Page 126 of Cilka's Journey

For a long time, they simply look at each other, touch each other’s hair, smile, tears leaking from their eyes.

Will they be able to talk about thatother place? That time?

The waitress comes over and they realize they must look asight—pawing at each other, crying and laughing. They sit down and order coffee and cake, sharing more looks, delighting in the knowledge that these are things they were not allowed, that it is still a daily miracle to have survived. These simple pleasures will taste different, for them, compared to anyone else in this café.

First Cilka asks about Lale, and is delighted to hear about how he and Gita found each other in Bratislava after the war, what they went through after that, and how they have settled in Australia. Gita only stops smiling when she says that they have been trying a long time for a baby, with no success. She touches her stomach, reflexively, under the table, as she says this.

“Alexandr and I, too, have had no success,” Cilka says, reaching out to clutch her friend’s other hand.

And then, working backward, Gita asks—voice lowered, huddling in closer—if Cilka would like to talk about the Gulag.

“It is where I met Alexandr,” Cilka says, “and made other friends too.” It is too hard to articulate the relentless bone-chilling cold, the constant flow of sick and injured and dead prisoners, the rapes she again endured, the humiliation and pain of being imprisoned there, after theother place.

“Cilka,” Gita says, “I don’t know how you could bear it. After everything we’d already been through.”

Cilka lets the tears run down her cheeks. She never speaks about this with anyone. No one around her, except Alexandr, knows she was in Auschwitz, other than her only Jewish neighbor who had been hidden as a little boy all throughout the Shoah. And few people know she was in Siberia. She has done her best to put the past behind her, create a new life.

“I know the people who came in after us, to Birkenau, they just didn’t understand what it had been like, to be there for so long.” Gita continues to hold Cilka’s hand. “You were sixteen, and you had lost everything.”

“We were faced only with impossible choices,” Cilka says.

The sun shines in through the caféwindow. The past is seen through a muted gray light—cold, and never as far away as they’d like. The images and smells are near the surface of their skin. Every moment of loss.

But they turn their faces to the sun coming in.

Gita brings the conversation back to Lale, to their business ventures, and to the Australian Gold Coast, where they holiday. She spoons cake into her mouth, closing her eyes with pleasure, the way Alexandr still does when he smokes or eats. And Cilka joins in, talking of the present, of living.

They lift their glasses and toast, “L’Chaim.”