Witness of Dreams

The thick legal-sized envelope was the airmail type, thin and crackly, almost like rice paper, the postmark Germany. The handwriting on the address was neat, resembling that of a typewriter, but clearly the deliberate work of a clenched hand. Mimi hadn’t heard from Howard Fisk the genealogist prior to his stop in Prague and was not impressed with his ramblings. He was undependable. She brushed thin wisps out of her face and sat down at the dining room table in one of the plastic molded chairs her father had left her. Now that he had died, she clung to what reminded her of him.

What little light was left trickled over the ivy and through the large picture window. The cat garbled her dinner wishes and Mimi scooped dry food into the bowl. She played through the messages on the answering machine, admiring the teak wood of the bookcases— surely they had darkened in color since she had bought them, what must be now over twenty years ago. She blinked an eye and extracted a renegade eyelash, black unlike the gray her hair was slowly turning into. Grabbing the letter opener from her desk, she sliced open the envelope.

“March 13, 2006. Dear Ms. Rosenberg: Today I find myself on a journey out of Cracow to somewhere in Germany. I am not sure where yet. You may disapprove of all this wandering, but remember, as I told you in our meeting, I will only charge you for the time where I make some connection. The train station at Cracow was in disrepair, the whole front entry a re-working of structure. I was almost afraid to board the train at first until the conductor assured me the tracks, which seemed to be off kilter, were actually temporary ones, but safe. This reminded me for some reason of the SF Bay Bridge, the piles driven into the soil beneath. They were the old railroad ties from the pier extending from the Berkeley marina which served the Key System lines. You might say I’m a fan of railroads. I usually take the local train rather than the express…”

            The letter continued in this vein for many paragraphs. No wonder the envelope was so thick. Why couldn’t that man stick to the point.

“…The records in Cracow amounted to nothing. The family name was written down, but nothing aside from that, no destination. And no word from the people there. Perhaps they are not talking. I will go to Berlin, the seat of all records for Germany since it was the capital of the Reich. Not as long as Noah’s life, eh? He lived over 900 years. What hope did Hitler have? It’s winter here now and the fields are covered with snow. It’s a good thing I stuffed my down jacket in my luggage, though I think I will spring for a real overcoat now that I’m dealing with officials. Dress is 99 % of the language, isn’t it, with these people? Show them what you can do. I will let you know when I get to Berlin. Sincerely, Howard Fisk.”

            Maybe she shouldn’t have told the truth. But that did not deter this man. At the restaurant where she suggested they meet, on a Saturday afternoon a month ago, a nice Indian place not far from her home, he had listened intently, both elbows positioned on the table. She must have described herself well, because he made a direct line to her table and offered his hand. His dark, almost black eyes cut through so that she could hardly meet his gaze, which his brown hair, standing up on end, underscored. He strode towards her like he had met women many times before, with a smoothness, his arms swinging, his narrow hips shuffling side to side in pencil thin jeans. A thin green shirt hung straight from the upright shoulders across his chest. Glasses of water came immediately, then the waiter. They ordered their food.

“Before you say anything, you should know something,” she began. “I have a few photos of my parents and grandparents, but no more than that.”

“Never mind,” he said. “I didn’t even have that much when I did my own family research.” He nodded his head to reassure her.

“No, listen. You have to hear me out and decide if you want to take this on. I thought you might be more approachable because you aren’t certified.” Mimi took a gulp of water. “I decided to do something about the dreams that I’ve had for years. And last night, another one.”

“Dreams. I have dreams…” he began.

“Please, let me finish,” she said. “The Nazis are hunting me down, me and my cat Cleo. I’m in a barn, no light, old wood splintering my clothes, I tiptoe around inside empty stalls. I finally find a ladder leading up to a hayloft. This is one of the many I have. I cover myself with hay and wait. My heart is pounding. Then I hear it—boots approaching and barking dogs. I can see boots through the hay. With Cleo in my arms I wait. She radiates heat but doesn’t calm me.”

The food came, his chicken and her vegetables, with naan for each. He picked up the bread as if he’d never seen it before, like he didn’t know what to do with it, but then took a bite, the large white circle of dough surrounding his pointed chin. She tore a piece off of hers and dipped it in the curry.

“Mmm. Tasty, reminds me of—”

“Yes, it’s my favorite Indian place. Now, don’t take me off the subject,” she continued. “Usually I wake up by the time the men are making their way up the rungs of the ladder, but sometimes I don’t make it, and I find a knife pointing at my face, or a gun. Then I usually wake up. Only once did I actually die. Oh, and just to explain, the uniforms are black with lots of insignias. I must be an outlaw, a spy, or a member of the underground.” She gulped down some of the vegetables. She waited.

 “Well…” His eyes seared her before continuing. “It was clearly World War Two because of the uniforms. But why would they care about a woman hiding? It’s all very interesting.”

“Don’t be polite. You can say it’s nothing, it’s not enough, they’re dreams.”

He gulped down his water. Obviously the food was too spicy for him. “Sadie and Richard said you would be intriguing. You were born in California, so why should you have these nightmares?”

Mimi nodded. “My grandparents came over from Russia and Poland in the early 1900s, before the Nazis. Some family got killed in the camps, the ones who didn’t emigrate, and some more massacred in the pogroms, but whoever was left came to New York.” She put the cloth napkin to her forehead, mopping the beads of sweat.

“Look. I have my own dreams—Mimi—can I call you Mimi?”

She nodded, suddenly self-conscious, and noticed a few renegade peas by the side of her empty plate, sopping onto the white tablecloth.

“I don’t know what Sadie told you about me. I got the position at the society through my success with finding remaining family or some physical evidence. I can’t make any promises, but I know where to look, and I’ll do everything I can.”

He pierced her with his eyes, but this time she couldn’t look away.

“You looked in the archives—what?” She felt squeamish, nauseous.

“I went to Germany, got to know the clerks. They throw nothing away, but you have to be patient waiting at these bureaucratic places.”

She pictured him waiting, his eyes piercing the clerk helping him, shelves and shelves of files beyond.

“Look, what I want you to do is find my father’s brother. His name is Brzezinski, but who knows what he changed it to while he was escaping or hiding. If he’s still alive. My father talked about him but couldn’t find anything out. You say you’ve been to Germany, you know the system. He left Poland to go to Germany, that’s all I know.”

The man looked straight at her without flinching. “Just because I couldn’t find my family didn’t mean I can’t find the answer to your question. And I found my own answer in the records of the concentration camps...” He took a deep breath, and finally looked away from her. “And this is why I want to help you.”

Mimi had to look away, out the window at the busy street. Busses made their way past the many shops. She had walked past the boutiques often and frequented the bookstore, knew the clerks. She felt dizzy.

