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  By the time we reach Košice, Marianne is asleep in my arms. There is still no sign of Béla. I scan the platform for Klara. Is she here to meet us? Will Csicsi come? Has she understood the danger we’re in? What preparations has she made in the hours since we spoke?

  Just before the train pulls away from the Košice station, the compartment door opens, and Béla rushes in, giddy from adrenaline. “I have a surprise!” he calls before there is time to quiet him. Marianne opens her eyes, she is disoriented, she fusses. I rock her, side to side, I reach for my husband. My husband who is safe.

  “Don’t you want to see my surprise?” He pulls the door open again. And there are my sister Klara, and Csicsi, and a suitcase, and her violin.

  “Any seats free in here?” Csicsi asks.

  “Little one!” Klara says, as she pulls me to her chest.

  Béla wants to tell how he evaded the police search in Prešov, and Csicsi wants to recount how they discovered one another here in Košice, but I am superstitious. It seems like counting chickens before they’ve hatched. In myths, nothing good comes from gloating. You have to let the gods maintain the image of their singular power. I haven’t even told Béla yet about the ring, about how I got him out of jail. He hasn’t asked.

  The train is moving again. Marianne falls back asleep with her head on Béla’s lap. Csicsi and Klara whisper their plans: Vienna is the perfect place to await their visas for Australia, the time is right to leave Europe, to join Imre in Sydney. I can’t let myself picture Vienna yet. I hold my breath at every station. Spišska Nová Ves. Poprad-Tatry. Liptovský Mikuláš. Žilina. Three more stops before Vienna. Trenčín yields no catastrophe. No crisis at Trnava. We’re almost there. At Bratislava, the border crossing, the place of our honeymoon, the stop drags on. Marianne wakes up, feeling the stillness.

  “Sleep, baby, sleep,” Béla says.

  “Hush,” I say. “Hush.”

  On the platform, in the dark, we see a dozen Slovakian soldiers walking toward the train. They spread out, approaching the cars in pairs. Soon they will be knocking on our door. They will ask for our identification. If they don’t recognize Béla’s face, they will see his name on his passport. It is too late to hide.

  “I’ll be back,” Csicsi says. He pushes out into the aisle, we hear his voice, the conductor’s, we see him step down onto the platform just as the soldiers reach the door. I will never know what Csicsi says to them. I will never know if money or jewels change hands. All I know is that after a series of excruciating moments, the soldiers tip their hats at Csicsi, turn, and walk back to the station. How did I face a selection line, sometimes every day, sometimes more than that? At least in a selection line the verdict comes quickly.

  Csicsi returns to the compartment. My heart has stopped its frenzied beating but I can’t bring myself to ask him how he convinced the soldiers to turn away. Our safety feels too fragile to count on. If we speak our relief out loud we risk destroying it. We are silent as the train moves on to Vienna.

  * * *

  In Vienna we are little drops in the flow of 250,000 seeking refuge and passage to Palestine or North America since the end of the war. We take shelter at the Rothschild Hospital in the American-occupied part of the city. The hospital is being used as a center for refugees fleeing Eastern Europe, and the five of us are assigned to a room with three other families. Though it is already late at night, Béla leaves the room even before I have settled Marianne into a bed. He is intent on contacting Bandi and Marta, the friends from home with whom we have been planning to go to Israel, to tell them where we are. I rub Marianne’s back while she sleeps, listening to Klara’s whispered conversation with the other women who share our room. Here at the Rothschild Hospital are thousands like us, all awaiting help from Bricha. When we sat at our table eating sauerkraut soup with Bandi and Marta on New Year’s Eve, hatching the plan to start a new life in Israel, we were building something, not running away. But now, in a crowded room with other refugees, I realize the meaning of Bricha. Bricha is Hebrew for “flight.” We are in flight.

  Is our plan a sound one? The women in our room at Rothschild tell us about their friends who have already immigrated to Israel. It’s not an easy place to be, they say. After a year, the Arab-Israeli War is finally winding down, but the country is still a war zone. People live in tents, do what they must in a time of deep political unrest and continuing hostilities between Arabs and Jews. That is not the life we prepared for when we packed our boxcar. What good will our silver and china be in a tent surrounded by violent conflict? And what of the jewels sewn into Marianne’s clothes? They’re worth only what others will pay for them. Who wants to eat on gold plates that bear our name? It’s not the idea of hard work or poverty that creates a little drag of resistance in my stomach. It’s the reality of more war. Why start again if it yields nothing more than the same suffering?

