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The nurses hold me down and clamp my eyes open with pincers.

Mengele advances on me. The needle looks as big as the Eiffel Tower.

I look away, to the wall.

There, pinned up like butterflies, are hundreds of human eye, rows and rows, all labeled neatly with numbers and letters, and in half the colors of the rainbow: brilliant blue, yellow, violet, green, red, gray.

Eye without body and without sight, all watching me without blinking.

It is the last thing I ever see.

You ask me how it feels to be blind, sudden and without warning.

Well, to be honest, it is only one of my problems; because Esther is right next to me, and when she sees what Mengele has done, she starts screaming, louder than I ever hear anyone.

They hit her, I hear her fall, people shout in German; and still she screams.

Then there is a gunshot, no louder than Esther’s cries, and she is silent.

Of the next few days, I don’t remember much.

I said nothing and had no real thoughts, just sensations; confusion, bafflement.

My first real memory is when they push us out of the camp, and we start on the death march. These things, the savage cold and perfect agony, these are the only ones which can stop me being numb.

I was alone, but I still had so much to say to Esther and share with her. Everything she and I had ever done was now without meaning. The biggest tragedy of my life, and who else would I seek but her for help?

But she is gone.

Dreadful, dreadful, that the disaster takes from me the only person I needed.

As though half of me is ripped out.

People who lose limb say they still get phantom pains, years later. That is how I feel; a part of me was missing, a physical part.

I am without balance, lopsided, bleak, hollow. The world is distant. I watch, I do not take part. I am an observer.

An observer who cannot see.

There were thousands of us on that march, but I walked alone. My soul pirouetted silently through life, joined with her shadow. We had arrived together, Esther and I; why would we not leave together, too?

Without Esther, I could not imagine myself. Worse, I could not imagine life itself. I had ceased to exist.

Why hadn’t Mengele shot me, too? I begged him to. But no; he wanted me alive. He had injected a super dose of methylene blue into my eye, and he wanted to see if it had worked.

You’re married and your spouse dies, so you change; you go from wife to widow, husband to widower. But when your twin dies, you’re still twin. I played with words. I was twin. I had twin. I am twin. They all mean nothing.

For everyone else, they lose someone close, and is awful, but they still have memories of life without that person: husbands before they met their wives, parents before they had their children.

Not for a minute did I know how it was, not to have a twin. You can marry again, even have another child; but you can never have another twin. You are still the person you were, except when you’re a twin; then you are half, and that’s it.

What did I do? I did what any twin would do. I take on Esther’s characteristics. Her mannerisms, her laugh, even her voice sometimes.

Like she borrowed me for a moment.

I had been quiet; now I was a chatterbox, like I had swallowed a gramophone needle. Before, I avoided danger. Now I looked for it, and being blind helped, because if I could not see it, it could not hurt me.

In any case, I knew already the worst pain possible. What else could there be?

Now, years later, I know the truth: I felt guilty for still being alive, and thought that if I could die, that guilt would go.

For Esther, I was Cain: I had taken her place, her life.

Would I have changed positions, given my life for hers? In the beat of a heart.

I had no one else; all my family had died in Auschwitz.

Why was I the only one to live? For one person, one single person, to come out with me; someone else to share my responsibility, someone else who failed to save our family.

I was angry, and at everyone. Angry at myself, more lucky than my twin and my parents. Angry at the good fortune of those who had survived with their own families, more or less.

I felt an impostor. I was no saint; why was I so lucky?

Guilt, humiliation, and shame. How to beat them? How to take back dignity?

Over time, I found the answer. The same way to live life itself: day by day.

I realized that things happen, and not necessarily for a reason, but still they happen. Someone must survive, after all. Someone must bear witness.

Oh yes, Herbert, that is big part of being Jewish, bearing witness. You want to find what happened to Max Stensness, I try to help you, because he was killed, and that must be made better.

I stopped thinking: Why me? I started to think Why not me? Maybe I was chosen, maybe not. I was still here, because, maybe I don’t know it, but because I struggle, I have strength, I make the best of what I have.

I want to give Esther a gift, and now I see what that gift is. I must not let go of this life and be with her. Instead, I stay alive for as long as I can. I live my life for her as well as for me; I am her window on the world, and all the joys and sadnesses in my life are for her as well.

We had shared life before birth; we share it after death, too.

Being a twin doesn’t stop when there’s only one of you, because there’s never really only one of you. We who have been are one another forever.

Suddenly I was afraid to die because, if I died, then so would she. With her alive, I would not be so lonely. But at the same time, I would forever have been half a person, always existing against her, compared to her, opposed to her. We had been one soul in two body; now we were one soul in one body. The skin was around us, not me.

In Nigeria, solo twins from Yoruba tribe carry round their necks a wooden image which represents their dead twin.
This way, the dead twin’s spirit has a refuge, and the survivor has company. For me, no such souvenir, but nonetheless I carry Esther with me wherever I go.

So the me I knew before was gone, and instead came discovery, rebirth, excitement. And that’s why I forgive Mengele.

You’re surprised? Don’t be. I forgive him because that is only way to sanity.

I don’t know what he does now. He escaped the Allies, they had him at a camp and he escaped. He’s probably in Brazil, or Paraguay, or Argentina, getting fat and molesting the local girls. I don’t know, and I don’t care.

I don’t absolve him, no, never; but he left me with life, and so with a choice: what to do with that life.

So I make my choice, and my choice is to forgive.