“It’s too bad you don’t have anything more than a name and photos, but it’ll have to do.” He ran his hand through his hair. His face seemed to be sprouting just in the time they had eaten, a visible gray line appearing from ear to ear and down his throat, where his Adam’s apple bobbed. He must have unbuttoned his shirt because a few hairs made their way out from the material. The spices must have really gotten to him. Mimi took pleasure in his suffering, but she didn’t know why. She thought that somehow, those eyes needed an answer, even though it was she that was asking for one.

Just then, a green bottle from the next table tipped over, its contents arcing out to the smooth brown floor and her legs. Mr. Fisk offered the napkin off his lap and she dabbed her legs.

Before they parted he had taken the photographs and her address, plus a deposit of 400 dollars to get him started. He said he would bill her for the rest.

“Bitte, die Akten von Brzezinski.” Howard Fisk did not speak too much German, but knew from previous experience in Berlin that it would suffice. He stood as erect as possible, his mouth a thin line, in hopes that the clerk behind the desk at the bureau would take him seriously. Her hair was a throwback to the 1950s, a bun high in the sky compared to the modern styles. Even people walking around on the streets outside had moved forward with the times more than any of these clerks. He thought of all the Jews that were verdammen, condemned, without a trial, and the volumes lurking behind the desk on endless shelves, further than he could see, as if there were mirrors back there, tricking him. The dimly lit green marble interior spoke of empire days, as did the gold filigree on pillars and onyx piping on the edge of the counter. The olive drab uniform of the clerk coarsened the theme. She disappeared for long minutes before re-appearing, her expression unchanged.

“Wir haben keine Akten—geflüchtet,” her full lips uttered.

Destroyed? Unlikely, since the Nazi’s kept everything. They didn’t burn or shred anything that spoke of atrocity. Good record keepers.

“Bitte, nein gerichtet,” he said. Sweetening his voice to a syrupy tenor from its natural lower register, he warmed her like a sugar thermometer, how his mother used to make candy on a pot on the stove. Her hair seemed to turn a pale orange as a result, from the caramel-brown, and she offered to go look again. This was what it took—patience and sweetness, acquired talents, artificial ones that he could dispose of at will.

Armed with a copy of a single record, he strode down at a brisk pace to the local pub for more of that beer he found the night before, upon his arrival. Down the stairs of a dimly-lit restaurant that hosted local talent, he found a different act from the string quartet of the previous night—a youth vocal group. They varied in size and shape, mostly round boys whose cheeks looked like they needed a good pinching. The youngest member, a young girl with corkscrew curls falling down the front of her white blouse, looked innocent enough, but the older girl next to her had put on too much red lipstick and looked whorish. He tried to catch her eye, but she focused ahead to some friends in the audience. Amid countless glasses of the dark liquid, he hesitated before finally scanning the document once over, to ascertain not its validity, but whether it would be of help. The name at the top of the page said Brzezinski, but Anatole as the first, a French sounding name? Further down, he could see this particular man had been picked up on suspicion of black market activities. Wrong time period, too late. His growing appetite suddenly abated, as if his stomach had shrunk with hours of traveling and waiting for nothing. Rather than trying again at the same window, he would follow his instincts and go ahead to the National Archives in Freiburg the following day. He saw no other course.

Staring into the endless glass of beer, glowing on the thick wooden table in the corner of the room, he thought of Mimi Rosenberg as he first met her, at the Indian restaurant. He hadn’t thought much of her at first, with her drab attire and lank bangs falling into her eyes. Except for some photos of her parents and grandparents, she had nothing except dreams. At first he laughed to himself, but then, when her pale, thin lips didn’t move, didn’t twitch, he wasn’t sure. She had tried a private investigator, another genealogist, but they didn’t want to hear about dreams. She even tried to do some of the legwork herself by going to the Mormon temple and blinking through wads of microfiche. Howard had held his tongue lest he frighten her away. And there were his own dreams, which he told only his therapist about, dreams which helped him in the search for his own relations, a search which ended, sadly, in German records from the camps.

Like hers, his dreams had proceeded over the years on a constant theme, but unlike hers, where she was almost caught or shot, in his dreams the torturers burnt flames into his eyes to try to make him give up the names of his compatriots. Strapped in a chair, unable to breathe or wriggle free, he woke up in the middle of his queen sized bed, stretched out diagonally with the covers thrown off, unable to breathe. He probably had not breathed during the entire dream.

Ever since he was a boy he would wake up in the middle of the night, and hearing his parents’ voices down the hall, tiptoe to their door. Howard listened for hours, slumping down on the carpet, while his mother described the thin bunks in the camps, the muddy ground outside carpeted with nothing, the barking and yelling. He fell asleep at the door while she spoke of hiding in a barn and the piercing lights of interrogation. His father calmed her down, the well-measured voice like medicine an attempt to convince her that the dreams were unfounded, and that her grandparents and uncles had not suffered so much. He would always wake up in the still dark hallway and pull himself up and drag his feet back to his bed, wrapping his covers under his feet and around his body so that the monsters under the bed couldn’t get him. His parents never knew he heard.

Mimi’s dreams had reawakened in him his own and convinced him to take her case. So he had good reason to listen to Mimi. He had to admit, her presence had made him uncomfortable. Staring at him with those intense eyes, little lights went off in the center of brown. And when the bottle of beer spilt on her legs and shoes he watched her delayed reaction and her legs, which he hadn’t noticed until then, their slender shape reaching up into her dress. After all that talk, barely letting him get a word in, she was arrested by something so pedestrian as spilt beer. He found it endearing—her words halted, her motion ceased, her features disorganized, eyes, mouth, nose, even her ears, all in a jumble, searching for movements of a bottle. And then, finally, a re-assembling, the mouth reforming itself and everything else following. She had left a minute after the incident, explaining that she needed to go back to school. Now he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Not that she was glamorous by any means. She was a tall woman and seemed self-conscious of it. As she got up to leave, her knees bent, her shoulders curved inwards. She wore dark green leather shoes without heels. They went well with the dress, dark green with little white flowers, almost prairie-like, anything but sexy. Not what he usually went for. And now, the fateful glimpse of her legs haunted him on top of every movement she made. He began to construct a fantasy about her, thinking of their meeting upon his return, he hoped the happy pilgrim.

His hollow stomach swished with liquid as he made his way back to his hotel room, through dark and greasy streets, and down a steep alleyway had no one lurking in any of the corners. Church towers loomed over the human-scale brick houses, their bells silent—only the moon, a sliver in the sky, lit what remained of a rain that must have occurred while he sipped his liquid dinner. The hotel room’s only charm was the floral striped curtains of a lavish, thick material, bragging of former glory days.

The next morning at the Cracow train station he made up his mind to pass the train trip down to Freiburg thinking about Mimi Rosenberg.

Mimi had been receiving letters from Howard Fisk weekly. They did not illuminate much, yet she devoured them like candy to a starving survivor whose hunger cannot be cured. She retrieved his letter from the box, and sliding into the plastic chair, immediately dug into it.

