life or death,” he says. He sounds angry, as if the illness is my fault, as if he can’t let me forget that from the very beginning Marianne’s life has been founded on risk, on my foolish audacity. Now see what has come to pass. But maybe what sounds like anger is just weariness. He lives to heal. How often his labor must end in loss.

  “What do we do?” Béla asks. “Tell us what to do.”

  “You’ve heard of penicillin?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Get your baby penicillin. And fast.”

  Béla stares at him, dumbfounded, as th
e doctor buttons his coat. “You’re the doctor. Where’s the penicillin?” he demands.

  “Mr. Eger, there is no penicillin in this country. None that you can buy legally. Good night. Good luck.”

  “I’ll pay any price!”

  “Yes,” the doctor says. “You must make your own arrangements.”

  “The Communists?” I suggest when the doctor has left. They liberated Slovakia from Nazi occupation. They have been courting Béla, courting his wealth and influence. They have offered him a position as minister of agriculture if he will join the party.

  Béla shakes his head. “Black market sellers will have more direct access,” he says.

  Marianne has fallen back into a fitful sleep. I must keep her hydrated, but she won’t accept water or milk. “Get me the cash,” I say, “and tell me where to go.”

  Black market dealers run business alongside the legal sellers at the market in the center of town. Béla will be recognized, but I can preserve my anonymity. I am to visit the butcher and say a coded message, and then go to the baker and say another code, and then someone will seek me out. The dealer intercepts me near the flower vendor.

  “Penicillin,” I say. “Enough for a sick child.”

  He laughs at the impossibility of my request. “There’s no penicillin here,” he says. “I’ll have to fly to London. I can leave today. Return tomorrow. It’ll cost.” The price he names is twice the amount Béla has wrapped in newspaper and put in my purse.

  I don’t waver. I say what I will pay him. I say the exact amount I carry. “It must be done. If you don’t go, I’ll find someone else.” I think of the guard the day we left Auschwitz, my cartwheel, his wink. I have to speak to the part of this man that will cooperate with me. “You see this bracelet?” I pull up my sleeve to reveal the gold bracelet that I have worn every day since Marianne’s birth.

  He nods. Maybe he imagines how it will look on his wife or girlfriend’s wrist. Maybe he is mentally calculating the price he can get for it.

  “My husband gave this to me when our daughter was born. Now I am giving you the opportunity to save our daughter’s life.”