My father struck a match stub and lit a lamp, or maybe a candle.
They looked at me, and looked and looked. My mother wept silently. My father covered his face with his hands and smoothed back his hair, leaving his hands on his forehead and eyes—a gesture that stayed with him till the day he died. His pale, high forehead invaded his dark, straight hair in two deep gulfs.
My mother picked me up, put me on the massive desk, undressed me and said, Ilonka, Ilusia, Ilitska. But I was Irenka. I knew that I was Irenka. I knew that I was Irena Seremet.
I saw and I was invisible.
In the light of the candle or the lamp—I recall a foul smell—the woman began inspecting me, checking every little part of my body.
My mother and father hadn’t seen me for months, and despite all the proof, the photographs and the drawings that Hania Seremet sent them, they hadn’t believed I was still alive. Every little part of my body astonished my mother profoundly. How healthy I was, how tanned. How many sores I had on my hands, how deep they were—my knuckles were scraped down to the bone from rubbing potatoes on the sharp, rusty grater. How shiny my cheeks were, so round and red. Like two apples, she said. How hard the skin on the bottom of my feet was—I’d run around barefoot in the village. How dirty I was.
And how I was teeming with lice.
She walked around me over and over again, and I wanted very much not to be there.
My father stood and watched, occasionally putting his palms back on his forehead and eyes.
My mother and father, who’d been in their hiding place for days on end, were pale, exhausted, and starved. My father had very large eyes, and my mother no longer had teeth. My father had pulled out all her gold crowns and bridges, the ones her brother Leibek, a dentist, had fitted her with after she’d come back ill from her pioneering escapade in Palestine.
My father had pulled out her bridges and crowns with his pocketknife.
My father’s expensive, amazing, ultramodern pocketknife, the Swiss pocketknife he was so proud of, the first thing he’d bought for himself with his own money. My father had worked from the time he was a child, and others always needed the money he earned more than he did—his widowed mother Rachela Goldman, his younger brother Henryk Goldman, and his baby brother David.
That pocketknife was the height of sophistication. A remarkable tool that I found endlessly magical. The most wonderful in the world. Countless parts popped out of it.
Some of them had functions the world had never known.
From the time she was a child, my mother suffered from problems with her teeth, which got much worse when she was a pioneer in Palestine. She immigrated there with members of the Hashomer Hatsair youth movement. She paved roads and lived in Kibbutz Mishmar Haemek and Kibbutz Beit Alfa until she had to abandon the man she loved, Avreim’ele, along with her ideals and her girlfriends Clara and Ziga, because she had to go back to Poland to recover from a terrible fever she’d caught, and because her sensitive, almost transparent alabaster skin and her gorgeous Titian red hair could not survive the deathtrap of the Mediterranean climate.
Her good health was restored in Poland, but the teeth she’d lost in Palestine weren’t, and her older brother, Leibek Gruber, who’d been to dental school in Berlin—or was it Vienna—made gold bridges and crowns for her. The Germans murdered Leibek.
In Krakow, after the war, a dentist who had gone to dental school with Leibek pulled out the miserable stumps left in my mother’s mouth and made false teeth for her. That dentist was my worst nightmare, even worse than the Spanish Inquisition I’d read about in books—but that was after the war, before we immigrated to Palestine.
The gold of the crowns and bridges Uncle Leibek had made for my mother was given to Hania Seremet, and that gold bought me a few more weeks in the village, in the fresh air, the wide open spaces, the sunlight, on the side of life, the Aryan side. My good health, my tan, my apple-red cheeks, my bruised knuckles, the hard skin on the bottoms of my feet—all those disappeared in a flash in my parents’ hiding place.
The lice remained.
I don’t like all this digging up of the past.
I ABSOLUTELY DID NOT WANT TO BE THERE WITH MY MOTHER and father, two people I didn’t remember, almost strangers, whom I didn’t like at all.
My mother began asking me all sorts of questions; she asked, asked, and asked. I didn’t understand her language. I’d forgotten. They didn’t understand me. I’d come back speaking a dialect, a rural language in which every sentence ended with a mew of surprise: ta-ee-ou!!!
I wasn’t much of a talker anyway, and I only answered questions when I had no choice.
My mother took a few small, damp rags and began wiping me all over, even inside my ears, even behind my ears, even between my toes. My cute little toes, my family. Fat father big toe, mother middle toe, and their three children: two slightly bigger children and a sweet baby—my little toe.
Those pink toes were like little birds. On the underside of each one was a small bump, like a tiny beak. Sometimes, when I had something to draw with, I drew little faces on my toenails. I liked to draw them on my palms too, and then distort them to give them funny expressions.
But when I saw the row of blue numbers on Uncle Isser Laufer’s arm—he always wore a hat, and under it a kind of upside-down saucer made of soft velvet—I immediately stopped drawing on my body.
I saw.
I saw it, that row of numbers, when Uncle Isser Laufer rolled up his sleeve and wound a strip of black leather around his arm and attached a black box to his forehead, then wrapped a striped white shawl around his shoulders and swayed forward and back and sideways so strangely, not exactly a respectable way for a grown-up to behave, as he mumbled and made strange sounds.
Unlike the drawings I drew on my toenails and palms, the numbers drawn on Uncle Isser Laufer’s arm couldn’t be erased, even after he washed it. They were there forever. And from then on, I never drew anything on my skin or body again.
That was when there was no more war in the world and my mother and father and I lived in a room in an apartment with other people and my mother kept saying, saying, and saying that without her, we all would have been destroyed. She was right. All sorts of people began visiting us then. Uncle Isser Laufer also appeared suddenly and lived with us for a while. My mother said that before the war, he had a family, a wife and a child, but now it was just him. And the people who came, ugly, gray, tired, and sad, had those numbers. They would roll up their sleeves and show them to my mother and father.
I didn’t look, but I saw. And they told us. They told us everything. Unbelievable stories that happened in the world. I didn’t look, but I saw. I didn’t listen, but I heard.
I hated all those ugly people. Uncle Isser Laufer was the only one I liked. I loved to breathe the smell that came from him, a sad, lovely smell, like the fragrance of lilacs.
My mother scrubbed and wiped my whole body with the damp rags. It wasn’t very pleasant, being with those two people I didn’t know, didn’t remember, didn’t understand, who were shocked and amazed by me, who were so excited to see me, who tried to wash and clean and fix me. I felt as if something was very wrong with me.
I didn’t want to be there.
When the dirt that had accumulated on my body during all those months in the village—in the pigpen, in the straw-lined coffin I slept in—when all that dirt had been wiped away, the lice had their turn. And it was wonderful.
My mother spread a newspaper on a chair, bent my head so that my hair streamed downward, and began combing it with a fine-tooth comb. It hurt at first. My hair was full of knots. But at some point, the lice started to fall out. A shower of lice fell onto the newspaper, thousands of lice, millions, and every time a louse fell onto the newspaper it made a gentle tapping sound. A shower of taps. After a while, the