  In the dark, waiting for Béla to return, I open the papers from the American consulate, the papers I was so adamant that Béla retrieve in Prague, that have crossed the border with us, strapped against my back. Two Czechoslovakian families qualified for immigration to America. Just two. The other family, Béla learned when he went to Prague, has already left Europe, they chose to immigrate to Israel instead of America. It is our turn, if we choose to go. I turn the papers around in my hand, look at the words, blurry in the dim light, wait for them to crumble in my hands, to rearrange. “America, Dicuka,” I can hear my mother say. America is the hardest country to get into. The quotas are fierce. But if the letter is not a fraud, a hoax, we have a way in. Yet our fortune is in Israel. The letter must be a false invitation, I convince myself. No one wants you if you’re penniless.

  Béla comes in breathless, waking our roommates. He has managed to contact Bandi in the middle of the night. Tomorrow night our friends will travel to Vienna, we will meet them at the train station the following morning, and together we will travel to Italy where Bandi, with the help of Bricha, has secured our passage to Haifa by ship. We will go to Israel with Bandi and Marta as we have been planning since New Year’s Eve. We will build our macaroni factory. We are lucky to be leaving Vienna almost as soon as we have arrived. We won’t be waiting years, as Klara and Csicsi might have to in order to go to Australia.

  But I don’t feel joyful at the prospect of leaving Vienna in thirty-six hours, of having fled the postwar chaos of Prešov only to bring my daughter back to a volatile conflict zone. I sit on the edge of the bed, with the papers from the American consulate in my lap. I run my fingers over the ink. Béla watches me.

  “It’s a little late,” he says. That is his only comment.

  “You don’t think we should discuss this?”

  “What is there to discuss? Our fortune—our future—is in Israel.”

  He’s right. Half right. Our fortune is in Israel, probably baking in a boxcar in the desert. Our future isn’t. It doesn’t exist yet. Our future is the sum of an equation that is part intention and part circumstance. And our intentions could shift. Or split.

  When I finally lie down on the bed, Klara whispers to me across Marianne’s sleeping body. “Little one,” she says, “listen to me. You have to love what you are doing. Otherwise you shouldn’t do it. It isn’t worth it.” What is she telling me to do? To argue with Béla over something we have already decided? To leave him? She is the one I expected—maybe counted on—to defend my choices to me, the ones I have already made. I know she doesn’t want to go to Australia. But she will go to be with her husband. She of all people should understand why I am going to Israel even though I don’t want to. But for the first time in our lives she is telling me not to do as she does, not to follow her lead.

  * * *

  In the morning, Béla leaves right away to procure the things we will need for our journey to Israel—suitcases, coats, clothes, other necessities provided for us refugees by the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the American charity that supports Rothschild. I go out in the city with Marianne, the document
s from Prague tucked into my purse the way Magda used to hide away sweets—part temptation, part succor. What does it mean that we are the one Czech family allowed to immigrate? Who will go if we decline? No one? The Israel plan is a good one. It is the best we could do with what we had. But now there’s an opportunity that didn’t exist when we committed to the plan. Now we’ve been offered a new possibility, one that doesn’t involve living in tents in a war zone.

  I can’t stop myself. Without Béla’s permission, without his knowledge, I ask for directions to the U.S. consulate, I walk there with Marianne in my arms. I will at least satisfy the possibility that the papers are a mistake or a hoax.

  “Congratulations,” the officer says when I show him the documents, “you can go as soon as your visas are processed.” He gives me the paperwork for our visa applications.

  “How much will it cost?”

  “Nothing, ma’am. You’re refugees. You sail courtesy of your new country.”

