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sagging doors.
    The remaining contents of drawers were strewn on the floor, items nobody wanted: a single glove, a dried inkpot, a box of clarinet reeds, a tub of skin lotion, a ball of twine, candle stubs. And yet to Sarah this valueless debris seemed as precious as heirlooms.
    She spent the first day of her return in tears, moving from room to room. Toward early evening, she tried to tidy up. She returned the objects to their places, hanging the glove on a hook in the hallway, sliding the inkpot against the wall where her father’s desk had been. She scraped wax drippings from the floor with her fingernails, and used her head scarf to wipe all the doorknobs and faucet heads. She scrubbed the door frame where a brass mezuzah had been pried away, reciting the Sh’ma as she touched her fingers to the bare wood.
    Near midnight, she sealed up the windows as best she could and set up a bed and lantern in the kitchen near the wood stove. She ignored the scuttling sounds coming from the closet and rested her head on a folded towel. When she dimmed the lantern, the discoloured patches on the walls stood out like holes made by a giant fist. She filled them with her memory, creating ghost portraits of her parents and grandparents. She stared at each one of them until she could not imagine the walls without them.
    Sarah’s return to her village elicited total astonishment. She had vanished from the streets and shops of the town and now she had reappeared. She was a spectre, Lazarus returned from the dead, a phantom of the wind. The man at the dairy turned down his radio and stared when she walked in. His mouth gaped. He extended his hand as if reaching to touch, to prove she was solid, then stopped himself. A former schoolmate looked at her and then, without breaking her pace, crossed the street to avoid passing her. Many of them rememberedthe morning the town ghetto was emptied and the Jews were told to meet at the village school, where they were taken to the trains. Sarah’s existence forced them to recall what they had seen and not seen, how they had watched and how they had looked away. Her survival had the double effect of both allaying their guilt (she was alive) and intensifying it (she was alive in spite of their inaction).
    Sarah knew that she was an unwanted reminder of shameful times, fated to become the conspicuous Jew, to be either pilloried or patronized, treated with too little or too much kindness. Yet she had to remain in the village, a survivor praying for the return of other survivors. The looks of curiosity, of pity, of disdain were the price one paid for waiting in a world that preferred to forget.
    Waiting was Sarah’s way of warding off a conclusion, of delaying the pain of final knowledge. A state of permanent suspension that might have driven others to madness kept Sarah from falling apart. The shock of the war never lessened, but as time passed, Sarah learned that it was possible to form a kinship with even the most shattering of absences. Her shoes resounded across the open floor as she went about keeping house.
    A month after her return, Sarah removed an old door bolt from the basement and brought it upstairs, to protect herself in her new, old home.
    H OW CAN I TRUTHFULLY know the lives of people I have never met? I reassure myself I am as good a detective as any. After all, it has become a life work reconstructing other people’s stories. I spend each day before my mountain of scraps, and imagine.
    When Andrei first told me about his mother what I imagined was this: one girl among hundreds of thousands of silhouettes set againsta vast plain of packed snow. I saw the crunch of feet, the march of death. The recesses of the mind are full of the grim images of history waiting to be summoned, and this image possessed me—the figure of a girl trudging along an icy path, slowly fading into the swirling snow.
    “I’m remembering those newsreels we were shown in school about the liberation of the camps, but