SARAH
Last night, Sarah poked her head into Sam’s room and saw a sight that made her throat tighten. David was reading to him, and it looked like Sam was truly listening, his eyes focusing on his father and not on some unseen point as they often were. Creeping back to the kitchen, she offered up a silent prayer of thanks.
Today is Friday, and Shabbat begins at sunset. After Sarah drops Sam at school, she goes home to prepare the challah, the sweet bread they break before they start the meal. As she’s not permitted to do any work between sunset tonight and sunset on Saturday, she needs to make sure everything’s ready. This means getting all the shopping done, as well as the food ready for the next day too. She enjoys the preparation for Shabbat almost more than Shabbat itself. There’s a comfort in the ritual. Counting out the candles, she places them in the candelabra.
She decides to do the housework before the shopping and cooking. First she tidies the kitchen, then she moves on to the sitting room and finally the bedrooms. As she makes their bed, she remembers all the sleepless nights spent praying that they would find Samuel, trying to work out how to track down the railroad worker at Drancy, the one with a long scar running down the side of his face, almost touching his eye. The Nazis were efficient with their record-keeping, so it wasn’t hard to get his name. The International Tracing Service was put on the case, but they were told it might take years. And it did.
The waiting and false hope was hard to bear, and after five long years, David told her that they had to stop, that they had to accept their loss. Sarah couldn’t seem to move forward. Sometimes when she closed her eyes she could still feel the silky softness of her baby’s head beneath her lips, could still smell his milky innocence. She didn’t feel that she could be complete again till she found him, and in her heart she knew he was alive. She could feel it, just like she could feel his heart beating when he was in her womb. David thought they should try for another child, but Sarah didn’t know how to tell him that her body felt alien to her, that it disgusted her. When she looked at herself in the mirror for the first time after Auschwitz, she thought she was looking at a ghost of the Sarah who had died there. She was unrecognizable. Bones protruded at odd angles, tufts of gray hair sprouted from her head, her eyes like hollows in a skull. This image of herself remained with her for a long time, and it was at least a year before she could look in a mirror again. She had to get to know herself again. And David. They were changed.
But time ticked by. Relentless and indifferent, weeks turning to months, months turning to years. Years as her child learned to love someone else as his mother, someone else as his father. She would sell her soul to have the last nine years of Samuel back.
She tries not to wallow in the sense of loss that she feels, tries to remember how lucky they’ve been compared to many others. They are alive, and their child is alive too. It’s so much more than they could have expected after they were taken to Drancy on that dark morning only two days after she’d given birth.
She wanders into Sam’s room, rearranging the books on his desk, folding his clothes, which are strewn across the floor, putting them away in the drawers and cupboards. She picks up his pillow, intending to smooth it out, but instead she breathes in its smell—the boyish odor of sweet sweat.
Quickly she puts the pillow back, telling herself to stop procrastinating. There is a lot to be accomplished today, but she’s so tired. She’ll rest for just five minutes; it will give her the energy to carry on. She lies on his bed, closing her eyes, breathing in the scent of him. A sense of peace comes over her, making her feel closer to her son, lying here on his empty bed, than she has since he arrived.
Opening her eyes, she feels ready to tackle the day’s chores. She gets up and lifts the sheets and blankets, tucking them in properly. A piece of purple paper catches her eye. Without thinking, she pulls it out and looks at it. It’s a letter.
She drops it as though it’s scalded her. Though she doesn’t understand it all, she understands enough. Crouching on the floor, she grips her stomach, cramps shooting out from deep inside her. It feels like when her water broke, before she gave birth to Samuel.