  I feel dizzy. It’s the good kind of dizzy, the way I felt the night before when the train left Bratislava with my family still intact. I take the applications back to our room at Rothschild, I show them to Klara and Csicsi, I study the questions, looking for the catch. It doesn’t take long to find one: Have you ever had tuberculosis (TB)? Béla has. He hasn’t had symptoms since 1945, but it doesn’t matter how healthy he is now. You have to submit X-rays with the application. There are scars in his lungs. The damage is evident. And TB is never cured; like trauma, it could flare at any time.

  Israel, then. Tomorrow.

  Klara watches me put the applications under the mattress. “Remember when I was ten and I got accepted to Juilliard?” she says. “And Mama wouldn’t let me go? Go to America, Dicu. Mama would want you to.”

  “But the TB,” I say. I am trying to be loyal, not to the law but to Béla’s wishes, to my husband’s choice.

  “When you can’t go in through a door, go in through a window,” Klara reminds me.

  * * *

  Night comes. Our second night, our last night in Vienna. I wait until Marianne is asleep, until Klara and Csicsi and the other families have gone to bed. I sit with Béla in two chairs by the door. Our knees touch. I try to memorize his face so that I can recite its contours to Marianne. His full forehead, the perfect arcs of his eyebrows, the kindness of his mouth.

  “Precious Béla,” I begin, “what I am about to say won’t be easy to hear. There is no way around how hard it will be. And there is no way to talk me out of what I will say.”

  His beautiful forehead creases. “What’s going on?”

  “If you meet Bandi and Marta to go to Israel tomorrow, as we planned, I won’t hold it against you. I won’t try to talk you out of it. But I have made my choice. I will not go with you. I am taking Marchuka to America.”

  PART III

  FREEDOM

  CHAPTER 11

  Immigration Day

  Immigration day, October 28, 1949, was the most optimistic and promising day of my life. After living in the crowded room at the Rothschild Hospital for a month, and spending another five months in a tiny apartment in Vienna, waiting for our visas, we were on the threshold of our new home. A sunny blue sky lit the Atlantic as we stood on the deck of the USAT General R. L. Howze. Lady Liberty came into view, tiny in the distance like the little figurine in a music box. Then New York City became visible, a skyline emerging, intricate, where only horizon had been for weeks. I held Marianne up against the deck rail.

  “We’re in America,” I told her. “The land of the free.”

  And I thought we finally were free. We had taken the risk. Now safety and opportunity were our rewards. It seemed a just and simple equation. Thousands of miles of ocean separated us from barbed wire, police searches, camps for the condemned, camps for the displaced. I did not yet know that nightmares know no geography, that guilt and anxiety wander borderless. For twenty minutes on the upper deck of a passenger ship, standing in the October sun, my daughter in my arms, New York in sight, I believed the past couldn’t touch me here. Magda was already there. In July she had finally received her visa and sailed to New York, where she now lived with Aunt Matilda and her husband in the Bronx. She worked in a toy factory, putting the heads on little giraffes. It takes an Elefánt to make a giraffe, she had joked in a letter. In another hour, maybe two, I would embrace my sister, my brave sister, her jokes at the ready to transcend pain. As Marianne and I counted the whitecaps between the ship and solid land, as I counted my blessings, Béla came up from the tiny cabin where he was packing the last of our things.

  My heart swelled again with tenderness for my husband. In the weeks of travel, in the little cot in the room that rocked and bobbed across black water, through black air, I felt more passion for him than ever before in our three years together, more than on the train on our honeymoon when we conceived Marianne.

  Back in May, in Vienna, he had been unable to decide, unable to choose, up until the last minute. He stood behind a pillar at the train station where he was to meet Bandi and Marta, suitcase in hand. He saw our friends arrive, saw them searching the platform for us. He continued to hide. He saw the train pull in, heard the announcement that passengers should board. He saw people getting onto the train. He saw Bandi and Marta at the door of a train car, waiting for him. Then he heard the clerk on the loudspeaker calling his name. He wanted to join our friends, he wanted to board the train and meet the ship and rescue the boxcar holding his fortune. But he was frozen there behind the pillar. The rest of the passengers filed on board, Bandi and Marta too. When the train doors closed, he finally forced himself into action. Against his better judgment, against all the bets he had made for what he hoped would be a safe and financially secure future, he took the biggest risk of his life. He walked away.