I forgive, and he has no hold over me anymore. For some survivors, everything is always Auschwitz; they’re more at home with their memories than in the real world, and that’s all they can think and talk about.

Not me. This is first time I tell anyone this, Herbert. No one else knows, because until now no one could understand; but you I think are different, and I hope you are worthy of it.

I have many friends, but no one for such confiding.

I have many lovers, but no one who I give my heart to.

How could I? How will I ever have with someone what I had with Esther?

I already have a soul mate; I don’t need another.

“Can I touch your face?” Hannah said. “I want to see if you smile or not.”

Perhaps when she found out she would let him know, Herbert thought; after hearing all that, he was not sure he could tell.

He
did
understand, or at least hoped he did; because while anyone could have comprehended it, in purely intellectual terms, he had actually
felt
it.

The wrenches, the fury, the gaping wounds of loss had flowed from her as she spoke, or maybe they had been in him all along, and she had brought them to bloom.

As for whether he was worthy of this knowledge, well, he hoped so, for it seemed more important than anything he had ever encountered.

Hannah traced the fingers of her right hand over his mouth, forcing his lips slightly apart. Then she moved her fingers up to his cheek, fluttering them along the ragged sproutings of his late-night stubble, while her left hand flowed and undulated through the lines on his forehead.

“Hmm,” she said. “A smile, a frown; hard to tell.” She paused. “Say something.”

He could not speak, for what could he say that could possibly do justice to the things Hannah had been through?

The words had not yet been invented that would have sounded adequate, and it was fear of being thought otherwise—of proving, through some ham-fisted platitude, that he was not the man she had taken him to be—that held him silent.

That, and the sudden vertigo-inducing thought that he had never felt closer to any human being.

“Oh, Herbert,” she laughed. “You know why I like you? Because you’re different.”

“Different? In what way?”

“Most men, they get you alone in a room, and they want sex, sex, right now.” Her tone suggested that this
had not, on occasions, been entirely unwelcome. “Not you. We sit here till the end of time and still you do nothing, no?”

His gut churned. “I’m not much to look at, Hannah.”

“Well, you find the right person, then.” She laughed again, her delight a golden firework which fell on him and lit him up. “Herbert, Herbert, even if I see you, I don’t care what you look like.”

She moved her lips to his, and he was destroyed.

H
erbert woke with a start, already thrashing at the python which had wrapped itself round his body as he slept. Then he realized, with shamed surprise, that it was Hannah, her legs curled round his and her arms clasped across the back of his neck, as though she were a koala clinging to the trunk of a eucalyptus.

Spot the man unaccustomed to waking up with a woman, he thought.

Hannah stirred but did not wake. Herbert dropped his head back on to the pillow and dared a small smile as he thought about the previous night.

Now, granted, he did not have much experience in these matters, but even if he had been Casanova, he would still have thought that Hannah was, as lovers went, incredibly skilled.

Her fingertips were calloused, rough against his skin; from Braille, no doubt.

She had told him, as her hands had traced intricate patterns across his skin, that some Indonesian masseurs were blinded in childhood to increase their sense of touch. Feeling the exquisite way in which her own fingers had known exactly where to apply pressure, and to what extent, he had easily believed it.

Hannah had taken the lead, of course, extraordinarily confident both in her own desires and in the instructions she had given him, which made him think of all the practice she must have had to become that adept,
and therefore of how many men had been with her before he had, and of how most of them would inevitably have measured up better than him.

He blinked twice to rid himself of the thought.

What did it matter? He seemed to have given Hannah some pleasure, too, unless she was a much, much better actress than he had given her credit for. And now she lay there, snuffling contentedly against his neck, and he was happy.

So what did it matter, indeed, who had come before him?

It mattered much more, he thought, that there be no one after him.

The radio said that it was freezing at Kensington Palace, and colder still at London airport. Northolt had 90 flights scheduled in and out, and none were moving; of London’s 107, only 6 were still running.

Herbert saw in the dim dawn light that the fog had crept into the edges of the room where they lay, gray streaks which would hang there until the fire had warmed enough to disperse them.

The fog had settled for less than three days, but already there was a thick black film on everything inside Herbert’s flat. The curtains looked as though a chimney-sweep had toweled himself down with them, and the metal surface of the draining board was dusted in a fine layer of sooty grime.

Putting more coal in the grate would hardly make the place cleaner, but the fire had gone out, and the room was appreciably colder than it had been when they retired.

Faced with the choice of freezing or choking, Herbert decided that warmth was the sine qua non. He
scooped a pile of black nuggets from the scuttle next to the fireplace.

He watched Hannah as she dressed. In some inexplicable way, this seemed even more intimate and invasive than making love with her a few hours before had been.

Only when she had finished did Herbert remember that he still had a killer to find.

He had been lost in Hannah for hours, a blissful time out of time; he would have stayed there forever, but she would not have let him, and for that he loved her more than ever.

The knock at the door was loud and sudden enough to startle them both.

Herbert jumped slightly in his chair, sloshing coffee over the side of his mug. Hannah, who was standing, took a step backward, and turned her foot slightly on something. She bent down to pick it up, and Herbert saw as she ran her fingers over it that it was his makeshift paperweight; a model car, about six inches long with one wheel missing, an old childhood toy. It must have fallen from the desk.

Strange, he thought, that she should jump so. For her, all sounds must in some way be sudden, and therefore the unexpected must have gradually become the norm.

Herbert got up and went to the door, tensing himself.

“Who is it?” he called out.

“Me. De Vere Green.”

Herbert looked at Hannah, who raised her eyebrows in surprise.