Spared Remnants

Malka sits just outside the kitchen door peeling potatoes, breathing the damp air and looking across the clotted fields to the woods beyond. The treetops tinged with first green tease her, as if offering shelter. When her paring knife skims the surface of each tuber, her fingers grow sticky, making her impatient for the rinse that will come as she releases each stripped potato into a pail of cloudy water at her side. She wipes her hands on her apron, fashioned from threadbare towels, and wonders at the curve of her thighs, once parchment over bone.

In the distance, lorries crawl along the road from Nuremberg, sending up trails of dust. Americans, hale and bulky, bearing canned goods, powdered milk, cigarettes, and chocolate. Powdered milk to a dairy farm. She has to laugh at their clumsy generosity, their eagerness to please, their mouths filled with excellent teeth. Hopefully, today’s entourage will include Beckman, his tilted lope and casual winks. Bringing a curl of potato peel to her lips, she runs her tongue over its roughness, tastes its salt, its starchy bitterness, glad for the absence of rot.

Riding shotgun in the U.N. relief truck, Beckman knows the landmarks as the convoy rumbles westward from a guarded warehouse near the Nuremberg Palace of Justice toward a displaced-persons camp set up to run like a farm, a teaching site for Jews dreaming of a pioneering life in Palestine. They roll through Furth, past the smashed and toppled tombstones of its Jewish cemetery, and into Cadolzburg, where an ancient castle rumored to have been a meeting hall for Hitler Youth lies in scorched ruins, a most satisfying sight. From there, the countryside fans out, and a handmade signpost comes into view. “To the Jewish Training Farm.” Beckman spots the blue-and-white flag whipping in the wind atop a massive barn seized from indicted Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher, its buff walls crisscrossed with timbers. With any luck, Malka will be there, scowling on her barn stool as she milks a Holstein, sending streams of milk into a dented pail, giving him the once-over from the corner of her eye.

Glancing at the driver, Beckman pinches his nose between his index finger and thumb, lifts his eyebrows. The stink of manure sours the early spring air as it does around his uncle’s whitewashed farmhouse on the swelling fields just east of Lake Michigan, his adopted home since his mother spent her last Reichsmark to spirit him out of pre-war Germany as he was about to turn thirteen. How he’d ached to get back here to exact revenge, racing to the draft board office the moment he was eligible. For what? A war nearly ended, a mopping up, a tedious war-crimes trial? Pursing his lips, he lets out a low whistle.

The driver laughs, shakes his head. “Regretting this gig? You’re off duty, private. I’d be on a beer stool if I were you.”

“Ever take a piss on Streicher’s estate, on the lumpy German soil?”

“Yeah, there’s that.”

Mostly, though, there’s Malka, a teasing edge to her Yiddish as she bossed him around on his first visit a week ago. Such delectable chutzpah. He tightened the shaky leg on her milking stool, hoisted bales of hay, fetched her a cup of water from the pump in the yard. He’d have done almost anything to keep her gravelly requests coming, to see one corner of her mouth curl almost imperceptibly when he obliged. Unlike so many high school girls back in Benton Harbor, Malka was no pushover.

She’d drained the tin cup, then handed it back to him. “You’re one lucky mensch.”

“To be ordered around by you?”

“You call these orders? Where have you been? Oh, right. America.” Her laugh a brittle burst, like the cracking of a walnut shell.

She rose from her stool and tucked a strand of her pale hair back beneath her kerchief.  “Come, boychik.” She carried her pail of milk to a large metal urn, and emptied it in one long pour.  “Why don’t I give you the grand tour of Herr Streicher’s farm, converted to kosher. Our sweet revenge.”

He offered his arm, and she slipped her hand through the bend at his elbow. Pointing out the Hebrew signs above the chicken coop, the stable, the store, lul, refet, machsan, she nodded at every worker along the way, the wavy-haired men with hoes over their shoulders, the women with baskets of smudged eggs. Not an elder or child in sight, save one newborn fussing in its mother’s arms. Peeking into the dining hall, its candelabra emblazoned with the Star of David and its walls decorated with Zionist exhortations, they listened at a distance as three young women practiced a Hebrew song that ushers in the Sabbath.  L’cha dodi, likrat kala. Come, my beloved, to meet the bride. Their voices unspeakably pure, a peeling back of buried want. Beckman’s knees softened, the walls wavered. With his hand at the small of Malka’s back, he guided her outdoors, stretched his neck, squinted in the morning sun. What dreamy universe had he stumbled into? These fearless displays of Jewish life, the unabashed pride, the absence of dread, of sorrow. Not the Germany of his childhood, not even the America he’d come to know, where being a Jew was a private affair, nobody’s business, something best left unsaid. The light in Malka’s speckled eyes as she hummed along, he wanted to bask in that light.

