The Rabbit Girls Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Anna Ellory

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542007238 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542007232 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542094191 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542094194 (paperback)

  Cover design by Emma Rogers

  Dedicated to the women that time forgot.

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  January 1945

  1 MIRIAM

  HENRYK

  MIRIAM

  2 MIRIAM

  HENRYK

  MIRIAM

  3 HENRYK

  MIRIAM

  HENRYK

  MIRIAM

  4 MIRIAM

  HENRYK

  5 MIRIAM

  HENRYK

  MIRIAM

  6 MIRIAM

  HENRYK

  7 MIRIAM

  HENRYK

  MIRIAM

  8 HENRYK

  MIRIAM

  9 MIRIAM

  HENRYK

  MIRIAM

  10 HENRYK

  MIRIAM

  11 MIRIAM

  12 MIRIAM

  13 HENRYK

  MIRIAM

  14 MIRIAM

  HENRYK

  MIRIAM

  HENRYK

  MIRIAM

  15 MIRIAM

  HENRYK

  MIRIAM

  HENRYK

  MIRIAM

  16 MIRIAM

  17 HENRYK

  MIRIAM

  HENRYK

  MIRIAM

  18 HENRYK

  MIRIAM

  19 MIRIAM

  20 MIRIAM

  21 HENRYK

  MIRIAM

  22 HENRYK

  MIRIAM

  23 MIRIAM

  24 MIRIAM

  25 MIRIAM

  26 MIRIAM

  HENRYK

  MIRIAM

  27 HENRYK

  MIRIAM

  28 MIRIAM

  29 MIRIAM

  30 MIRIAM

  31 MIRIAM

  HENRYK

  MIRIAM

  32 MIRIAM

  HENRYK

  33 MIRIAM

  HENRYK

  34 MIRIAM

  35 MIRIAM

  36 MIRIAM

  HENRYK

  37 MIRIAM

  38 MIRIAM

  39 MIRIAM

  40 MIRIAM

  HENRYK

  December 1990

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst

  Are full of passionate intensity.

  W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’

  January 1945

  It couldn’t be rushed.

  Crouched on the end of the bed, focused only on the uniform in her lap, she unpicked an inch from the hem with fingers fat and numb. Very, very carefully she pushed the slip of paper into the pocket.

  It needed to lie flat. Completely hidden within the folds.

  She fed another all the way along the seam as far as it would reach, checked the front, the back and the fold. Then another and, finally, the last one.

  The final one.

  Time was slipping away, rushing by. It was the end.

  Her fingers raced to thread the needle but the eye was small and the thread thin. The calls and screams thundered closer, louder, each one more urgent than the last. Her hands shook, a tremble mirrored in her chin, her lips and her heart.

  They were hidden.

  Safe.

  She rolled the thread nimbly around her fingers and placed it into the seam. She wove the needle through the hem, locking it in.

  There was nothing left to do, except . . .

  1

  MIRIAM

  December 1989

  The Wall between East and West is open. The door between her and the rest of the world is closed. Locked and checked, twice. She runs her finger along the gap between door and frame to find the tiny, soft feather in place. Her fingers trace the grain of the worn wood down to the handle. To check for a third time. Locked.

  She lifts the intercom phone and listens.

  Silence.

  Thick carpet lines the hallway to his room. Without glancing at him she smooths the velvet curtains before opening them to a lavender sky. The rain has washed the air clean and she welcomes the breeze.

  ‘It’s a beautiful day,’ she whispers, wanting it to be true. The building opposite looms in all its classical primacy, facades stark, windows shut. Light seeps out through cracks, barred from reaching across the street by old twisted railings. Berlin is Berlin again. And Miriam is home.

  The cobbled pavements of Klausenerplatz glisten from night rain. When the rasp of the pressure mattress fades to white noise she withers away from the window to the man in the bed. Arranged flat on his back, white sheets tucked around his body.

