She did not understand why these two bothered her so much. Why should she be offended by the irony of a Polish gentile trying to pass as a Jew? Maybe Esther had promised the father that she would take the boy to Palestine, which Zorah supposed would make her a Zionist hero.
Or maybe she disliked Esther just because she was a Pole. The Poles had been just as monstrous as the Germans. The Nazis did not require her neighbors to spit on her family the day they were taken away. They had spit again when she returned, after the war, to see if anyone else had survived.
Her father had been right on this point: the Polish people were blockheaded boors who hated Jews from the soles of their feet. I do not have to be nice to Poles, Zorah decided. Not even a Pole with a half-Jewish child in Palestine.
A low groan rose from the bed beside her. Esther was sitting straight up on her bed, panting and clutching at her stomach. Grabbing her dress, she rushed to the door.
Zorah realized she would not get much sleep that night, which meant she would be too tired to finish the story she was working through: an ancient fable woven around the first chapters of Genesis, recounting an argument between the sun and the moon about which was to be more powerful.
She glanced over at Jacob and saw that he was lying facedown on Esther’s pillow, clutching the sides of the bed as though it were a life raft. Zorah watched his shoulders heave as he sobbed without making a sound.
He is afraid his mother has left him, she thought, and counted to sixty, waiting for someone to do something for the boy. He might even think she has been killed.
Zorah counted to sixty twice more before she got up and sat beside him.
“Your mother will return soon,” she whispered.
His body went rigid.
“She went to the toilet. She will come back.”
He turned his head. Tears glittered in his lashes.
Zorah ran her hand back and forth across his back, slowly and evenly, not stopping until he turned his face to the other cheek and she felt her hand rise and fall over a sigh that released him into sleep.
She let her hand rest where it lay, his heart keeping time beneath her fingers.
Anger burned at the back of Zorah’s throat. She wanted nothing to do with this. Nothing at all.
She had kept herself alive through wretched days and worse nights by holding fast to a single thought: If I forget thee, my slaughtered companions and my murdered kin, may my hands wither and my tongue lose the power of speech.
She had seen evidence, cruel and sad, that the world was an instrument of destruction. Bearing witness to that simple truth had kept her from madness. Nothing else was required.
But Jacob’s beating heart had something else to say. Through the tips of her fingers it insisted, Come, let us go up to the mountain and sing the song of the child who sleeps and trusts.
The pulse under her hand was the irrefutable proof that destruction had an opposite number whose name was … Zorah could not think what to call it, but her mouth flooded with the memory of a white peach she had eaten as a little girl, sliced by her mother, shared with her brother. The sky was clear and blue after a summer rain. They were sitting at the window looking out at the sturdy brick building across the street where her friend Anya lived. The building had been bombed to dust with many of the souls inside, but the memory of the peach and the light on the bricks and Anya’s gap-toothed grin remained with her, still beautiful.
Zorah looked at the number on her forearm, which rose and fell, slowly and gently, with Jacob’s sleeping breath, and the word came to her.
The opposite of destruction is creation.
A gray, foggy light had begun to filter into the barrack by the time Esther returned. When she saw Zorah sitting on her bed, staring at Jacob as though he might disappear at any moment, she gasped.
“He is fine,” Zorah whispered in Polish. “He woke up and I told him that you would be back.”
“Thank you,” said Esther. “You are very kind.”
Zorah shook her head. “I am not kind.”
Later in the morning, Esther took Jacob to the children’s Hebrew class, which was taught by an earnest young woman with a toothy smile and a withered arm. The students, fascinated by the strange combination of cheerfulness and deformity, were quiet and obedient in her presence and soaked up her lessons effortlessly. But instead of staying to watch as she usually did, Esther left him there.
She found Zorah sitting on her cot with a book and said, “I wished to tell you that I am sorry for last night. The food here does not sit well with me.”
“None of us is used to this food,” said Zorah, without looking up. “Especially in the beginning.”
“It is not only the food that bothers me, miss. I am worried about a subject, that is to say …” Esther stammered. “There is something I need to know, which keeps me from being able to … I’m sorry to bother you, but if I could have just a moment of your time. There is a question. I mean to say, I have a question of great concern.”
“I can’t tell you anything about getting out of this place,” Zorah said. “I’ve been stuck here longer than anyone.”