As Beckman bounded back to the convoy, his shoulders square, his military cap at a rakish angle, Malka wished he’d kissed her goodbye, at least a peck on each cheek to leave a trace of his cedar scent. And yet, his gentlemanly reserve felt homey, reminiscent of pre-war Poland, the days when she pined for the sophistication of western shores, for the great universities and concert halls of London, Paris or New York. Each Sunday afternoon she’d beg her father to put aside his research and take her for a stroll through the formal gardens surrounding Branicki Palace. Warm in her wool coat with its fox collar, her gloved hand resting on his elbow, she’d inhale the scent of his cherry pipe tobacco and smoky cologne as they strode toward the portico columns of Bialystok’s own Versailles. “Stand up straight, my angel. Shoulders back.” Speaking to her in pristine Polish, rather than the Yiddish spoken at home, his jaw clean-shaven, his collar starched, he was the picture of an aristocrat, refined, like Count Branicki may have been back in the 1700s.  “You’ll be a polished ruby one day, Malkie, lecturing at the Observatoire de Paris,” her father said, his refrain on these elegant strolls. “A womanly Copernicus.” Their leather boots crushed the stone mesh of the garden’s broad walkway, in sync and steady as a metronome. The flowerbeds lay dormant but the conifers, sculpted into cones, stretched alongside the promenade, erect as palace guards. No one ambling past would recognize them as Jews.

What would he think now, watching her trudge back to a barn smelling of curdled milk, cat spray, and cowpats. She likes to believe, in her steadier moments, that he can see beyond the grave. That he’s risen from the ditch on the outskirts of Bialystok, where he crumpled nearly five years ago, with the other Jewish intellectuals, sliced by Nazi machine-gun fire, tumbling atop each other, a morass of bloodied white shirts, soiled trousers, toppled hats, their brims naked to the firmament. That from another place, any other place, he knows what she’s accomplished during the war, the weapons delivered, the safe havens procured, the Molotov cocktails hurled at SS guards stationed at ghetto corners. That he’d give his blessing, proud of her exhilaration as she flung the flaming missiles from the rooftops in the sealed-off Jewish ghetto, her arm nearly disconnecting from its socket.  But perhaps he’d shrink from her, ashamed of the taut cords in her pale neck, disappointed by her slide into vengeance?  She isn’t sorry, she will never be sorry. But how to explain to her scholarly father, with his strained eyes and loosened collar, his desktop cluttered with cups of tea gone cold? Or to Beckman, who escaped before the war. An American soldier now, yes. But had he ever seethed, ached to kill, screamed in delight as a bomb hit its target, set a storm trooper ablaze? Doubtful. Why would he?

The cool air rushing through the truck window gives Beckman goosebumps as he heads back to the training farm for his second visit. He rubs his arms, feels clean for once, away from his guard duties at Nuremberg Prison, the hours spent peering through the barred portholes in the wooden cell doors. Each dawn, a different Nazi prisoner, and yesterday, the most perverted specimen, Julius Streicher, who begins each day with calisthenics in the nude. The jumping and jiggling, the profane yelps as beads of sweat drip down his bullet-shaped head and sharpen the cell’s tang of mildew, dried urine, and morning breath. After his regimen yesterday, Streicher knelt before the tarnished toilet in a small alcove, and splashed his face with water from its bowl. Beckman turned his head, gazed with envy at the sentries on the upper tier—to have that distance, and those machine guns. To display that firepower. As a boy in Leipzig, he’d tried so hard to blinker his gaze, to ignore the sturmerkasten, the red display boxes filled with Streicher’s Der Sturmer weekly, its front pages screaming lies about Jews committing ritual murders, assaulting Aryan girls, drinking Christian blood. Always with caricatures, the Jews as grotesqueries, whiskery, hook-nosed, obese.  And the calls for annihilation. “Don’t look at that schmutz,” his brother Meir would hiss, squeezing his hand and pulling him along. All business at age eleven. Nearly two years younger, but such a vise grip.

