The Postcard

by Anne Berest

the bystander gives the yogurt to the man, and it perforates his stomach because it’s too heavy for someone hanging on to life by a single thread after being evacuated from Auschwitz by the SS in January, three whole months ago, after having somehow survived the final massacres and death-marches and forced walks through the snow beneath the blows of the soldiers’ truncheons, the constant humiliations, the chaos of the fall of the Reich, and the journeys in the same stock cars, on the same trains, and hunger, and thirst, and the fight to stay alive long enough to get home, a fight that has been almost impossible for his exhausted body, and so his heart finally stops beating there and then, on the day of his arrival home, on the gray pavement of Paris, at the bottom of the stairs on the rue d’Alsace, after weeks and weeks of fighting. His body is so thin that it folds in on itself as it crumples to the ground softly, like a dead leaf, and settles there slowly, without making any sound at all.