  Now, minutes away from our new life in America, nothing seemed deeper or more profound than that we had made the same choice, to relinquish security in favor of opportunity for our daughter, to start over together from scratch. To have his commitment to our daughter, to this new venture, to me, touched me deeply.

  And yet. (This “and yet” closing like a latch.) I had been ready to forsake our marriage in order to take Marianne to America. However painfully, I had been willing to sacrifice our family, our partnership—the very things Béla had been unable to accept losing. And so we began our new life on an unequal footing. I could feel that though his devotion to us could be measured in all that he had given up, he was still dizzy from what he had lost. And where I felt relief and joy, he felt hurt. Happy as I was to greet our new life, I could already feel that Béla’s loss put a dangerous pressure on all the unknowns ahead.

  So there was sacrifice at the heart of our choice. And there was also a lie: the report from the medical examiner, the X-rays we had pressed inside a folder with our visa applications. We couldn’t allow the ghost of Béla’s old illness, his TB, to deter our future, so Csicsi had posed as Béla and gone with me to the medical examiner. We now carried pictures of Csicsi’s chest, clear as spring water. When the naturalization officers cleared Béla for immigration, it would be Csicsi’s body and medical history they legitimized, another man’s body they determined to be sound.

  I wanted to breathe easily. To cherish our safety and good fortune as miracles, not guard them close and warily. I wanted to teach my daughter confidence in where she stood. There she was, hair whipping around her head, cheeks red from the wind. “Liberty!” she called, pleased with her new word. On a whim I took the pacifier that hung on a ribbon around her neck and threw it into the sea.

  If I had turned around, I might have seen Béla caution me. But I wasn’t looking. “We’re Americans now. American children don’t use pacifiers,” I said, heady and improvising, tossing my daughter’s one token of security like it was parade confetti. I wanted Marianne to be what I wanted to be: someone who fits in, who isn’t plagued by the idea of being different, of being flawed, of playing catch-up forever in a relentless race away from the claws
of the past.

  She didn’t complain. She was excited by the novelty of our adventure, amused by my strange act, accepting of my logic. In America we’d do as the Americans do (as if I knew a single thing about what Americans do). I wanted to trust my choice, our new life, so I denied any trace of sadness, any trace of fear. When I walked down the wooden ramp to our new homeland, I was already wearing a mask.

  I had escaped. But I wasn’t yet free.

  CHAPTER 12

  Greener

  November 1949. I board a city bus in Baltimore. Gray dawn. Wet streets. I am going to work, to the clothing factory, where I will spend all day cutting loose threads off the seams of little boys’ boxer shorts, paid 7¢ per dozen. The factory reminds me of the thread factory in Germany where Magda and I worked after we were taken from Auschwitz—dry, dusty air, cold concrete, machines clattering so loudly that when the forewoman speaks she must shout. “Minimize bathroom breaks!” she yells. But I hear the forewoman of the past, the one who told us we would be worked until we were all used up, and then killed. I work without stopping. To maximize my productivity, to maximize my meager pay. But also because to work without a break is an old necessity, a habit impossible to overthrow. And if I can keep the noise and the urgency around me at all times, I will not have to be alone for even a moment with my own thoughts. I work so hard that my hands shake and shake in the dark when I get home.

  Because Aunt Matilda and her husband didn’t have the space or resources to take in my family—Magda was already an extra mouth to feed—we have begun our new life not in the Bronx, as I had imagined, but in Baltimore, where we live with Béla’s brother George and his wife and two young daughters in a cramped walk-up apartment. George had been a well-known lawyer in Czechoslovakia, but in Chicago, where he first lived when he immigrated to America in the 1930s, he made a living as a Fuller Brush man, selling brushes and cleaning products door-to-door; now, in Baltimore, he sells insurance. Everything in George’s life is bitter, fear based, discouraged. He follows me through the rooms of the apartment, watching my every move, barking at me to close the coffee can more tightly. He is angry about the past—about having been attacked in Bratislava, and mugged in Chicago in his early immigrant days. And he’s angry about the present—he can’t forgive us for having arrived penniless, for having turned our backs on the Eger fortune. I feel so self-conscious in his presence that I can’t walk down the stairs without tripping.