 “April 11, 2006. Dear Ms. Rosenberg: I find myself in Berlin. The staff at the large bureau wear ordinary German street clothes—not too fancy but 'korrekt'. That means dull and a bit official. The staff will always address you as Herrn xxxxx and will never be Du (only Sie). They will use your last name, and titles mean a lot to them. The researchers in the archive normally work in complete silence. Nobody jokes or small talks. The atmosphere is not as relaxed as in the States, but then on the other hand there are no security guards etc., as there are in Britain. People are trying to get as much work done as possible. They are normally friendly, but keep their distance. Only once in a while there is a young researcher who does not come within these lines….”

            His letters were certainly becoming more precise about the actual research, but she still could not understand what exactly he was doing. She didn’t know why she had hired the man, and should have known from their first meeting.

“…The staff will go out of their way to help you, unlike in many other countries. Even the most simple clerk has a great knowledge about the archive and I have several times been helped by people who transport files to and from the stores. They know their way around and if you approach them in a friendly way are normally willing to help you 'beyond normal practice. The reading room: Tile floor, dull egg-white walls, metal doors (fire doors), simple furniture (bloody awful chairs), neon lights and books, lots of books. The archive is placed in an industrial area with a few houses in between. There is a whore house right across the street from the archive…”

            She should have known from the initial meeting, the way he looked her up and down, the way he was talking about prostitutes here. And what was this about “normal”?

“…There are no eating facilities at the archive. You are not allowed to bring any food. You have to go to some local dining places in the vicinity, if you want anything to eat during the day. I will write when I get to my next destination, unknown yet. Sincerely, Howard Fisk.”

This man was not what Mimi expected. She had consulted others before him, but after what she told them they had only answered they couldn’t help. She had met Mr. Fisk only because of her sister, Sadie. He was an ex-coworker of Sadie’s husband, at a small computer company where they were engineers together. The night she heard about Fisk at the dinner at Sadie and Ryan’s house, Mimi had carried the weight of skepticism as a shield against defeat.

Sadie and Ryan’s living room imparted the light and airy tone of a Scandinavian showroom, the opposite of the house the sisters grew up in, with its dark wood furniture and large paintings and generous bookcases. Mimi had moved back to take care of their ailing father a few years earlier, and after his death a year ago she decided to remain, breathing in the simultaneous experience of being a child and an adult under the same roof, as she parented her parent. Little statues on tables and handmade baskets with fruit, odd-shaped blown glass lamps and rugs from Mexico—these had peppered their childhood. Sadie had veered as far away as possible and adopted a nuclear-free-zone sterility, Mimi thought as she perched on a little chair on their living room for desert.

            “He recently won an award for doing breakthrough work on one case,” Sadie boasted, as if he was her son.

            “I don’t know,” she said. Would the man be able to help her as the other two had failed? “Anyhow, why am I the only one pushing for this?”

            “You’ve asked that before, and you know my answer,” said Sadie. “Isn’t it enough that we’ve found this Howard Fisk for you?”

            “Yes,” chimed in Ryan. “If he plays as mean a game with genealogy as he does on the racquetball court, you’re in luck.”

            “Do Jews have luck?” she said.

            “You could be thankful,” said Sadie.

            “He has to believe.”

            “Again with the dreams?”

            “If you didn’t believe me yourself, you wouldn’t be helping me,” she said. “I know you wouldn’t do it to just shut me up.” Mimi undid the top button of her high-necked blouse. Didn’t they ever open their windows?

            “I really think it’s because of all those Holocaust books you read, and then the one about the pogroms in Galicia you read last week—”

            “That’s just the point—our family was there when it all happened.” Usually Sadie was the one to make Mimi sound stupid, instead of this, the reverse.

            “Even if reading these accounts doesn’t cause the dreams, they must affect them.” Sadie placed her hand on Mimi’s.

            Mimi pulled her hand back. “I haven’t read more than the usual Jewish person.”

            “What are you trying to prove?”

            “Me, what about you?”

            “We always got along as kids,” said Sadie.

            “That was a really long time ago.” Mimi sighed.

            “Settle down, you two,” Ryan said.

            “Come on, let’s have our desert,” Sadie said, pouring coffee and cutting the pudding-like chocolate cake.

Mimi usually wore dark green or brown, and as she sat sipping the darkly-roasted beverage, she felt like a piece of moss on a perfect snow patch, while her sister sat opposite in her white jumpsuit, almost invisible against the seamless white décor. Ryan too, blended in, with his beige slacks.

“You’re nervous about your review coming up, is that it?” Sadie asked.

 “I’m going to go back to school anyhow and start teaching ESL.” Mimi had made no secret that she didn’t like teaching a bunch of fourth graders.

“That will be great,” Sadie nodded exaggeratedly.

Ryan balanced his coffee cup on his lap and gesticulated with his hands. “I’ve played a few sets with Howard, plus one of my co-workers found him to be quite resourceful in the government sector. Another one gave the female perspective, something about how he could charm the pants off a horse.”

Sadie erupted in laughter and Mimi upset her coffee cup, the brown syrupy liquid edging down the side of the table, and her thigh.

“At least it will blend in with your brown skirt,” Sadie said, not moving.

Mimi got up and soaked a dish towel with water.

“Oh, the carpet!” Sadie folded a paper napkin to catch the coffee on the table leg before it headed to the pristine carpet. Then she continued on Ryan’s theme. “I’ve met the man myself—we had him over to dinner. And I believe he’s the one.” She nodded in her husband’s direction.

“You mean to help me with my search, don’t you? You’re not trying to set me up again?”

“What makes you think that?”

“Oh, just a little matter of three blind dates.”

“Never mind that. I’m sorry they didn’t work out. But really, Howard is the one, believe me.”

“Why do you keep saying that? I want someone who will take me seriously,” she said.

Ryan smacked his lips. “He grew up on the East Coast. He told me he searched for his own ancestors but failed. Instead of throwing in the towel, he helps others—that’s the kind of guy he is.”

“Well…” Mimi gently sipped the fresh cup of coffee Sadie had poured for her. “Let me think about it.”

“We gave him your number,” Sadie said.

“What?!” she said.

“I told him to call you, that you would put up resistance, and that he should be persistent.” She chuckled. “You see, I want this to happen, too.”

“You do?”

“Maybe not for the same reasons as you, but I want my baby sister to be able to sleep. I look at you—the lines on your face—those dreams are going to destroy you.”

Mimi said nothing.

Sadie continued. “And since dad died—there is a correlation, I know it.”

Mimi seized the opportunity of Sadie’s mentioning their father. “Why did you leave home so early?” Her head was spinning. She could barely see her sister.

Sadie’s face slumped. “I left when most kinds do. I was 18.”

“You left everything behind—all your things, and you had to go to school in Michigan, the middle of nowhere.”

“Hey, that’s where she met me,” Ryan said.

“I came back, didn’t I?” Sadie looked her straight in the eyes.