“Psst, Herr Streicher.” Beckman leaned his forehead against the cell’s porthole and against regulations, hissed at the prisoner in German. “Jews dance at Pleikershof, old man, drinking the cream of your fat Aryan cows, slicing the necks of your pure German hens.”

Relishing the taunt as he bounces on the U.N. truck’s cracked seat, he scans the fields for the turnoff to Streicher’s property, reborn as Kibbutz Nili. Its name, Malka told him, is  based on a biblical verse, “The eternity of Israel will not lie.” Such belief, such faith. How did she scrape it up? The lorry takes a sharp right turn onto a gravel road, and there’s the entrance, a wooden archway bearing block-like Hebrew lettering, Blessed are those who come.  Beckman wishes he had a camera, like the GIs in the Signal Corps. He’d like to take some photos around the place, print them out big and glossy, then wave them under Streicher’s nose before rolling them up and shoving them up his ass.

Through the kitchen window, Malka watches Beckman lift a carton of provisions from the back of the U.N. lorry and carry it to a storage hut as if it were a box of goose down. Brushing his hands on his slacks, he turns toward the kitchen, sees her in the window and waves. She’d like to run over, feel his hands on her shoulders, straighten his jacket lapels. Instead she dips her head, turns to the dishes in the sink, scrubs the residue of scrambled eggs from an enormous skillet. When he opens the kitchen door, she turns off the tap, wipes her hands on her apron, and leans against the sink’s rim, its white enamel worn away in spots, exposing the ironwork beneath.

“Beckman. Back with the tzedakah trucks? Helping us poor refugees?” She tilts her head toward the window, offers a glass of water. Twelve oblong loaves of rye bread sit cooling atop the kitchen table with its spindly legs. He leans over, takes a whiff.

“You bake these?” He runs a finger over one of the cooling ovals.

“Tch, tch. No.” She turns back to the stack of dishes in the sink. “I do know how to stuff them.”

“Cheese, eggs, schmaltz with chopped onion?”

“Never mind. You wouldn’t understand.”

“I’m not as stupid as I look.”

“Please, forget I said it.”

He slips an arm around her waist, turns her toward him. “Come on, Malka. What were you saying?”

The chipped dishes, dripping in a rack, need to be wiped, put away.  But the warmth of his hand, resting just above her hip. “Well. So.” She straightens her shoulders. “During the war, we used loaves of bread to hide maps, pistols, coded messages. We’d cut out the bottom crust, remove the soft insides, wedge in the goods.”

“We?” He leans closer, his jacket smelling of damp woolens drying atop a radiator.

“Let me dry these dishes.” She steps away, picks up a dish towel.

“Oh, no. Don’t leave me hanging.”

“Us. Okay? Us, schoolgirls. The ones who didn’t look Jewish, who could speak Polish without sounding Jewish, who dressed with style. Who could guess, looking at me now?” Pulling a breakfast plate from the rack, she runs the rag over its surface, blotting the droplets.

“Are you kidding me? You’re a doll, Malka.”

“Ha. Don’t make me laugh.” She slips the plate atop a stack on the shelf. “Anyway, we’d slip past the Nazis who guarded the ghetto gates—using fake IDs, a little teasing. They’d wave us through, and we lived among the Gentiles, as Gentiles. At night, we’d sneak supplies and news back to the ghettos or the partisans in the forests.”

“Malka. My God. You’re a fighter, a hero.”

“I’m no hero, believe me.” She picked at her cuticles, torn and red. “The heroes died in the camps, the ghettos, the woods. See, you don’t understand. Not at all.”

She picks up another damp plate, runs the cloth in a circle over its surface. She won’t go on, trying to explain. Why should she? All the humiliations of her cover job as a housekeeper for German SS officers. He doesn’t need to know about the hours spent wiping feces from chamber pots, slicing shriveled beets for borsht, flipping stained mattresses. Pretending not to understand German, all their filthy jokes as they flipped through yellowed pages of Streicher’s Der Sturmer and all their boasting about what they’d like to do to their willowy Polish maid. “Foolish Marika,” the top officer often said, calling her over to his reading chair. “Let’s practice your German.” Opening up the dog-eared tabloid, he’d pick out words for her to repeat: germ, pest, parasite, locust, extermination. “Who am I talking about?” he’d say. Looking him in the eye, she’d answer, “Juden, mein herr.” The response each time, “Good girl.” And then, his hand grasping her behind, a pinch, hard enough to bruise. “Back to work now, sweetheart.” Some hero she was. Beckman would be repulsed, of course he would. He didn’t need to know. She’s not some whore.

