key to evolution.

SHE PAUSES AND HIS EYES FLICK UP FROM HIS PLATE, BRIGHT AND PINNING. HE catches her hesitation and holds it fiercely while it lasts. his frown twitches and smooths –– he can’t find the lie –– and he looks back to his plate, scrapes his eggs onto a forkful of hash brown. fifty-nine. he was –– in buenos aires. following mengele. missing him by four months. 

“with who?” greece makes sense for the migration. he hasn’t been, doesn’t know what it looks like. he imagines white beaches –– a ferry and a dock. magda standing there without a suitcase, being whipped by the wind, clutching her bag as tightly as she did on their way here. who was beside her? a group of women whose husbands were dead or useless? a partner? indistinctly, a figure of a man is foggy beside her. faceless. greek or ukranian. gentle. helpful. protective. he chews his mouthful in the silence before her question. his teeth grind, but his hard swallow softens the bite of his jaw. she wouldn’t have that. even for the protection, even for the comfort. he couldn’t imagine her inviting a man in. not then. he watches her hands on her cutlery, can feel them shake like the metal is his skin. not now. his elbows had been on the table, but he retreats and drops them, tucks them in. his silhouette is as small as his broad shoulders will allow. he subtly drags his plate to the edge of the table, away from the middle. his invasion retreats with sudden awareness.

“i killed schmidt.” he met charles. “i had no reason to keep running.” he ran for a year. “i suppose new york was convenient.” he came back. his cutlery scratches the plate.“i’m also based in argentina,” he says, and doesn’t know if he means it out of spite or comfort, “so you’ll be glad to know i’m not always on your doorstep.” 

     “others,” she says, vaguely, “who were looking for a new home.” magda hadn’t been -- she had already lost her home, had been looking for somewhere to hide. she had thought she could disappear into new york the way she had hoped to disappear in the mountain snow but in the end, it hadn’t made a difference. max had found her in the end, like part of her always knew he would.

he’s silent for a while and magda drifts back to her food. the eggs are warm and a little runny but they’re good with some pepper from the little shaker on the table. she forks some onto the toast and folds a corner into her mouth, pleased with herself. food, a warm meal, has always been a comfort to her when there was little else. 

she picks her fork up again to spear more hashbrown onto her fork but it clatters to the plate in her surprise. “you killed schmidt?” her eyes are wide, her mouth slightly open. in the next second, her gaze scatters again at the things she hears lurking in his tone. you’ll be glad to know -- what else was she supposed to be? sad? heartbroken? the thought of him has not been a comfort to her in over ten years -- had been the very opposite of safety all this while. does he think this food will change that? is that why he keeps asking?

HE WANTS TO TERRIFY HER LESS, HE WANTS THE HUNTED LOOK TO DISAPPEAR from her dark, ducked gaze that won’t meet his, he wants to –– for the first time in many years –– be someone else, if only to steal the fear that she clutches like her battered bag from her. the daylight doesn’t disguise his harshness, the crowd doesn’t muffle his powers, his relaxed shoulders are a pretense that won’t convince her. shes knows what he is and –– eyes on her, reading her discomfort, her cold-sweat-terror and not facilitating her escape –– he knows it too. 

their eggs arrive with a clink of cheap crockery on the worn tabletop and cutlery wrapped in thin, cheap napkins. milk leaks from under his scrambled eggs, soggying the corner of his toast –– mixed in to get the most out of a single egg. he should have taken her somewhere better. somewhere not stretched as thin as home. but he didn’t want to spook her. as if an expensive restaurant would make her skin prickle more than his hard jaw. 

every question that hangs between them is a knife she expects. what have you done since vinnitsa, who have you been. winding questions that lead down a dark dirt path, whose pebbles are hot underfoot the further down the shadowed road you get, whose trees are orange with a blaze that blurs the air in the distance. “i came to america in sixty-two,” he says, instead of any of the questions that burn. “i didn’t mean to stay.” he cuts egg, cuts toast, cuts the extra hash brown he got to replace the bacon on the set breakfast, and spears them on his fork. “when did you get here?”

