The Collected Stories

with her for life. To abandon someone like that would have been like leaving a child alone in a forest. Even before we got there, we got into all kinds of conflicts, all of which had to do with the fact that Dora was afraid to leave me alone for even a minute. When the train stopped at a station and I tried to get some food or hot water, she didn’t let me get off. She was always suspicious that I was trying to desert her. She would seize my sleeve and try to drag me back. The passengers, especially the Russians, had something to laugh at. A streak of insanity seemed to run through this family; it manifested itself in fear, suspicion, and a kind of mysticism that stemmed from the time when man still lived in caves. How this primitive heritage reached all the way to an affluent Hasidic family in Warsaw is a riddle. This whole adventure that I went through remains an enigma to me to this day.
    “We got to Kuibyshev and it seemed all in vain. There was no sister and no insane asylum. That is to say, there was an asylum, but not for strangers. The Nazis destroyed hospitals, clinics, and asylums as they retreated. They shot or poisoned the patients. The Nazi murderers hadn’t reached Kuibyshev, but the hospital was jammed with the heavily wounded. Who in those days worried about the insane? Well, but a woman had told Dora all the details. The Jewish officer’s name was Lipman, the woman was Lipman’s relative, and there was no reason for her to lie. Can you imagine the disappointment? We had endured the whole trek with all its miseries for nothing. But wait, we did find Ytta, not in an insane asylum, but in a village living with an old Jew, a shoemaker. The woman hadn’t invented things. Ytta had suffered from depression and had been treated for it at some institution and after a while they had discharged her. I never learned all the facts, but even those that she told me I later forgot. The whole Holocaust is tied up with amnesia.
    “The shoemaker was a Polish Jew, actually from one of your towns, Bilgoray or Janov, an old man nearly eighty but still active. Don’t ask me how he got to Kuibyshev or why Ytta moved in with him. He lived in some dump, but he could patch boots and shoes and there is need for this everywhere. He sat there with his long white beard, surrounded by old shoes in a shack that was more like a chicken coop, and as he hammered tacks or drew the thread, he mumbled a verse of the Psalms. By a clay stove stood a red-haired woman—barefoot, ragged, disheveled, and half naked—cooking barley. Dora recognized her sister at once, but the other didn’t know Dora. When Ytta finally realized that this was her sister, she didn’t cry but started to bay like a dog. The shoemaker began to rock to and fro on his stool.
    “There was supposed to be a communal farm, a kolkhoz, somewhere nearby, but all I could see was an old-fashioned Russian village with wooden huts, a little church, deep snow, and sleighs harnessed to dogs and skinny nags, just the way I used to see them in pictures in a Russian-language textbook. Who knows, I thought, maybe the whole Revolution had been only a dream. Maybe Nicholas still sat on the throne. During the war and afterward, I saw many reunions of people with their loved ones, but these two played out a shattering sisterly drama. They kissed, licked, howled. The old man mumbled through his toothless mouth, ‘A pity, a pity …’ Then he turned back to his shoes. He seemed to be deaf.
    “There was nothing to pack. All that Ytta had were a pair of shoes with thick soles and heels and a sheepskin without sleeves. The old man took a black loaf of bread out of somewhere and Ytta tucked it away in her sack. She kissed the old man’s hands, his brow and beard and commenced to bark anew, as if possessed by the spirit of a dog. This Ytta was taller than Dora. Her eyes were green and as fearsome as a beast’s. Her hair was of an unusual shade of red. To describe to you how we made our way from Kuibyshev to Moscow and from there back to Poland again, I’d have to sit here with you till tomorrow. We dragged along and smuggled our way through, facing arrest, separation, or death at any moment. But summer had come, and after lengthy travails, we finally got to Germany, and from there to Paris. I make it sound so simple. Actually, we only got to France by the end of 1946, or maybe it was already 1947. One of the social workers on the Joint Distribution Committee was a friend of