“Not before I had to deal with mom’s illness and dad’s worries. You made me stay.”

“That makes it easy to place blame,” Sadie said.

“I’m looking for answers.”

“Then I think this man can help.”

“Thanks. I know you’re trying to help.” Mimi said, reaching for her sister’s hand. Sadie had the right impulse, to take care of her. Yet she wished it could come from the same core, that she could truly understand.

Howard sat on a train headed from Berlin to Freiburg, better known as the gateway to the Black Forest in Southeastern Germany, but for him the home of the National Archives. His meanderings about Mimi by this time had gone so far as picturing her in the advanced stages of dating, then their engagement, which of course, by that time, they would have made a couple of trips to Europe together, walking over the dark cobblestone  streets of Cracow hand in hand.

When he glanced up, he noticed the woman sitting next to him in the compartment, busy knitting something pale blue, for a baby boy maybe. He had seen women knitting his whole life, from his mother to his ex-wife. He couldn’t help associating the itching, squirming feeling he had when he thought about Mimi with the early days of dating Cassandra. Women were always making something for a newborn, or a baby that hadn’t even been thought of yet, always ahead of the action. The woman’s pale blonde, almost white, hair reminded him of Cassandra’s, and her well-fitted pink shirt did too, as well as the knit slacks. Cass always looked good and she still did, he knew from their recent meeting about their children’s schooling for the Fall. She never understood him. He should have known when she stared at him blankly when, on one of their early outings he had described his first girlfriend’s father banning him from seeing her because he was Jewish. He had told all his Jewish friends about it because something like this had never happened to him before, or to anyone of his age group. It was the stuff of books and his parents’ generation. And when her own father found out Howard was Jewish, he hurled names and told him to get lost. This from a seemingly mild-mannered man. Surely we were past that, he had thought, as the door shut in his face. How much more literal can you get? So Cass and he began to meet in secret, which gave him a strange thrill. She said nothing the night after the incident with her father, when she had dinner with him, and as they ate their hamburgers, the juice from the undercooked flesh and condiments eked out onto the plate, making a small puddle of yellow, green, red, and pink. The fat coagulated like a doily around the edges of the puddle. No response from her on that account. He didn’t know then that he would come away without the house and only one night a week with the kids, now ten and twelve. He could not have helped himself, as he had fallen immediately for her beauty and ambition, proven by the way she shot to the top of the department in the EPA that she had only worked in for two years, a worthwhile devotion.

            After his marriage desolved, he had taken the risk and dropped the job he had worked hard to get, designing computer software for a small, but fast-growing company with an International clientele. He spent most of his married years earning a Ph.d. that would posit him in such a job. But genealogy had taken hold of him as he began to search for the generation of his family that didn’t make it to the U.S., like his grandparents, in towns of what were now Poland and the Ukraine. According to his mother, no one had even tried to find out anything because they assumed no one remained. Her attitude caused a tidal wave that sent him to the Mormon temple and to other domestic sources to find documents before finally making his virgin pilgrimage to the land where his people came from and had been exterminated.

His mother all the while insisted his work was futile. A 300 pound woman, she now lived in upstate New York, after having moved from Coney Island, where Howard grew up. He left her care to a motherly woman with grown children of her own, as well as to his two older brothers who lived in New York. She complained about bed sores and asthma, yet he had not gone to see her for ten years, not so much because she had changed in appearance and was needy, as much as she had not changed, pulling him near as she always did. As a child, he was her favorite, playing on her lap, and then when he was older, when he should have been out on the sidewalk with other boys playing marbles he loomed within a small circumference of her figure. She gave him a sock to mend or he helped her with polishing the furniture. The closeness was fine when he was a boy, but now being near any older woman made him want to scream. Now he circled the globe. On this last visit she said to him blankly, referring to the decimation of their family, “They didn’t come, so now what do to?” Couldn’t she see the matter should not be left alone—just because she didn’t know what gruesome end befell her aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins, didn’t mean she shouldn’t care. She told him that her sisters, the only remaining older generation, had the same thing to say. A hollow tension built in his stomach so that he could barely listen before storming out the door.

The fuel of this last visit had pushed him into doing the work, and he found his love of precision, which had benefited engineering, gained him much in this new venture. Patient with the detailed microfiche, he found results immediately. His initial trials encouraged him to make the trip to Europe and make his acquaintance with the endless bureaus of records in Poland and Germany. When it amounted to nothing, his mind stormed that he would never take this on again, but when friends who heard of his search plied him with the search of their own relatives, he couldn’t resist. Finally, lauded after a few years as a member of the local Jewish genealogical society, he was voted in as president. Reluctant because of his own failure, he tried reasoning that he did not deserve it, but the group would not hear of it. They believed in him. And it was in this capacity that he was asked by Sadie to help Mimi. But it was not until Sadie mentioned her sister’s foreboding dreams that Howard decided he had to meet this woman.

            The train worked slowly through Germany, just the kind of ride Howard enjoyed, so he could process his work as he made his way between two points on a map. The woman in pink did not pause from her work, but glanced over at Howard. If he had been wearing glasses she would have looked over them, and now he could only nod, hoping she would ignore him and let him remonstrate silently.

            “American?” she asked, with an American accent.

            The worst question. He answered “Nein,” and she went on with her knitting.

            Howard watched the train pass by small garden after garden, none of them connected to houses, but with paths in between. They slowed to a small station, red and white brick, the train shuddering even after it had stopped. A few people got on and off. Usually they passed these old, often dilapidated structures, which hadn’t been in operation since before the last war, but he had taken the local train rather than wait for the express.

An old woman sitting opposite him slowly unwrapped a sandwich from a checked cloth—rye bread, almost black, the mantra of the German people, with one meager slice of some kind of pink meat. To prepare for the journey, which would fall during lunch time, he had bought at the station in Berlin some bread, a local mild white cheese, and a long tube of brown mustard, the smallest size they had. From the waft of her sandwich, he knew he would have to dig into his supplies shortly. The woman’s coat shone bright red, yet it was so worn that threads appeared in some places rather than wooly pile. Howard looked down at the sleeves of his own tweed jacket, which he had found when he and Cass honeymooned in Scotland. Her father gave them the fare, for they were living on nothing. The jacket had done its time, the many-toned wool heather showing its age.

            Behind the woman, her gray hair escaping on both sides from her kerchief, a mirrored panel reflected his own unruly hair. He kept it so short normally that it stuck up on end, yet during the trip it had grown longer, a dark cap enclosing his head. Only a few gray hairs and he looked younger than his 42 years, plus his workouts and swims helped. What was the old woman saying to him? Schliessen sie das Fenster? He shut the window and thought of his mother and how if she hadn’t bloated herself up so much she could enjoy traveling like this woman. Now the woman stretched out her hand with a piece of bread and cheese. He thanked her, but declined, wondering how she had enough for herself, let alone to offer some to a stranger.

