Howard grew up next to Johannesburg’s city centre. He and his parents boarded with another family, they had the second floor, that’s all. I never saw it, but Howard told me about it, described it: its bareness, and how cramped it was. There were chickens in a coop at the back, and a narrow laneway. Howard’s father worked in a menswear shop, he worked for his landlord. They struggled, they always struggled.

Perhaps my mother-in-law never got over the trauma of leaving her home, her country, and her parents, everyone left behind, and the long years after 1940, when she heard nothing, nothing, from them. No letter. No letters. She’d mention often, even when I knew her — during the short while that I knew her — the letters, the letters, that never came, that never came from Europe, after 1940. From her village, from her shtetl, whose name, she told me once, was Rakishok. A silence, a silence from there, no sound or trace of anything, anyone, ever again.

Howard was an only child, like me. We joked, from the beginning, that it’s what bound us. Of course, it is not. I think of Howard as the rescued one, the salvaged one, from the wreckage of the war that his parents left behind. I feel that it was enough, full enough, for his parents to have brought one rescued person into the world, brought him into being, and they could not manage another. I do not know, though, if this is true. Perhaps my mother-in-law was physically unable to conceive again, perhaps she had miscarriages, how would I know. She would never have spoken of such a thing: she who spoke so little, to begin with.

I’ve understood since that my mother-in-law was a person of absences, and erasures. Something I learned about other people among us, too. But that was later; much later.

In any case, I think she and her husband never cared to keep their Jewish traditions, or pass them down, I think it hurt them too much.

And I think Howard felt about it as his parents did. He married me, after all. I, who am a secular Jew.

But here’s a thing. Helena travelled to Lithuania a few years ago, in 2009, with her husband. She had always been interested in that history, her grandparents’ history.

Howard had only the town’s name, Rakishok, to give her. Nothing else. He tried, he tried to remember, but he’d never asked his mother. Helena is interested in absences. I’ve said it before: she resembles me.

JOSEPH, the lawyer working underground for the resistance, came to our house, to our garden room, in late January. Howard brought him home from work.

It was in the evening, just before dinner.

Joseph, Howard said, as we stood in the lamp-lit hallway.

This is my wife, Jacqueline. And Joseph shook my hand.

Thank you, thank you, he said. It won’t be for long. I’m so grateful. He was dark-haired and bearded, and thin, he wore silver-rimmed glasses.