    the food looks so appetising, like in a tv show or in a magazine magda flicks through sometimes when she buys bread at the corner store. the eggs a warm yellow, bread toasted brown, the potatoes max had gotten to replace the bacon crispy and golden. in spite of her own anxiety, she unwraps her knife and fork and peers at her plate with interest. it all feels so american -- even more so when the waitress comes back with steaming mugs of black coffee. it is a rare treat for magda, who prefers to spend extra money she has on cheese or a small block of chocolate that she hoards for a week or some oils for her hair.

her eyes flick up from the plate, where she is spearing a corner of the hashbrown onto her fork, the knife left on the table to weigh the napkin down so it does not flutter off. she was in america in nineteen sixty but if she says that, he might ask where were you before? he knows her well enough to know when she is hiding something -- and she would have to hide why she had to stop running in transia when she had never stopped running before america. 

this lie seems easier.

    “i am not the most patient,” magda admits, and then adds, as an afterthought, an undertone to herself, “astaghfirullah.”

max mentioned food and magda had been hungry, even if all her appetite has left her, even if her stomach now roils with anxiety, with the terrible knowledge of how much metal there is in the room. knifes and forks and spoons, bits of metal in the hinges of the doors, coins, belts, zippers ... even her own bag would not be safe, for all that she’d clutched it like a lifeline while he kept his silver-shard eyes on her the whole way here.

she had expected him to find her again, had known it was inevitable the moment she had seen him, the moment he had known. but she had promised herself she would fight harder, that she would not be cowed into going with him again -- but, faced with the harsh angles of his face, her courage had fled her, flapping into the distance and out of reach. he will never leave her be and magda has nowhere left to run.

and so, she sits. her jaw seemingly glued shut, not knowing what will spill from her mouth if she opens it. the diner, open, with daylight pouring in and people bustling around, is not comforting. she sits and she waits for her eggs and toast and she waits, like she had the last time, for him to understand and allow her to leave.

MAX. HIS EYES FLICK UP TO HER AND A LUMP OF POTATO GULPS DOWN HIS THROAT. her voice is low and serious. his hand lowers onto the scrubbed table, bread held poised like it, too, is listening. 

the silence is long and measured for max by the blood that pounds loudly, beat by wet beat, in his ears. “what does ––” his face twitches, a convulsion that clenches his jaw, spasms his mouth and its aborted question. “ –– what does that mean?” sick for months, like she’ll need the hospital? the thought makes his skin, clammy under his worn shirt, crawl. “what else did he say? how serious is it?”

though the chair in the corner of their cramped living room calls to him –– threadbare and thinned, but still begging for his collapse into it –– he pulls himself up by the bannister and follows the soup to the table. 

his smile is less shy than hers by nature. spread wide, closed-mouthed. “good. i’m glad.” his voice is as warm as the bowl he cradles his callouses against. “hopefully that’s the end of it, then.” 

he swirls his bread through the stew and picks all of the potato out first. saving the best until last is still a foreign concept. he holds some potato in his cheek, savouring it, while he answers, muffled. “good,” the other men don’t like me because i am young and clever and jewish. “training under the draftsman is still going well.” he’s a drunk and i am better at his job than he is. “ –– good.” he shrugs. “i will hopefully be promoted soon.”

     “i ... ” all day long, she’s been thinking about what to tell him -- how to tell him. how he would react. would he be happy? angry? they are already struggling and he works so hard already.

“No problem…” Jake smiles back, helping to grab all he can to collect her shopping, he might be a thief of sorts but his mother raised him to respect a lady, unlike some who apparently leave after rudely bumping into people. “Are you okay, Miss? Nothing is damaged is it?”

   Randi Lehnsherr had only twice in her life managed to make Erich feel ashamed of himself, although she had tried often.  The first time he had asked her why she had let Jakob go off to war and she had slapped him across the face.  The second she had died and he had not been at the funeral.  He looks down at his palm and thinks — Randi should have known him less, and maybe she would have shamed him more.  But she had always understood when he was up to something.  This girl doesn’t and the kindness nearly makes him feel guilty.

   Better go to bed hungry than rise in debt, the Talmud says.  Remembering it all of a sudden feels odd; too wretchedly holy for a dirty grocery store.  He holds her money between two fingers and sighs.

       “Oy.  Mausi, I have money.  What are you buying with this, huh?”