            Through the window now he observed the passing cornfields. They raised corn for pigs here. A country of pigs, he thought. Howard continued twisting his hands.

            Mimi woke up covered in sweat and reached for her tape recorder. With this method she did not have to fiddle with her glasses or a pen. She took down her dreams before they dissipated, the nuance of difference or similarity to the others—to her real as her waking life, haunting her for the last year, since her father died.

            “They asked me questions but I didn’t know the language. They took me to a small room, larger than the one I was hiding in—if I had that much space in the hayloft I could have stretched out properly—I heard the whistle of boats, so we were near a harbor. The questioning went on until my head throbbed and I could only see white light, and I thought maybe I’m dead, maybe they are fading away. I had this kind of power to push away their questions, and one man had an especially low voice, a real baritone, booming, a young voice—I don’t know what he looked like, except that he had a long face, long and lean, like a gun ready to shoot. His eyes never looked away, and there were two big men, one on either side—they waited. These guys, they bound my hands with a thick cord until I was numb, but I couldn’t look down to see if they were still there because they bound my head to the top of the chair with a cloth. The cloth absorbed my stinking sweat until it was full, and drops ran down my forehead, my cheeks, one hanging on my nose for what seemed forever until it landed on my mouth… salty liquid, the only thing I had to drink. The white light got brighter. I thought, maybe I’m an angel and all my mother’s stories are true, and all the stories I read growing up. The craziest thoughts ran through my mind, and all I could think about was I wished I had my swimming goggles with me to stop the light—”

            She pushed the recorder aside until it knocked over the bulging shoe box of tapes, strewing them all over the rug. The now empty box still had a over-sized look, its sides bent and curved. Even before her Nazi dreams, Mimi had begun recording her dreams, for years now, each tape containing many morning rants. Sadie had morbidly joked that when Mimi left this earth for good, Sadie wanted to listen to them all. Mimi had told her she could do it now, since she herself never played them back. Why she recorded the dreams at all she could not explain to anyone, even herself, except that she knew they had to be documented. She knew it before her father died, before her mother died. They were her journals.

She took a few deep breaths. If only her father was alive she could ask him. What would he have made of her dreams? Her forehead felt moist as she swept her hand against it. Talking about the dream was almost like re-living it. She needed distraction. She would read Howard Fisk’s latest report, on the shelf by her bed. She hadn’t had the energy the previous night to read through the minutiae of his day, but, too, she was wary of any discouraging results. She put her finger through the little space and ripped open the lightweight envelope.

“May 14, 2006. Dear Ms. Rosenberg: If you want to know, I do my studies in the National Archives in Freiburg. The modern office building was built in the 80s in the boring German style, but very practical. Because it is a national archive there is a fence around the building, but it is not a maximum security like in the UK. There are no guards etc….”

            The man did not know how to start a letter, that was clear. Beyond that, she now knew he had entered a real government office, which encouraged her. But where was he while writing the report? She could not picture him anywhere. She sighed, and read on.

“…The staff is very friendly. The leader of the reading room is a young woman (about 30) with a great sense of humor. Her first assistant is an old woman, who is very, very confused, but who has helped me several times over the years (and bent the rules quite a few times). The rest of the staff is friendly but not very interested in their job or customers. I have never had any problems with the clerks. There are some rules, but unlike the UK it is possible to bend them when it fits…”

            Why did he keep talking about Britain—to let her know he had traveled to more than Germany and Eastern Europe?

“…The reading room is not very big and you have to reserve a seat in advance. That is normally not a problem and you can order the files in advance. The big problem is that you are only allowed to order 15 files a day. For someone like me that can be a problem. I work fast, very, very fast, and order a lot of copies. I normally get the chance to order 30 files a day, but that depend on who is sitting at the counter. That is where the old woman has helped me quite a few times. She has also guided me through how to order microfiches that is not listed in their files (from safety copies)…

            Mimi had to put Howard Fisk and his mission out of her mind. Otherwise she dwelled too much on the results, and wanted to avoid disappointment. She was not someone who believed in epiphany, in soothsayers, or magic, considered herself a rational person first and foremost. She had, however, talked to a Jungian therapist known for dream interpretation about a year before. The woman’s orchid-filled office had a sand box in the middle of it, raised up like a table. Shelves surrounding it had small figures of every kind, from Japanese warriors to little fuzzy rabbits and ducks. Mimi had been instructed to pick out characters and arrange them on the sand while she told her dream, and she complied. The woman had claimed Mimi’s dreams were a metaphor for her absent father, for loss. In spite of the whole process, Mimi had stuck to her own notions, but it had slowed her down and she had gotten nowhere with her research. She was a historian by trade, yet her training had let her down and she was teaching kids who didn’t care to learn anything. Now Mr. Fisk was doing the legwork she needed to do herself, but could not, stuck in an endless circle of exhaustion from the effects of the dreams. In the end, the fact that he had his own dreams convinced her he could find a trail.

            “…I have all together spent a few months in Freiburg. It is a beautiful old city with a big university. A typical day for me in the German national archive start at 6.30 with a shower and breakfast at the hotel. The archive opens at 8 or 9 (depending on the day of the week) and I am always there at the starting time. I normally work until about 17.00 hours. I then walk back to my hotel (about half an hour fast walk). I do not eat during the day, because that will take too much time since I have to leave the place to get something to eat. I normally check in at the hotel before I go out to eat. I never eat at my hotel, but prefer to visit some good restaurants around the center of town. My favorites are an Italian, an Arabic, and a German restaurant. The last night during my stay I normally visit a little bit more expensive restaurant and eat deer or wild boar. I will get back to you with more details as I move along the tracks. Sincerely, Howard Fisk.”

            The seat of records and the soul of Howard’s hopes, Freiburg had offered another red herring, leaving him staring at his over-worn shoes, unable to shuffle out the door and out to the street. Just when he got the momentum to begin, a sweet young clerk working away from the official counter suggested Howard try the Bremen office, explaining many unduplicated records were sent there at a later date. Bremen, its old town a juxtaposition of red brick architecture and Medieval church with Chagall windows, its dark hoffbraus with plates of sausages and potatoes, and the farmer’s market with a woodwind trio, brought him back to an earlier time, as if the town had been frozen in the previous century.

Making his way from the train station after lunch, across the park, in its first bloom of crocuses and tulips, to the stately and honorable residential houses, he found the address he was looking for. Unlike the usual squat entry with Greek arches, he found what looked like a house among the others, undistinguishable. This felt right. The clerk, a man much Howard’s own age, but with acne of a younger man, did not wear a uniform, but a well-fitted blue suit without a tie. Clearing his throat, Howard prepared for his fate. But the man pre-empted him, asking how he might help Howard. In no less than five minutes, the man, a kind of magician, retrieved a thick file from another room off to the side and handed it to Howard.