“I’d like to understand.” Pulling the dish towel from her hands, Beckman takes over the drying.

“How could you? You’ve become an Amerikaner.”

“Is that so bad?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

She wipes her hands on her apron, admires his ease with the dish rag, and turns back to the remaining dishes in the sink as he describes some shtetl called Mish-ee-gan. His uncle’s blessed orchards, the tree limbs drooping with peaches, plums, and sour cherries. The nearby freshwater sea, its waves scrubbing the shoreline as the sun slides beneath the horizon each evening. His uncle’s clapboard home, tucked at the edge of a forest whose towering beech trees thrum with bird calls. She isn’t buying it. Not one word. Such harmony in this world? Please.

“So, boychik.” She picks some dried egg off the tines of a fork. “No one ever called you a dirty Jew over there? Stinky refugee? Christ killer?”

“I’m not saying it’s perfect.” Dropping the cloth on the counter, he eases up behind her.

“Aren’t you?” She leans back against his chest as it rises and falls, feels his heart race. His arms close around her, and for a moment she lets herself breath in his salt, his morning coffee.

 Let me finish up here, liebling.” She turns to kiss him on the cheek, then shrugs him off. “Take a look around. I’ll find you.”

Beckman lifts a crystal inkwell off the desk in Streicher’s former study, nestled within the estate’s main house. As he rotates it side to side, sunlight plays off the conical stopper, sending iridescent shimmers across the walls and the bookshelves strewn with farming manuals, expense ledgers, contracts with relief agencies and Zionist treatises. Atop the oaken desk now used by the kibbutz leaders lies a thick, dog-eared document, its title in Hebrew script, “She’arit Haplitah.” Spared remnant. Beckman turns the page to find a list of survivors. Pages and pages of handwritten names, some in pencil, some in ink, some paired with the name of a displaced persons camp—Dachau, Deggendorf, Feldafing, Landsberg—some with location unknown.  Starting at the top, he runs his finger down each page, looking for one name, Meir Beckman, his fingertip growing smudgy and gray. Each ‘M’ name stops him for a moment. . . Mendel, Mira, Moishe, Margalit, Mordechai, Mezullam, Malachi. Nothing here, maybe nothing ever. Replacing the title page, he rests an arm across the stack, and lays his face atop his sleeve, breathing in the musty stationery.  In barely audible tones, men’s voices mingle, fragments in Yiddish, German, Polish, Hebrew, conspiratorial one moment, joshing the next, somehow purposeful. Sitting up, he tidies the sheaf of papers, tries to flatten its curly corners. Malka peeks around the doorframe.

 “Nu? Who’re you looking for?”

Beckman wipes his mouth on his sleeve.

“What? No one.”

 “You’re a poor liar, Beckman.” Those gold specks in her eyes, little knife tips. “You couldn’t fool the Gestapo, not for a minute.”

“No, not like you could.” He rises from behind the desk.  What to say? That while he got out, his brother didn’t. That Meir puffed out his skinny ribcage and spread his arms to block the SS from entering the family’s apartment, only to be slashed with a bayonet and dragged away. That he doesn’t know if Meir’s alive, dead, or drifting among the living dead. That shame winds him when he wakes each morning on his army cot, the shame of taking a breath, of filling his lungs so easily. That it doesn’t wash off when he splashes his face with icy water or scrubs it with a frayed washcloth. How to explain that to a girl who lived with her heart in her throat for years, her life teetering on the credibility of her lies.

“I wish I’d been here too, Malka, to fight like you. To save people.”

“Save people?” She turns to leave. “You think anybody was spared?”

Erect in her seat at the war-crimes trials, Malka bites off a hangnail as Julius Streicher steps into the witness box, straightens his shoulders, sets his chin at an upward cut, like a child about to be reprimanded for scuffing his shoes. Insane. She was insane to come here with a group from the farm, to see justice done. What justice? Even the courthouse name, the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, a sick joke. Nuremberg, the pounding heart of the Nazi party. But she’d missed Beckman’s visits, his quiet way of lending a hand, the tilt of his head as he listened, his tinge of formality, not unlike her father’s. She’d wanted to catch another glimpse of him, more than that maybe. But already she feels smothered as Streicher stands in a trim suit, right hand raised, inhaling through flared nostrils before reciting his oath in the packed courtroom.

“I swear by God, the Almighty and Omniscient, that I will speak the pure truth, and will withhold and add nothing.” 

