1940 Part I

            I will speak with the teacher, she said. Just like you did last year about the German boys. And if that doesn’t work you will speak to the director again, I suppose.

            Yes.

            Her eyes bore on his again.

            And this will make Adam Svoboda conduct himself in a more civilized fashion. This will make Aleks grow ten centimeters over one night so he’ll be bigger than Adam, or twenty centimeters, and Adam will suddenly just leave him alone. Shift his kicks to another child perhaps who will turn the other cheek.

            Aleks must learn to exhaust all the possibilities before pummeling back. I know that’s what you want, for him to return every blow, but he must learn.

            And why, because it’s the honorable thing? Because it’s what you wish him to do, to learn? Adam Svoboda’s father went to Poland so he could go on fighting Germans. That’s the lesson Adam Svoboda learned.

            And now he’s probably dead and his son draws the blood from smaller boys because he’s not here to teach him the difference.

            The difference between what?

            The simple difference between what we do and what we ought to do. Perhaps the difference isn’t so simple but it must be learned.

            She turned to her work again, fingers clenching the dough so that it escaped between them. Gripped at it again and never looked back.

            If you won’t teach him to fight, she said, I will. I’ll find a way. I’ll find somebody.

            The muscle stood from the jaw, the tendons taut inside the neck. She pounded the dough again.

            Thank you for making dumplings. We all like them so much.

            We have dumplings every week. It’s nothing special.

            Quick fingers pinched out pale clumps and set them aside.

I must shave, he said.

            He closed the lavatory door, rolled his cuffs. The water purled in the stoppered sink and the steam fumed from it. He undid two shirt buttons, folded in his collar. Be glad of hot water. The brush grew the lather in the cup and he spread it along his jaw, under his chin, to the cheekbones. He put a new blade in the razor, its new glint suspended in the mirror beside the face with its white beard. An ersatz Saint Mikulas. The rasp of the blade took the soap and left the face behind again, the same face, same stare a puzzle in the clouded glass. The dripping razor her wedding gift from all those years before. No one uses a straight razor anymore, she said. The scrape at his neck. Seven years. In the fog of the mirror, a small rain coursed, blurred the lather, blurred the face. I could grow a beard for winter, a winter beard for warmth. Save time mornings. He lengthened his lip and took the soap from there. Save water. Save the gas to heat it. With the razor he stirred the suds in the basin, raised the blade and blinked the fog away before cutting at what remained.

***