Howard could not wait, and opened the file. He asked if these were the copies, so clean they looked. The clerk nodded no, they were giving documents away. Rather than question the man, who must be out of his mind or sabotaging the operation, Howard stole out of the building quickly and quietly. Finding himself in Burgerpark across the street, he sat inside a topiary house. Just right, he thought—everyone can see me, an illusion of a home, just like the Jews, who thought they could hide. The top of the document said something “Brzezinski,” a woman’s name he thought, but the letters were partially rubbed out. It sounded more German than Anatole and the dates matched up, with the list of relatives making the older generation what Mimi’s father would have been if he were here today. Pictures of a man on his knees being beaten with a stick, a woman whose hair was being shaved—what kind of documentation was this? Another showed a man strung up between two posts, guards upon him with the butts of their guns. The man’s stomach caved in, the ribs falling to the back of his carriage. Beyond, a wall of prisoners looked on.

Ducks in the pond near where Howard sat on the bench inside the living house swam in circles slowly, occasionally speaking a language he could not understand. Maybe the prisoners spoke silently to each other, or to the tortured ones, in attempt to break free. Why had the name been scratched off? He got up and proceeded back to the office, knowing he risked all, suspicious that he had found anything in the first place. He couldn’t believe the clerk’s acquiescence—no, enthusiasm—as the name at the top of the sheet became clearer. Some liquid substance revealed that a layer of dirt had simply made the name unreadable, rather than what Howard had feared, eroded. He could not read the full name. The gently smiling clerk told him the young woman lived in a small farming community thirty miles north, which could be reached by a bus line. Howard looked her up in the phone book there and talked the accommodating clerk into ringing her and asking if an American could visit that afternoon. After a few minutes of back and forth on the phone, the clerk’s agitation poured from his greasy complexion; yet finally she must have acquiesced, because the clerk nodded yes. Howard felt his stomach shift slightly at the prospect of this visit.

The wide houses in Worpswede were not just utilitarian, curlicue frames around doors and roses lining entryways, elegant throwbacks to another century. Bikes sailed by and people waved and said gutten tag, more friendly than in most places he had been in Germany, where strangers were not forthcoming. He read, on an informational sign, that the town had been built by painters, sculptors, writers. They hauled reeds from the swamp, thatched their roofs, designed homes down to the wallpaper, did stained glass and weaving. As he approached the house, he pictured the scene a century earlier. They entertained on rose-ringed lawn, the mother wearing wide-leg slacks, white poet’s shirt, a tom-boy hair cut, and around her neck a pendant of her mother’s. With their artist and intellectual friends, they exchanged ideas on transportation, what kind of art was important, earmarking time. He stood in front of the house playing out all this—it had happened before they turned on the Jews, when the rich culture gave and gave.

A young woman opened the door. She was probably in her twenties and she had brown hair swept back from her face in a large barrette on top of her head. Howard knew immediately she was the relative, for the image of Mimi constantly occupied a part of his brain, a living organism. Their images simply matched up. The smell of bread baking met him, yet she did not usher him in, instead looking him up and down while drying her wet hands on her apron. Her mouth closed tightly, then it opened, a clam’s width. As they conversed in German, Howard did his best.

“I’m Mr. Fisk.”

“Yes.” She wouldn’t give an inch. “Tell me what you want.”

“My client in the States is looking for her uncle. Any family.” Let me in, he thought. Didn’t the clerk explain? He should have done it himself.

She shrugged.

“She lost family because of the Nazis. The camps.”

The woman’s face softened, her lips fuller, the muscles loosening. He must have uttered the correct password.

She then took his arm and whisked him into the kitchen, where the smell enveloped him, and she pressed him into a chair while she donned oven mitts and removed two golden loaves, setting them on racks by open windows. Through the full-length window to the garden he could see nothing but green leaves and fruit bearing trees, strangely tropical. He ascertained that she was a music teacher to children at the local school and her husband was at work. The family had changed its name to Bedford as a precaution after the war, and Ms. Brzezinski had it changed back officially to the original to honor her grandfather. Her husband was not a Jew but practiced with her. She served Howard a slice of rye bread, and he helped himself to the soft butter, spreading as if he had never eaten butter before, once he discovered its smooth creaminess. He hadn’t eaten lunch yet, so when she brought out the cheese and home made apple cider, he made quick work of it, and she refilled his glass when he had quenched his thirst. She joined him in a slice of her own bread, sighing with seeming satisfaction in her own handiwork. Satiated, he brought out his briefcase and took out the photos, sliding them over to her side of the table. She didn’t realize she had butter on her hand, because when she put it on her face she left a greasy, glistening dab. Howard leaned over and removed it with his napkin, and she took the napkin and wiped her eyes with it, for she had recognized the likeness in the photos.

Not pausing to speak, she got up and walked into another room, returning in a minute with a piece of cloth. She explained that it had belonged to her grandfather, but could say nothing else, except that it was one of the only things she had left of him. She would give him the piece because she had another.

Speechless with his finding, he could not move from the chair. Hannah sat opposite him, also silent, until her husband Gerhard came home from work. They spoke quietly by the door in fast German, too fast for Howard to understand, before inviting him to say for Sabbath dinner.

Howard had not performed this ritual in his own home while married to Cass. As a college student, he had been a member of a Jewish organization and had hoped to settle down with a nice Jewish girl, but they always wanted too much too fast of the serious things, while the other girls were more malleable. He could get a nice non-Jewish girl into bed fast. He probably had the proof somewhere, in his endless notebooks, of the bets he kept with his buddies at the time. Howard’s room, at the end of the long hall in the communal living house, was the most frequented by the opposite sex. When he married Cass, he thought little of her faith or lack of it, and was even egged on by the challenge of her father’s bold anti-semitism. Cass looked like bait at the end of a fishing pole and he was a large, shiny fish. The longer the bait dangled before him, the hungrier he got.

His parents had kept all the rituals of their own parents—going to temple on Saturdays and holidays, keeping kosher, and celebrating the Sabbath. Thousands of years of women lighting candles, he could hear his mother saying as she did every week, reminding them all of the female force behind their religion. He had fond memories of him and his brothers at the table, giggling while heads bowed for the prayer, given by his father in prayer shawl and modest yarmulke, and his mother in her long-sleeved high-necked white lace dress, inherited from her mother. Friday nights they were together. He saw them now as one bead in a string, promulgating from ancient Hebrews to Europe to America.

Hannah and Gerhard bowed their heads while she said the prayer. She wore the prayer shawl. Howard had never seen a woman take the lead, and it opened up the possibility of Mimi doing the same thing in their own home. In almost four months, the invention of their future lives appeared dangerously real. He had to proceed with care and not let fantasy take over. Yet, watching Hannah, he saw Mimi—the long, elegant face, the long dark hair, her soft lips eschewing the ancient text.