The British prosecutor, with a gracefully receding hairline, sets out with civility. Malka wills herself to stay calm, to breathe, as she listens through her translation headset, adjusted to the occupiers’ German.  She understands what’s underway. The prosecutors are constructing a foundation methodically, trying to build a shatterproof case for conviction on incitement to murder and extermination. As she’d hoped, she spots Beckman standing sentry next to Streicher’s vacated seat in the prisoners’ dock, eyes blank as the “Jew-baiter of Europe” responds to each of the prosecutor’s questions with evasion, denial, lies.

“I did not intend to agitate or inflame, but to enlighten.”

“I never wrote . . . ‘Burn Jewish houses down, beat them to death.’”

“We educated no murderers . . . No murders took place. What happened during the war—well, I certainly did not educate the Fuhrer.”  One of Streicher’s arms rests on the side of the witness box, the other pitched akimbo, hand on his hip. The gall, the chutzpah. . . to look the prosecutor in the eye, and spew garbage.

Malka squirms in her seat. The woolen fabric of her swing skirt chafes, itches like the lice she’d finally gotten rid of. How could Beckman stand stock-still like that? Of course, he has to. But she despises him for it. She despises the courtroom decorum, the Allies taking the high road, their belief in the quiet power of international law. It’s beyond insulting. Where’s the rage at Streicher’s poisonous words, at Der Sturmer’s caricatures of Jews knifing babies? All the lies, the calls for slaughter that seeped from Germany to the East, letting bigots feel like patriots. Is it any wonder many Poles turned in their Jewish neighbors for five kilos of sugar, or looked the other way as scholars like her father were strafed by machine gun fire or burned alive in shul? Or that Nazis strutted through villages with the heads of Jewish children jammed onto their swords? Why the quiet legalese, the measured tone? Why is no one shrieking, spitting in Streicher’s face, clamping hands around his neck, choking the breath out of his squat body? Why bother with this legal charade? Just march him at gunpoint to the countryside, slam him in the kidneys with the rifle’s stock along the way, over and over again, until he can barely walk. Order him to dig a grave and stand before it. Riddle him with gunfire before kicking his corpse into the oily clay. She removes her headset, drops it to the floor, and bolts down the aisle, bumping the knees of other visitors, offering no apologies.

The sound of her heels clicking on the flagstone helps slow the pounding in her chest as she searches the corridors for an exit. Once outside the courthouse, she strides through the open iron gates and past the sentry post, with its jagged stripes, onto the street, where Allied tanks and jeeps line the perimeter. Heads turn as she walks briskly past the soldiers perched on armored vehicles. What do they know? Idiots, like Beckman. So easy to look snazzy atop a tank, the war over. Her pumps pinch her toes, but she walks on, finally sitting on a concrete ledge outside the Americana Snack Bar, its curved doorway astir with GIs striding in and out, arms draped over each other’s shoulders.  Leaning back on her elbows, she closes her eyes and wills the watery sunlight to warm her “good face,” her Aryan mask. The kibbitzing of passersby, the scrape of heels on pavement, the squabbling of sparrows in the nearby trees, the cacophony quiets her breathing. Soon she’s drifting off, back to wartime Poland, the muggy days leading up to the Jewish uprising in Bialystok, to August 1943. The final days, before all was lost.

The pistol taped to her inner thigh chafes as she saunters toward a countryside rail depot. With each step, a packet of bullets jostles between her breasts, like wedding rings, mezuzot, or crystal earrings sewn into a handkerchief then tucked into her brassiere for safe keeping. Sweat soaks her tailored dress with its sharply pleated skirt. She peers down the tracks, sees the train’s light in the distance, approaching so slowly. Please keep it moving. Please, God. The air, thick with creosote, throbs. A tap on her shoulder from behind, another one. Likely a blackmailer, threatening to turn her in. Swallowing a scream, she straightens her backbone, raises her chin and prepares to turn her head slowly. She’ll offer a few choice words in unaccented Polish, the haughtiest smile she can muster, the flask of vodka tucked in her market bag. It’s worked before.

 Another tap on her shoulder.

Breathing in, she raises her eyelids slowly, reels to find herself in the weak spring sunlight by the American PX.

 “Oy gevalt, Beckman! Sneaking up like a thief.”

“Malka. You’re sweating.” Sitting down next to her, he offers his hankie and a tall bottle of root beer.

