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this house and these companions. He needed an instruction manual to tell him how to wait calmly for food, how to talk with confidence to a soldier, how to sleep.
    He returned to the bed. When they were children, his mother had given each of them a piece of chocolate in bed each night, in the dark. After her death, when he was sent east to live with his grandparents, his grandmother did the same. Now, the memory of the tastemade him close his eyes, trying to fool himself into sleep. Had his brothers and sisters been given chocolate in the homes of the aunts and cousins where they had been sent? He had not thought to wonder before this moment. After his father remarried and he was returned to his home in Katowice, he did not remember chocolate. Well, he was already an adult then, almost fifteen, and his grandfather was ailing, his grandmother preparing to live with one of her surviving daughters. His mother’s family knew how to take in the grieving and the abandoned without making them feel as guests or burdens.
    Pavel let his eyes close, tried to push into his mind pleasant images, half-conscious dreams. He saw his grandmother, standing and smiling, blind to the men loading wagons with her precious possessions. Silver, china, his grandfather’s leather-bound Talmud, everything in piles like so many old rags. No, his grandmother did not see. Instead she called out to him, her voice more aged than he remembered. Eat, eat, you rascal, she said in Polish. Her croaked words caused him to give a nervous laugh, and his mouth began to itch. Her hand held out a bit of almond cake, and he knew that the almonds had come from the tree that had burst into blossom behind the house. His grandmother’s voice turned softer, to Yiddish: Eat. Skinny boy. Do you understand?
    Yes, he answered. But her words seemed to bounce against his ears and skull without falling inside him.
    Eat, eat. Do you understand?
    Yes, he repeated. And he almost did. But now it was she who did not seem to hear him. Her face was removed, yellow, as in a picture or film. Yes, Grandmother, yes. He said it in every language he thought that she knew, Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew, German. Yes, yes.
    Eat, she continued, her voice in a singsong. Eat, eat. My yingele , my little one, my lamb, eat.
     
    A FTER A MONTH OR two Fela was stronger, her legs no longer swollen, and she agreed to set out with Pavel on her new bicycle to the camp. They filled their satchels with cheese and bread, as well as a bit of gold, on a warm September day. There was no reason to be afraid; already she could move the bicycle in the side roads, and they would walk part of the way if she became tired.
    Look how well you have learned, said Pavel, riding behind her. Very steady.
    I had a good teacher, she called out.
    They stopped to eat in a clearing near a half-repaired train station, a quiet area not far from a bustling one. Fela looked past the line of birches and smoothed their blanket on the grass.
    I’m sorry I’m so slow. Really, I am very afraid. She laughed with a little hiccup, looked behind the row of trees again.
    It is safe with me, said Pavel. Two is a stronger number than one.
    She said nothing.
    Pavel said, We are together. He took her hand.
    She moved her hand from his. Pavel felt something move inside his ribs, a wind of fear. But he pushed it down. They sat silently. He waited a moment, then took her hand again.
    Again she pulled her hand away. He looked at it as she drew it into her lap: white, small, the knuckles slightly chapped.
    Pavel, she said. I am looking for someone.
    Ah, said Pavel. She was looking at him straight in the eyes.
    He managed a soft expression. But really he was surprised. With her resting in the house, her fear to go outside—how could she look without looking? He had thought—but he turned away from her, faced the bicycles, the frames flat on the grass, the spokes turning slowly in the breeze.
    Finally Fela spoke. And you? You are such a good-looking man.