While Gerhard served the meat and vegetables, Hannah passed the challah to Howard, and he tore off a piece, the first time in years he had enjoyed such a fresh braided bread. She had formed it into a round shape rather than the traditional long loaf, and it reminded him more of an Easter bread he had seen while in Italy. And like the Italian bread, it had an egg baked into its middle.

“Unusual—it looks like Easter,” he remarked in German, fearing she would be offended.

            “Yes,” she agreed, explaining that the first time they invited Gerhard’s non-Jewish parents over she wanted to include them somehow.

            Howard laughed at this attempt to placate the parents and Hannah frowned before erupting in laughter too, with Gerhard following.

            “Actually,” she told him, “his parents hid Jews and loved the ceremony. For them it meant participating in something they had helped preserve, but had never experienced themselves.”

            When Mimi got home from school the next afternoon she found another envelope from the genealogist, this time a large manila sheath. The hand-scrawled return address almost unreadable this time, except for the country—Germany. One stamp after another had been taped on the corner, probably because the sender was recycling stamps that hadn’t been cancelled. Cleo meowed in a higher pitch than normally, worked up to a frenzy. She would wait this time for her dinner. Mimi had to see to this first.

The envelope was heavy, full to the corners with paper. Was this what she had been waiting for? Sadie had told her, “Don’t think about it. That will just make the end results come slower.” But how could it have come any slower, she thought, hovering over the possible answers to her nightmares. Grabbing a knife from the kitchen, she ripped open the envelope with one movement.

            “Dear Ms. Rosenberg: I have found the only remaining evidence of your family’s time in Germany. At first, looking at the records of Poland and what is now the Ukraine, I was sidetracked. But then, I met a man in Berlin (his family changed their name from when they arrived in England) who suggested I talk to the consulate in Berlin. My Berlin hotel had a small noisy air conditioner. One of the ploys the Nazis used to gain power was to burn down the Reichstag, and blame it on the "terrorist" communists. This led to suspension of civil rights to combat terrorism. The US should not forget this. From there I made my way North to Bremen, where I found my way to the Ring Strasse to a house near the Burger Garten. I asked at a pharmacy for the home of the Rosenbergs, but it was a false turn and I went to the local bureau where a helpful clerk gave me the key file. I then traveled by bus to a town nearby called Worpswede, an artist’s colony and farming community, with tall corn fields and large rustic houses…”

            The letter went on in this distracted vein for some pages, tracing the footsteps of Howard Fisk. Mimi’s vision blurred, the letters resembling some other language. The pages fell from her hands and she had to balance herself on the chair, finally giving way and sliding onto its smooth, cool seat. Bremen wasn’t too far from the sea, and the port at Bremerhaven, where the Jews rushed to come to the U.S. Hand shaking, she picked up the pages from the floor and found where she had left off reading.

            “…When she spoke to me, I realized the similarity. After meeting you four months ago I remembered your face. I thought, Mimi has given me a picture of her father and uncle, but none of herself. Yet I didn’t need it. This young woman had the same shadows over her eyes. We spoke in German for quite some time over the tea that she had made. While I stirred the milk into my cup she disappeared, I thought to fetch something. But she returned with a small folded piece of cloth, which I have included here. This is the last remaining item of your relative before the Germans came one morning, taking him away in his robe to the deportation area. She thinks they took him to Auschwitz, but no one knows for sure. I looked up the records and it is true.”

            He was certainly pleased with himself, boasting of remembering her face. What was the difficulty in doing that? She reached into the depths of the envelope and felt a piece of smooth cloth. Pulling it out, she examined what threads remained. An orange-red, they held what seams there were, together. The brown plaid pattern showed a blue stripe running through it in both directions. It was flattened, either ironed by the young woman Howard had found or by being crammed in its safekeeping place. The many pages of the letter fanned out across the wood grained surface. She slid herself onto the plastic orange chair and read.

            “ Her name is Hannah Brzezinski and she continues to live in the very same house with her husband, not a Jew, that your grandfather’s brother lived in…”

            Smoothing the cloth on the table, Mimi imagined the rest of the item re-creating itself—the arms, collar, pockets. The sleeves were worn rolled up, the belt resting a little low on the waist, the corner of one pocket stubbornly folded no matter how much ironing. She rummaged into the bottom of her handbag for her bifocals. The threads seemed as elastic as new skin, submissive to tugging in various directions.

            Legs a little shaky, she rose from the chair and wobbled down the hall to the bedroom. In the closet she found the item and brought it out to the dining room table. Side by side, the robe of her father’s, who had died the year before, and the scrap of cloth retrieved by the genealogist, matched up perfectly, save for fading of the ancestor’s. The familiar robe, its smell not quite as strong as when she had put it away, could have spoken to its brother item. She had assumed her father had bought the garment himself, but possibly it had belonged to his own father. There was no tag inside to recommend it to one continent or the other—only the pattern and the thread, which shone a brighter red on her father’s. Looking closely, she now saw that a new red had been sewn over the older, faded thread, now almost a brown.

A halo appeared around the cloth, perhaps coming from the waning light. For some reason it reminded her of Howard Fisk’s impenetrable eyes. When she had looked directly at them, she couldn’t see them clearly. His letter had revealed more of the man. And with the cloth, it seemed that you always have to work your way around the truth. What she could see, through bifocals, questions that could not be answered anymore than this—the letter and the scrap. When she was a kid, she had heard the adults say that some had been “taken” during the war, those who hadn’t left early enough. It wasn’t until she was older that she discovered what that meant. And here it was, an incomplete sentence.

Howard’s flight out of Paris could not be booked for a few days, so he had attended an international genealogy convention, which in turn had garnered him an invitation to a party in the suburbs with diamonds and tuxedos. Two women, obviously a couple—though one had twenty years on the other with grey hair—had waylaid him in the corner, over-sized martini in his hand. Beatrice and Terese were their names. Members of their local chapter, one taught at a private girls college and the other was a private investigator, and it may have been these professions that allowed them to extract from him the whole story of Mimi and his research into her family. As one of the women ran off to refill his drink of choice, he expounded upon his feelings for the troubled school teacher in his slurring French tongue. Usually in abhorrence of unwanted attention from women, especially those who he had no interest in, he could nevertheless hear himself getting more and more drunk like someone who tosses in bed, trying to sleep. He did not refuse their refills nor their interest, and in the end, when they insisted he take back a plastic bag with the strong mix of aged flowers, called potpourri. He could not refuse, but simply say thanks, as he slid into the cab they had called for him.

The next morning he found his seat on the plane. The woman in the next seat offered him a banana. Why were women always offering things to him? He took it, his usual strategy. Placated, she went back to her magazine, which he noticed, featured flower arrangements. Her thighs flowed from over the dividing line of the chairs, and erupting from her short sleeves, her arms sidled up against his shirt. Next time he would have to pay for business class. So he sat with the putrid dried flower mixture at his feet, next to a woman who would probably love it. He thought of giving it to her, but the glow of her cheeks stopped him. No need to encourage any warmth. Besides, he imagined Mimi would appreciate the gift. The little white flowers on her dress told him so.

