Beyond the Shadow of Night(83)

“Well, Diane does. You got a place in . . . did you say Detroit?”

Asher nodded. “Nothing as nice as this. Little more than a shack, really.”

“Did you drive down here?”

“Bus. Last night. No need for a car most of the time. Like I said, I try to keep life simple.”

“Tell me about it. It’s this new technology that gets me. I’m happy as I am.”

Asher snickered. “You know, it seems after all these years you and me are still pretty much alike.”

“Like brothers.”

“Close brothers at that.” Asher’s face turned serious. “You know, I always wondered what happened to you after I left Dyovsta.”

“Yeah, well, I spent a lot of time thinking how you got on in Warsaw. It . . . it was Warsaw, wasn’t it?”

Asher nodded. “Sounds like we have a lot of catching up to do.”

“Like I say, I’ve half forgotten about those days, but . . . how long are you down here for?”

“Until you get bored of me, I guess. I don’t have commitments.”

“Why don’t you stay?”

“Seriously?”

“We have a spare room. Full of junk, but I think there’s a bed in there somewhere.”

“That’s . . . that’s very kind of you.”

“Like you say, we got a lot of catching up to do.”

“So, tell me,” Asher said, “what happened to you during the war? How did you end up here?”

“Well . . .” Mykhail gave his bald head a pensive rub. “No. You go first. I’m still in shock at opening my front door to find my oldest buddy standing there. Tell me what you’ve been up to these past sixty or so years.”

Asher shrugged. “As you wish.”

And so Asher talked about his difficult early years in Warsaw, about finding Izabella at Café Baran, about the horrible days in the ghetto, and about his days fighting with the resistance, which only ended, he said, when he was captured and sent to Treblinka.

At that point he stopped and gave his old friend a puzzled sideways stare. “Mykhail?” he said. “Are you okay?”

Mykhail breathed out long and hard, then nodded slowly.

“You don’t look okay. Do you want a glass of water?”

“No,” Mykhail croaked. “I’m sorry. It’s just the mention of . . . that place.”

“Treblinka?”

Mykhail nodded. “I’ve never been there, you understand, but I’ve heard of the horrors.”

“Heard?” Asher shot out a short laugh. “If only you had been there, my friend. It was beyond horror. Thousands of bodies—probably hundreds of thousands. The innocents. Probably a few guilty ones too. But no human who ever lived deserved the—”

“Please. You can spare me the details. I’ve read up since then.”

Asher nodded. “Perhaps you’re right. Better not to dwell on the details.”

“Why not tell me what happened to you after the war?”

“Okay.” Asher drew breath and exhaled loudly. “Well, I was something of a lost soul. I went back to Warsaw, to Izabella, but . . .”

“She’d gone?”

“Mmm . . . let’s just say it didn’t quite work out.”

“I’m sorry, Asher.”

“You know, she said she wanted to marry me when the war was over.”

“Really? She told you that? Wasn’t that a little forward in those times?”

“Oh, she didn’t tell me. Rina told me. She said Izabella confided in her one day while they were alone together.”

“I can understand your disappointment.”

“I’m over it—by about fifty years.” He smiled sadly. “So I simply couldn’t stay there. And I knew there was nothing left for me in Dyovsta; I hadn’t been there since I was thirteen. So I settled in Kiev for a while—at least, I tried to. I went back to my old favorite, a job in a tractor factory. Oh, I had grand ambitions of starting a new life there, of kicking those demons and horrible memories out of my mind. But life was hard, and I never felt any sense of belonging; I hardly knew the city. The place was still recovering from being overrun by armies of various flavors. There had been so much destruction over too long a time. There were few opportunities and too many reminders of bad times.”

“So when did you come to the land of opportunity?”

“Oh, about two years after the end of the war, as I recall. I still had very few friends in Kiev, but I’d started reading a lot. I came across a story about a huge factory over here that was starting to manufacture tractors by the thousand and needed as much labor as America could supply and then some. And I still liked the idea of spending all my days dealing with the mechanics of those beasts. Also, America was on the other side of the world, so there would be no easy way back. I liked that. It cost every ruble I’d saved to get over here.”

“You’re talking about Dearborn, I’m guessing?”

Asher nodded. “My career never really took off as well as I thought it might. I wanted to become a professional engineer or scientist, but I think any drive I had was left behind in Warsaw. In any case, the simple life of a production line worker was enough for me. Well, it was enough until I got laid off in the 1970s.”