Free Watch You Die by Katia Lief Page B

he’d pursued in reality or what country he was in. He might still have been in Germany or he might have crossed back into Poland; he had no way of knowing for sure. Without food or water, he lived on melted snow and the hope that his older sister – the last member of his family he had seen alive back at Auschwitz before she was transferred to a women’s camp – had survived and they would reunite. She had not; they would not. But he didn’t know that then. He trudged through the pillow-white frozen woods aware that the enemy could be anywhere and that if he was seen he would instantly be shot and killed. Which to a certain way of thinking would be a kind of luck. Because what he came to fear most was neither being killed nor failing to reach safety but suffering a slow demise alone in these woods.
    To deal with this terrible fear he pretended he was already safe. He pretended there was no enemy. He pretended he had not been held captive and starved and degraded for three years, that he had not lost track of or possibly actually
lost
his entire family. He pretended he was simply walking through the woods. “The imagination,” he always told me, “is a powerful friend.” It was for him.
    He did find his way back into Poland and he found the Russian army – or they found him: delirious at the edge of the forest. A couple of kind soldiers installed him in the home of a local farmer sympathetic to the Resistance. Thus my father found the end of the war in a feather bed and a plate of stuffed peppers. He never found his family – father, mother and two sisters – whom it turned out had all died, also alone, in various crematories. But he did, eventually, find Eva Gertlestein, my mother. They recognized each other across a crowded subway in Manhattan in 1952 and married soon after, joining forces in more ways than met the eye.
    I had stopped needing my father out of necessity – he was gone – but I had never stopped needing his “powerful friend”. I had employed imaginative escape many times, from the moment my father fled life. Had he deliberately taught me this skill to prepare me for his loss? All the hours he spent playing with me, lying stomach-down on the living room floor building castles and houses and amusement parks for my dolls. Later, I learned that reading was one way to escape. Writing, another. Love was an ideal escape in which imagination linked hopes and reality into a resilient web that could cradle you for years. You could escape into the eyes of your child and lose yourself in their needs. Or take up a cause and escape into that, believing your work important enough to give your life to. It was even possible to escape into every nook and cranny of your house, correcting its every imperfection. I had escaped all these ways. But one thing about escape was that you had to welcome the conduit that got you there. Work or love or children. To escape, you had to allow yourself to shift directions in a way that felt compelling.
    My father had escaped life-threatening danger through a forest.
    My mother was escaping old age by spooling herself back in, rewinding her life to the beginning.
    I had escaped my husband’s death by returning to my childhood city with the hope that I could help anchor my mother as she gradually departed into the past.
    And now I had to escape a man who appeared to be pursuing me.
    I had a problem: Joe Coffin. I no longer doubted that he was following me. He had a crush on me – or something – yet there was no one I knew whom I wanted less in my life. Escaping him would take ingenuity. We worked in the same office and soon he was moving to my borough in the general vicinity of my neighborhood. I lay on my bed that night thinking about how to handle it. Picturing myself alone in a snowy forest – an emotional forest, which is where Joe had left me, because that moment when I saw him on West End Avenue I
feared
him in a brand new way – I put myself to the test. What if, in