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Krugkoppe had to lead Berte away from the now-contained fire, the ruined building, the corpses being piled on the street both burned and broken, the sobbing and screaming crowds, the journalists trying to interview any survivors and witnesses, the noise, the grime, the confusion, the pain.
She followed him blankly, barely seeming to register who he was and that she was safe now, all the way to their fourth-floor walk-up. Only then did he realize that she was shivering, her face covered in soot except for where a few tears had leaked through. He wished for heat, he almost wished for a fire to warm her, and then he wanted to smack himself for his idiocy.
For Berte, he slowly heated some water in their largest pot on their coal stove, then grabbed their cleanest rags and started to clean her, gently and slowly, peeling off her clothing when he had to because it was stuck to her skin with sweat and blood. Bruises were blooming on her skin, along her right side. He didn't know how to put on the women's clothing properly, so he draped one of the shirts she had bought for him over her.
He wished they had soup, or even tea. She was still shivering, despite the warm water bath he had tried to give her, so he pulled their blanket off their bed to wrap it around her, and pulled what remained of last night's dinner out of the icebox. He had to feed her the first few bites, her chewing slow and mechanical, until she was able to hold the fork herself.
"I shouldn't be here," she said lowly, in a voice strained by smoke and screaming.
"There's nothing you could do at the factory now," Krugkoppe said gently, rubbing her back in slow circles. "There are firemen, police -- they have the fire under control."
Berte shook her head. "I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be alive."
"Berte -- "
"The fire was -- " She shut her eyes for a moment. "I can see it, and feel it, the heat on my skin. It came out of nowhere and swallowed us up, like the wrath of God. Everyone was screaming, panicking. And the doors were locked, we couldn't get out, we screamed and cried and banged, and I didn't know if -- and then I heard the elevator come back and I ran, I fought my way in among all the other bodies, I think -- " she swallowed. "There may have been -- the people we stepped on were still alive but crushed by our panic. I didn't stop. I should have stopped and helped them."
"The fire was so quick, Berte," Krugkoppe said. "By the time I got there, the building was consumed. If you had stopped, maybe you wouldn't have gotten out alive yourself."
"I should have died there, then, rather than knowing myself to be so cruel."
Krugkoppe's hands froze for a moment, then returned to their circular motion. "It is not cruel to want to survive, Berte. We all do things sometimes we wish we didn't have to."
"It's wrong," Berte said lowly. "We shouldn't have been monsters. Maybe we all deserved to die there."
All Krugkoppe could think to say was, "I am glad that you survived."
She took in a breath, then blew it out slowly. "Sadie was yelling -- go to the window, go to the window, there's a fire escape. But at that point I was closer to the elevator, so I...do you think I should have gone with her? There was a moment when the path was clear, I could have gone."
Krugkoppe realized that she hadn't seen the broken fire escape platforms, broken and crushed by the sheer number of people on them. "I don't know."
"Do you think she's okay? I should have checked, to see if she was okay."
"I'm sure she is," Krugkoppe lied.
He could feel her tensed muscles begin to loosen under his hands. "I need to go back here and check. My paycheck...Ididn't even go for my purse, in the rush."
"Just rest now," Krugkoppe said. "The rest we can deal with tomorrow."
---
It was astonishing how you could not see a person for thirty-five years, and still know the signs by which they were concealing something.
Berte and the children couldn't see what Krugkoppe saw easily in his oldest friend Avrum, the tension in his hands, the way his ears turned red when he was asked a question he didn't want to answer. He told little anecdotes about the war, about such and such a time, he smiled and waited for his words to be translated from Yiddish to English for the children (not really children anymore, Sadie married and expecting a child, Dora having graduated college), but there was tension and tics that he had never had before, that he never thought he'd see in his happy-go-lucky friend.
He waited patiently, until the dinner plates were cleared and dessert had been finished, to invite his friend out for a smoke.
They walked onto the fire escape -- Krugkoppe checked, as was his habit, that there was no wobble in it as they walked out. Krugkoppe offered his friend a cigarette and a light, a courtesy that Avrum gladly accepted. They stood and smoked for a while in silence, Krugkoppe resting on the railing to relieve the weight on his bad leg.
"Nu," Krugkoppe said finally, in Yiddish. "What are you trying to keep from us?"
"What do you mean?" Avrum asked.
"You're smiling, but there's no happiness. What makes my old friend so sad, when he sees his friend for the first time in years?"
"You haven't changed," Avrum said. "Always perceptive."
"You have," Krugkoppe said gently. "A trouble shared is halved. Didn't you always use to say that to me?"
"And you never listened."
"I finally learned you were right."
Avrum gave a small smile. "Now, that is a change from the Krugkoppe I knew as a boy." He took a long drag from the cigarette. "Do you remember the little town of Oswiecim, the one with the train station?"
"Of course," Krugkoppe replied.
"The Nazis built hell on earth in that place," Avrum said flatly. "They called it Auschwitz."
"There has been some in the papers about it," Krugkoppe said hesitantly, "but we never knew what was true."
"They can't know everything. There is too much to tell. We were numbers to them, nothing else. They worked us like dogs, until we were shells, and they killed...they would tell the new arrivals, you need a shower, here is some soap, you'll be working, you need to be clean..." Another drag on his cigarette. "And then they go into the showers, and gas comes out instead, and soon they are all dead. And then they take these bodies and they throw them in these pits, and burn them into ashes...Every day, the smell of burning flesh."
Krugkoppe remembered that smell. His cigarette dangled loosely from his hand.
"Every day we were there, we were starving and skeletal and always a moment away and a guard having a bad moment from being shot. And every day the smoke would come up from the crematorium, and we knew another few hundred Jews had been killed. It felt as though the fires would never stop, that there would always be people to feed into the flames, and any day it could be you..." Avrum trailed off, eyes unseeing.
"But it wasn't you," Krugkoppe said. "You lived."
"I shouldn't have," said Avrum. "There were so many people who were stronger than me, wiser than me, better than me, who should have lived. Young boys who had lives ahead of them, men who were fathers, who had made something of themselves...and yet I am the one who is here. It does not make any sense to me."
"Very little in life does," Krugkoppe said finally, to break the silence. "And yet, I am glad you are here."
"Here, in Amerika," Avrum said. "Reunited at last. You and Berte are happy?"
"Very much so," Krugkoppe reassured him. "And you can talk to her too, about this. Though you probably shouldn't mention the fire, it'll bring back too many memories."
"Right," Avrum said, "the factory fire. That's why she has that limp, yes?"
Krugkoppe nodded. "Her foot never healed right, she refused to get treatment when so many other people were suffering worse."
"Of course she didn't." Avrum stubbed out his cigarette. "And your own limp, what happened there?"
"A wrestling match," Krugkoppe said. "Of sorts."
"That's mysterious. Was it with an angel?"
"No, definitely only a man."