An Afterlife. Frances Bartkowski

of Jews. The next morning they were to see the doctor. Ilya for his lungs, and Ruby for her belly. You needed a clean bill of health to leave Germany, and everybody spent time getting one piece of paper or another signed, affidavits stamped. Everybody waited. They waited for letters from ancient relatives and distant cousins in places they could remember hearing their parents pronounce before the war: Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Milwaukee—names from long ago.

      • • •

      Ruby waited patiently for the tub to fill up with hot water, as hot as she could get it out of the faucet. She was also boiling a pot of water to add to the tub. A hot bath. Whenever possible, she would wait to take her bath in the late morning when the sun might be shining right into the room, so she could be warm in the water and a bit warm, too, on her back. She began to do her best to get the tight curls of her hair all wet and as clean as possible with this soap that was all you had for your face, and your dirty underwear, too. It wasn’t easy to find time to stay there a little bit longer, because more than a dozen of the women did their best to share what little they had of water and heat and privacy. Today was a good day! It seemed that nobody was hanging around, letting the next one know that they would be rushing to get in as soon as you got out. It wasn’t a place where they were especially nice to each other. Everybody had their mishegass or just their wishes that they insisted be respected when it came to getting naked, even though you couldn’t say that modesty was such a big deal for most. How they had lived not so long ago made modesty seem a relic, and they weren’t facing death any more, but it was still a world of too many of them in too little space. She hurried to get dry and back to the room she and Mala were sharing for now.

      The pitiful piece of broken mirror reflected back to her that she was fit to be seen now with her hair pulled back tight, wearing her royal blue blouse and gray sweater. She’d rely on one of the long windows of the dining hall to show her if she was put together properly on her way to work.

      It was Tuesday morning and Ruby was headed to the camp office. Those rooms were usually warmer than the rooms where they slept. It wasn’t more than a five-minute walk past the huge gray warehouse, now used to feed dozens of them in the evenings; there it was always colder inside than out. In some of the smaller buildings where they slept, conditions were better than before but crowded, dirty. Some women worked on burlap sacks to make long drapes to put over the windows that let in light, but also cold air. She was lucky. She could type. She knew Polish, Yiddish, German and had long ago learned just enough English to have this job. And every day she learned more. Working here, she got to know the one German doctor and two of the American army doctors who were working with the Verschleppte, the DP’s, as they were called, to get permission to leave Germany. Everybody waited to leave—for Palestine, Eretz Israel, Canada, or America. There were some who wanted to go to France, and some to Australia and New Zealand. But mostly it was Palestine and America. They could list their choices, and mostly they were assured their first choice, but who knew when? The ones who compromised and said they would go anywhere often left the soonest. Everyone argued endlessly about these destinations anytime the subject came up. Canada took you out of the fight. Getting to Palestine was the most chaotic—war there, paperwork shoddy and slow here. The British agencies were handling most of that. The Americans and Canadians worked more efficiently together. But saying you were bound for “Israel” showed your Jewish heart and the willingness to wait for permission and approval, and it could keep you waiting—for some it was already a couple of years now.

      You could almost guess who would choose Palestine over America. The ones like Izzy, who found time in every day to study Torah with the few old men who were left, and a few young boys. Izzy knew America called for business, talk, selling and buying—it was all about making a living. In Palestine, Israel—whatever you chose to call it—you could find couples, families who had gotten there already. Their letters said they had a little shul. And there were those wild Zionists who were there from before the war, like Ruby’s Aunt Masha. The letters they sent made it sound like Paradise; they’d gone there to make it so. So proud they were, it made Ruby wonder. Her aunt’s letters made it sound like a good but hard life, and there was war there. That cast a long shadow that troubled these stories for Ruby.

      Ruby looked at the photo that Aunt Masha had sent her and that she kept above her desk—a date palm orchard south of Jerusalem. It was like a poem, this photo. The shadows and light it caught told her she’d never been anywhere like this. The sunniest summer day in the country in Poland before the war was never so filled with light like this. The picture was taken in the shade, but what gave it light was the desert that she could imagine just beyond the frame. Her aunt Masha had left Poland for Palestine when Ruby and her twin sister, Pearl, were about ten years old. Ruby loved Masha, and remembering summers picking raspberries in the country with her was an image that had kept Ruby going in the work camps and death camps. No surprise that Masha would find her way to more sun and picking dates.

      Ruby had a vague sense it was a man Masha loved who got her to go so far away from home. The stories Ruby’s mother and the aunts told about Masha were a mix of curiosity, envy, and scandal. A letter from Masha was always a special occasion. They would be read aloud a few times to different groups of family and friends. Ruby remembered that Masha’s letters told funny and alluring stories. The sound of the telephone brought Ruby back to work from her daydreaming.

      It was a worker at the JOINT office in Munich on the line. The connection between them was not as good as some days; the crackling noises in her ears made Ruby a bit irritable.

      “Could you speak a bit slower, please? I am hearing your voice but it’s sounding far away and fast.” Ruby tried to explain her side of the conversation, because she needed to write things down even as they spoke to each other. Between the language, the noise, and the need to get things right, Ruby was doing her best to make the conditions more favorable for understanding each other. Ruby thought she heard that lists were coming by mail to the Landsberg camp office of how many places were opening in different countries for the next month. This was the kind of news everybody waited for. And Ruby would get to spread some of the news later. In the meantime, she took notes, and did her best to keep up with the mix of German and English this American woman was speaking. In person Ruby did better understanding the Americans. On the telephone she had to pay very close attention to the sounds and the tone of voice to be sure she wasn’t missing anything important, and that wasn’t so easy when the connection was bad like it was this morning.

      Ruby wanted the decision to go easy for her and Ilya. She’d be happy either way. With Aunt Masha in Palestine, or with Fanya and Jakob, their closest friends, in America. As long as she had Ilya, everything would be all right. Aunt Masha would be an anchor to the past, to the family, to Poland. But going to America would keep the four of them together like they were here, now. They all got along so well. And their lives were so much alike, and Jakob was a link to home, to Krakow. They didn’t have friends in common because he was a few years older than Ruby and Pearl, and a few years younger than her brother, Max. But they knew the same shops, the park, the schools and synagogues, and the train station. They reminisced sometimes about their childhood dreams of where they would go if they could take the train to anywhere. Jakob said he always imagined seeing Vienna, and Ruby, Paris.

      It wasn’t yet dark. Church bells were ringing six o’clock. Ruby could smell bread baking as the walk to her room took her by the bakery just across from the entrance to the Kaserne. The other smell this first chilly evening was of wood heating somebody’s home. She was going home—but it was only to the barracks, where nobody felt at home, but they wanted better words for where they slept and sometimes ate and talked their hearts out. At those moments Ruby was the one who would remind a complainer how good they had it compared to before.

      Not that she didn’t have her own list of griefs and grievances.

      Later that night, Ruby and Fanya took up the tiresome problem of Ilya’s sister.

      “That Sadie, she won’t let Ilya go. Here she is going off to Israel with Aaron and the baby, but still she does everything to make him feel like a bad brother,” Ruby lamented. She worked the dull knife as best she could through the dark bread. She was making tea for the two of them, and the good butter she had found would make the bread tastier. She kept at the slicing, till Fanya’s hand let her know she