Cold and oddly herbal, the soda sets her teeth on edge.  “What is this? Cough syrup?” She dabs her neck with his handkerchief and raises the bottle, with its beads of condensation, to the side of her face. “How can you stand it?”

“The root beer?”

“No! The trial, the so-called trial. I saw you there, just daydreaming.”

“What am I supposed to do? Go on a rampage?”

“What do you know about rampages? Bubkes. That’s what. Hold this, will you?” She passes the bottle back to him, slips the handkerchief into her purse and snaps the clasp.  “Let me go freshen up.”

Oh my God, for some air. Not these diesel fumes, the stink of sizzling meat, the trails of cigarette smoke. Not Beckman’s hot caramel breath. Turning a corner, she yanks off her heels, and takes off running, just to get somewhere else, anywhere else, away from the jeeps, the gun turrets atop the tanks, the checkpoint sentries, the so-called Palace of Justice. The soles of her feet grate through her nylons, chafe against the pavement, tender to each flint of gravel and stray chip of broken glass.

Beckman weaves his fingers together, cracks his knuckles, trying to shake off Malka’s abrupt exit, the sight of her hightailing it toward the courthouse, her ankles wobbling as she practically sprints away. Why did he give her his handkerchief, just a sheer slip of cotton but always there, in his breast pocket where he can rub the hemmed corner between his thumb and index finger, feel the fine thread of his initials embroidered by his mother in quieter times, before a mob poured kerosene over the bolts of satin and organza in her fashionable storefront and lit them up, screaming “Out, Jewish pigs!” That pre-war night of broken glass tearing through downtown Leipzig’s while he was safe in his gymnasium dormitory a few kilometers away, an imposter, enrolled as an Aryan.  Sneaking back home as word spread, choking on wood smoke and slipping on shards of plate glass along Nordstrasse, cursing himself, his going along to get along, raising his arm with the rest of the students in a Heil Hitler salute at morning assembly, as required. A disgrace, he was. A shanda. Swallowing hard, he darted from shadow to shadow, hands over his ears, praying the screams would die down, that he wouldn’t vomit in the street. By the time he found his mother trembling in their cellar, he was wheezing, his slacks shredded at the knees, his palms scraped and bleeding. Lowering himself to the earthen floor, he stretched out next to her under their pantry shelves, the warped boards lined with jars of kasha, dried beans, pickled beets, and dill spears. “Mama.” He tapped her shoulder. Flinching, she whipped her head in his direction, curling into a moan when she recognized him in the candlelight. “Get out!  Run back to school. Go!” He pulled out his hankie, wiped her nose.

 “Shhh, Mama. Don’t be crazy.”

“Get out!” Her whisper a muted shriek. “I won’t lose you both.”

The concrete ledge outside the PX chills the backs of his legs. No point waiting any longer, like some soggy mope. A schlemiel. Flicking a beetle off his slacks, he stands, walks to the trash drum outside the PX and pours the remaining root beer over the pile of rubbish, a heap smelling of Michigan summers. . . onions and mustard, coffee-soaked cigarette butts, chewed-up spearmint gum, chicken bones sucked clean. A goddam county fair. Still foreign to him, yet familiar. Such an Amerikaner. That’s what she thinks. He turns to leave, but he spots Malka limping toward him, the straps of her pointy shoes dangling from her fingertips. In her other hand, the handkerchief fluttering. She hands back his hankie, blotched with dirt and blood.

“I’m sorry, Beckman. I’ll wash it. Who embroidered your initials so beautifully?”

“Let’s sit, Malka.” Back on the concrete ledge, he lifts her foot to his knee. “You’ve got a splinter. Broken glass.”

“Forget that. Who sewed your handkerchief?”

“This will get infected.” He moistens a tip of the hankie with his saliva.

“Oy, Beckman! Stop it. Tell me.”

“Who do you think?”  With the dampened cloth, he dabs at the ball of her foot. Malka winces and lowers her leg, removing its warmth.

“Deyn mame? Is she waiting for you back home?” Her voice arrives muffled, like a transatlantic radio transmission, barely audible.  “Beckman? Liebling? Where are you?”

Her arm slides over his hunched shoulders and rests atop the stiff fabric of his guard’s uniform. With her thumb and fingertips, she kneads the knots at the base of his neck, squeezing and probing, blessedly painful. He swallows an urge to groan.

“Nu, Beckman? I asked you a question.”

“I’m here, Malkie. I’m right here.”