The food was cold, all of it, even the cake and garbanzo beans. Heather got busy seasoning hers to within an inch of its life. “Two hours down, two hundred and twenty to go,” she said, vehemently emptying a paper salt packet. “Mother-fucker.”
At the head table, Ari emptied a salt packet down the shirt of a squealing, delighted Jessica. “Motherfucker!” she echoed, giggling.
Later they had what Rabbi Amy called Where You’re At. They went around in a circle.
“Feel what you’re feeling!” Rabbi Amy said. “Just the fact that you’re all here means you’re amazing people. Not everyone could do this. I don’t know that I could’ve done it when I was your age.” Next to Shayna, Heather gave herself a slow pat on the back. Aaron Weiner went first.
“I’m psyched,” he said. “Really, really psyched.”
“Everything’s pretty cool so far,” said Jonathan Abrams, who wore a hemp necklace and nodded continually.
“My bubbe’s a survivor,” said Zoe. “So.”
Jessica spoke for both herself and Ari, in whose lap she was sitting. “We’re a little freaked,” she said. “But excited! And also? Can I just say? The food so far is really gross, and I don’t eat carbs, so I’m kind of worried about what there’ll be for me to eat.”
“I’m at a place where I don’t have to talk about where I’m at,” said Heather when it was her turn. She had her We Are the Living! binder in her lap and was busy filling in the word “Dead” after it with a black Sharpie, the exclamation point serving as the spine of the capital D. We Are the Living Dead.
Shayna looked shyly at the floor and said, “I can’t believe I’m really here.” She looked up to see Jonah smiling warmly at her, making her feel calm, as if she belonged and could just be. It was the right thing to have said.
Back in room 412 before lights-out, Jamie flipped her hair over, fluffed it a few times, and whipped her head back up, dazzling. And then, with a little wave, she said, “See you later, sweets,” and was gone.
Shayna looked around at the dusty fake velvet drapes, the filthy throw rug, the bunk beds pushed up against the wall, and the faintly humming fluorescent overhead. She folded herself into a cross-legged position on the bottom bunk, ducking slightly to avoid bumping her head (“Do you mind?” Jamie had asked, her hand already laying claim to the top bunk. “I’m allergic to dust and stuff.”), and tried for a second time with the journal.
Here I am in room 412, she considered. Or: Jamie’s my roommate in Kraków, where we arrived this afternoon. No. No! Too plain, too uneventful. Too standoffish. She needed a hook, a way in, a real beginning, befitting the scope of the trip, of being not only alive but the Living.
“The weight of what I am about to experience is intense,” she wrote. “I hope I can do it justice for my own sake and for the sake of my people.” But when she finished the sentence she spent almost a minute violently scribbling it out: It was Max’s inaugural entry, from memory, verbatim. When the words were satisfactorily blackened she removed the page expertly, like the first, along the binding, and promised herself it was the last time she’d fuck the journal up. This was her big trip, her turn to Live, her journal, and she would not wreck it with imitative idiocy, she would not save for posterity her own ineptitude.
She opened up her We Are the Living! binder to the table of contents: Introduction, Schedule, History, Feelings. She skipped the introduction. Tomorrow they toured Kraków, and the next day was Auschwitz, where they’d spend the afternoon walking to Birkenau, doing the famous death march. Then Lublin, Majdanek, Bialystock, Tikochyn, Treblinka, and Warsaw. Then Israel, the antidote.
She skipped History.
Under Feelings was an essay by Rabbi Amy (“You’re preparing for some of the most intense feelings your [sic] ever going to feel. Don’t be afraid to talk about these intense feelings! We’re all here feeling these feelings together!”) and an Elie Wiesel excerpt (“I remember it happened yesterday, or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the Kingdom of Night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed”).
Shayna reopened her journal and put pen to page, fired up by something. But just as suddenly it was gone again, whatever it had been, and her pen hovered, its blue-gray shadow hypnotic and trembling slightly on the stark, empty page. Her neck had begun to cramp, so she unfolded herself and stood up, eye level with the top bunk. Jamie had brought a miniduffel and a suede-bottomed backpack.
Snooping had been a lifelong habit of Shayna’s; sort of her modus operandi, the way she figured stuff out — the stuff no one would save you the trouble by just telling you. In Jamie’s backpack were magazines (a Teen Vogue, a Teen People, a Lucky), what looked to be a brand-new pink iPod, and Jamie’s own journal, a hideous pink-and-yellow thing with sequins. It, like Shayna’s, was blank.
Inside the miniduffel were three piles of neatly folded clothes (including a whole other velour tracksuit, this one forest green with racing stripes down the arms!) and a canvas toiletry pouch. The basics were all included: toothbrush, toothpaste, acne wash and spot treatment, Berry Fresh body wash, a packet of pink razors. Oh my, and what have we here? A bottle of prescription pills. Zoloft! Shayna felt a bolt: the miracle of rewarded snooping, the thrill of knowing what she had no right to know, what no one knew she knew. Very interesting. What in the world could Jamie have been depressed about? Given the tracksuits, the in with Jessica, the late-night rendezvous with whoever, could there then be hope for anyone?
She counted out three pills, wrapped them in stiff hotel tissues, and stuffed them into a corner of her backpack’s front pocket. She felt decidedly better, then, about standing on the lip of the fiery altar upon which the history of her people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.
The strange reality of Kraków was that it was beautiful. Spring had sprung, and the city was in bloom, fragrant, lush. Just the right temperature, with a little breeze. They spent the morning gaping at the intricate old buildings, the crowded Jewish cemeteries. Even the ghetto, with its big ugly wall, seemed like sort of a fun place to be: like one of those themed villages within Disney World where you could get your Disney passport stamped. The birds chirped ceaselessly.
A pack of Hasidic tourists shadowed them all day, visiting the same spots. The Living and the Hasids were mutually compelled to avoidance, however, as if in silent agreement that they had nothing in common. There was zero eye contact, despite the coincidence of running into each other again and again: at the yeshiva, in the ghetto, at the cemetery.
“Weird, huh?” Jonah came up beside Shayna in front of the Old Shul in Kazimierz. He could’ve been talking about anything, really, and it was weird, all of it. Poland, Kraków, the Hasids, being the same age as Max when he’d been here despite being the prototypical little sister and feeling forever younger. “What insanity,” Max had written, “to see the whole Jewish community eradicated. Their [sic] all gone now, and all these Jewish places are just abandoned museums.” Next to her Jonah gave off a sharp crack of wintergreen. Gum. “Ghosts of Poland,” he sighed, breath fresh.