            Howard stared out the window of the plane into darkness. Only the light of the wing, just in back of him, shone on drizzle. His reflection from the empty window showed a drawn complexion. Too much time in overcast countries and on trains. Too much time observing others lives. He watched Hannah Brzezinski lead hers, now he wanted his own. Not expecting success, he wasn’t bubbling with pleasure. Instead, he twisted his thin veined hands nervously. Mimi should be satisfied with the last month’s search. He wished he could see the look on her face when she opened the envelope. He was moving along a course that would take him back to his new life. When he saw her, he hoped he could persuade Mimi to listen to what he had to say.

Turning his head forward now, he saw that most people had their eyes on the airline’s film offering, what looked like an adaptation of a book he had read about a woman who had set up a house in Tuscany. The actress was pretty but the love interest of the story appeared to dwarf everything else, the restoration of the ancient villa and its olive grove, and the forays to the town’s farmer’s market. Now the woman next to him sat up and put her ear phones in to absorb the romance. Maybe it would feed any unfulfilled dreams.

            Mimi’s face floated before him as he had met her in the restaurant, making it unnecessary to pretend to not be watching the film. She did not know why he had taken the case, and at the time, he couldn’t have gotten in the words to tell her anyhow. Speaking of her dreams, what she left out was the grief—she did not speak of it. More than dreams, something had been broken, first a long time ago, and more recently, like the bottle shattering on the floor and her reaction. She could not respond. He had repaired a link, and he had desires. Like a man returning from war, he wanted his medals.

            Mimi waited for half an hour outside the restaurant, stuffing her hands in her blazer pockets to warm herself against the unseasonably brisk September afternoon. Why had she agreed to meet him? Saturday, more valuable now that she was looking for another job, eked away with the angle of the sun. She had received the envelope, but he had told her he had more to say than he could write in a report. Some report—all that personal detail, deviating from the actual point of the trip. But she had to admit, he had done it. And that was why she waited for him rather than leave after ten minutes, her usual cutoff mark for unreliable people. Also Sadie had encouraged her to meet the man again, and in spite of the friction with her sister, she generally trusted her level-headedness.

            Finally, she could make out a figure running towards her from down the street, his dark hair bouncing as he struck one foot and then the other, on the pavement. He reminded her of Peter Pan, who defied gravity because he believed.

            “I’m sorry. Got a call from—” he said breathlessly. “—The East Coast. Upside. Another job.”

            “Great.” She didn’t want to encourage him. “Should we go in?”

As they sat down, Howard Fisk ran his fingers through his hair, longer now than when she had first met him four months earlier. He wore a shirt with a delicate black pattern, curlicues against a light green background. The man certainly had taste in fabrics, but Mimi noticed his shirt collar was wrinkled.

“Look, I just want to make sure we understand each other,” she said.

“Okay…”

“I mean, don’t think that just because—

“What?”

“You got my check?”

“Yes. And you said you got the envelope?” He re-arranged the tableware, moving it from his right to his left. “Because I just wanted to be sure,” he said.

Mimi felt her pulse quickening. “I told you I got the envelope over the phone. I agreed to meet because I want to thank you, that’s all,” she said.

“I think we have more to talk about.”

“You found my cousin—it’s more than I hoped for. But outside of that—”

“I was able to do it because you expected me to find an answer. You were so sure.”

“I was more desperate really.”

“You convinced me. But look, there’s more. You talked about your dreams, but you didn’t let me tell you about mine.”

She listened while he told her about his mother’s woes and his own nightly visions, how he stayed up for hours at his parent’s bedroom door.

“The ears of a child, you know? I had to listen to what my parents were saying.”

Had his eyes softened, or was it jet lag? She didn’t know what to say.

“My mother’s dreams, your dreams—they’re the same.”

“I don’t see how it’s possible.” She got up, throwing her napkin down on the table.

“It’s true, and when I heard yours, they were my mother’s.” He rose from his chair, stretching his hands out to her.

She sat back down wordlessly, leaving his hands in mid-air. She almost missed the chair, then shifted herself to the center of the seat.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have told you,” he said, re-seating himself.

Mimi couldn’t speak, trying to take it all in.

He continued. “I tried to the first time we met.”

“I was paying you to listen to me.”

“Regardless, you should have known then, and you have to hear it now.”

“Okay, then, I guess officially we’re on an even playing field.”

“Good you see it that way. You see, I don’t understand it really, how these dreams—”

“I do,” she said, taking a deep breath. “We can’t see the whole picture, but the fact that you’re here accounts for something. I have to admit that.”

“Good,” he said.

            “And there’s something I haven’t told you,” she began.

            “More dreams?”

            “Actually, just the opposite.”

            “Tell me more.” He smiled wildly.

            “No. I’ve said too much already.”

            He folded his hands on the table in front of him, cocked his head to one side. “You know, before I began researching my family, my dreams dictated my life. I didn’t tell anyone because I thought they wouldn’t believe me—not even my wife. That’s what made me turn to genealogy. And even though I couldn’t solve my own case, I got the bug. At least I could succeed with others—and here, with you. When I met your cousin Hannah, I saw you in her—”

            “You said in your letter.”

            “I couldn’t help remembering your face after I saw it for miles. No, don’t give me that look. I know we only met once before, but even then something—”

            “Your updates were quite odd—most of that information was useless to me.”

            “Is that why you’re pulling back? Sadie told me you would be standoffish.”

            “Sadie!”

            “She means well.”

            Howard leaned in across the table and took Mimi’s hand, which rested next to her plate. Renegade vegetables were scattered around with a little of the sauce and a few beads of oil. His hand felt warm, and she felt his pulse in it. Her own hand, by comparison, must be stone cold, she thought. The next thing she knew her body felt an earthquake—not the gentle, rolling kind, but the shoving, jabbing kind. She looked around. Nothing moved. Yet she couldn’t focus, her vision blurred.

“My dreams have stopped,” she blurted out.

“You’re shaking.” He held her hand more tightly.

“Did you hear me? I can breathe.”

“I can’t wait to hear more. But first, tell me whether I should keep my hand on yours.”

He spoke succinctly, without faltering, yet he seemed not so sure of himself as when she first met him, and she could not get out of her mind how he sauntered over to her table, sure like a pilot dropping a bomb on a target. Something must have happened since then, because now his eyes had softened, she could see when he looked in hers, his dark, brown beads straight ahead. He could not keep them there, and they dropped down to where their hands were locked. What would she be agreeing to if she said yes? She only knew that something had gripped them both, and that she did not want him to let go of her hand. Together they could decipher what their dreams meant, how they had become intertwined through her father, his mother. She could reconcile with him her lost ancestors. She freed her hand from his.

“I agree there’s more here that I bargained for. That’s all I can promise you.” She smiled at him, her first smile to anyone in over a year, and the first to him. Then she took his hand.