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It’s not the white stone of Jerusalem that cousin Sonya wrote about in her letters, white stone tinged pink by the sun that’s kissed it for centuries, by the blood spilt for it and absorbed, over centuries, as its own. No, it’s the cold, grey stone of Europe that entraps me. Sun-starved stone under a low, grey sky. It will have my blood, but refuse to absorb it. My blood will puddle on its surface until a dog laps it up, until marching boots carry it to another place of butchery .
    I’m running for my life through a nameless city of Europe, running through a city of death. I’m running for my life, but death is gaining. I hear its boots behind me, its song, a drinking song. I turn blindly down an alley, a blind alley I see too late . Alongside me, two high walls of stone, and ahead a wall, also stone, with a heavy wooden door. The door is weathered grey. It matches the streets, the walls, the sky of the city. The markings on it are familiar, the scratched indentations to the left of the keyhole. I throw myself against it but it doesn’t yield. I hurl myself against the unyielding door as death approaches, its marching boots, its laughing, singing voice. I press my cheek against the door, and then it opens .
    Have I died, then? I don’t know. Can a person die in her dream and then wake the next morning to recall it? They were upon me, the door wouldn’t yield, and then it did. To Aunt Lottie’s courtyard in Krakow, where my mother would take me every summer, the clucking chicks and summer warmth, the notes of a piano filtering through the leafy cover .
    Is that what awaits me? A fragrant courtyard and summer warmth? The scent of ripening fruit and drifting fragments of music? If yes, then I fear I have no hope of survival. For why would I choose this, this fear and cold and hunger and mud? Why this pain, this futile task, if the summer courtyard of my childhood awaits me when I fail?
    Lily closed the notebook as she heard footsteps on the front stairs. She had already started to slip it under the mattress when she realized the steps weren’t Nathan’s. They were too heavy, too slow. Mr. Hausner from upstairs. He stopped briefly on the landing outside the Kramer apartment, then continued up thefinal flight, where she would hear his tread again later, pacing over her head half the night, back and forth, back and forth, more of a shuffle than a walk. She reopened the girl’s notebook, leafed past the pages she had already read, had read so often already since she had found it—taken it—that the images in them seemed to rise from her own memory.
    Who am I? A mound of mud in an autumn field. A pile of leaves to the side of a forest path. I tuck my hands beneath me as you pass, press my face into the earth. I’m a blur of motion out of the far corner of your eye, utter stillness by the time you fully turn your gaze. In your cities I’m a rat scurrying beneath the surface of your life. I hide in your sewers. I infect your dreams with pestilence. Vermin, you call me. Insect. Cur. Swine. Once I was a girl .
    Who are you? he asked me. He had uncovered me as I slept, pushed aside the layers of mud and leaves and lies to reveal me .
    He scraped the last of the leaves from between the blades of my shoulders, swept the crumbs of soil from my neck. I knew his touch, the brush of his fingers on my skin. I turned from the earth to face him and my entire field of vision filled with light, the dreadful day, the indifferent Polish sky. In the centre was a shadow, an absence in the shape of him, his broad shoulders, his curls in silhouette against the sky. He held something towards me. A potato? A piece of bread? I reached out to take it but my fingers closed on my own empty fist. I reached farther and my entire hand disappeared, my arm .
    A crack had appeared in the Polish day, a drawing back of the world along a ragged seam. I narrowed my eyes to make it out, this parting in the shape of him, this opening to someplace else