There was a wedding,

and we were invited

and, when we got there,

there was a man

who they said was

my father's cousin.

This is Michael, they said –

same name as you, hah! And at one point in the

wedding, my aunt took

me to one side and said

that there was a time

during the war when

Michael was a boy, six,teen or seventeen no older than you are now,

she said, and his parents

said to him that it wasn’t going to be

safe where they were

in Poland. And so, my aunt said,

his parents put him on

a train and he never

saw them again. Like it always was,

at that time, when people told me things

like this, my aunt just

shrugged, looked sad

and said, I suppose

they died in the camps,

and I never knew what that meant – what were

these camps? Why were

people taken there? At the wedding,

I watched him. He must have been about

forty years old then. In my mind, I thought of him

being the same age as me, and I imagined

my parents saying to me one day:

Michael, go, don’t stay,

there are soldiers and police and they are

kicking us out of our

houses and flats – go, don’t stay.

So they come with me

to a station and we

wait for a train and all the time we are looking

out for soldiers and police, but it’s OK, so they

hug me and kiss me and I get on the train,

and stand in the corridor and wave to them

through the window, and I can see them close

together, waving, and then there’s a shout and a whistle

and the train starts to pull off

and they wave and they wave

and I wave and I wave till they’re gone. And that’s the last I ever see of them. I never see them again,

but wherever I go, and whoever

I’m with, I remember that picture

of them standing together,

waving me off, and for the rest of my life I can’t make any of it

make sense, that they did that

thing of making me safe and

there was nothing they could

do for themselves. And I think

again and again of what they

might have been thinking at

that moment, as they waved

and stood close to each other.

What did they think as they

lost everything? And later

they were herded together and taken to a camp, never knowing

what had happened, never knowing

why this was happening, never knowing

what happened to me, even at the very end as they were closing their eyes.

And though I smile and walk about

in the world, I carry this with me

wherever I am, whoever I’m with,

and no matter how many times I try to change it, no matter how many times I try to get them

to come with me on the train, or how many times I get them

to escape and find me in those freezing places where I ended up,

or how many times I imagine

that I meet them after the War

is over, and we hug and kiss and cry, it never happens.

It never happens. There is always nothing. Nothing but

nothing. But I walk about in the world

smiling and nodding. I even go

to weddings, and people smile at me, even this young man

with the same name as me, no older than I was then when

my parents put me on the train. And he’s looking at me

like he’s trying to read me

like a

book.