  She pauses.

  The circuits connect and with relief her body follows the familiar pattern.

  ‘Did you sleep well?’ She does not let her mouth run quiet for fear that in the silence, her thoughts will ignite.

  From the bedside table she unfolds B.Z., the newspaper is dated 10th November, she hasn’t purchased another. The smell of words creates a sharp nostalgia.

  She reads the bold headline ‘We all thank God’ and turns the page. Faces smiling, laughing, crying, people hugging each other, bottles of beer raised, and in the background: the Wall.

  ‘What do you think, Dad? Do you think this,’ the paper crinkles in her hands, ‘is an act of God?’ She smiles, for she knows what he would have said. Or she thinks she does.

  ‘They are calling them wallpeckers, the people battling through with a hammer and chisel. It’ll take them a decade to reach the other side this way, but look . . .’ She turns the paper so that if he were to open his eyes he could see the picture, black and white, of a small boy and an even smaller hammer. She imagines the tink-tink as the wallpeckers young and old chip into the wall. ‘You should see this,’ she murmurs.

  There is no response, not even a flicker of recognition.

  He had always been busy; never still. Until now. He had a quick mind, but regularly knocked into things, his body betraying his age, while his mind was vibrant.

  Miriam folds and replaces the newspaper, suspended in time. The world continues to turn around her; the magnitude of the news is so big, it’s incomprehensible. The euphoria, the joy . . . The Berlin Wall is down, but the news is of little consequence, the emotion out of reach for her, because she is cleaning, caring and changing.

  A cycle which will end, and soon.

  ‘I’m lifting you.’ She leans on the bed and holds him under both arms, avoids looking at his face. She can lift and nudge with her body weight into h
is chest to hoist him a few inches up the bed. She fluffs his pillows and shuffles him up. Guided by her small hands, he rests, semi-reclined.

  ‘There we go,’ she continues and pours the water from a plastic jug into the cup. ‘Small sips,’ she says. She positions a clean hand towel under his chin.

  According to the medical staff, the slanted rim and two handles of the cup make it easier for him to drink, but the water bypasses closed lips and trickles down his beard. The doctors also say words like ‘Fluid Balance’, ‘Hydration’, ‘Comfort’. Their faces show boredom. Disinterest. Repetition. They look, they do not see. They talk, but cannot hear. He should remain comfortable, hydrated, and all input and output should be measured. Yet he was not meant to live longer than a few days. Weeks later he still breathes, but the prognosis is death. Attempting to make this a ‘comfortable’ experience feels as futile as sticking on a plaster.

  ‘A few sips now. A bit more.’

  The nurses encouraged her to shave him when he was in hospital, but it felt too intimate an act, so his beard continues to grow as water drips from it into the towel.

  Miriam empties the catheter bag into a kidney-shaped bowl and carries it out, conscious of the step between bedroom and bathroom. The fluid swooshes as a smell that is acid to both the nose and the stomach rises around her; she tries not to heave. Once flushed away and the tray disposed of, she sits on the side of the bath, waiting for the water to warm. It falls over her fingers and she resists the urge to wash her hands while she waits.

  Collecting the water in a bowl, she moves back into the bedroom. In the bed, she sets about undressing and bathing him. She does not speak through this process.

  Not once.

  She washes, dries using a soft, white towel, and places the cream for pressure sores on the affected areas. The mattress shifts as airflow changes to support his body as it moves.

  Taking his left arm, Miriam pushes it through the sleeve of the clean pyjama shirt. As she turns his wrist she notices his watch has stopped. Tapping on the face does not yield movement. His old watch, gold hands and gold face with black numbers, dissolved into tiny outlines over time.

  Turning his wrist over she places it on the bed, trying to find the clasp. Its wide gold strap has no links to unfasten. Bending closer she runs her fingers along its rim.

  Engaged as she is in the watch, her fingertips caressing for a hook, she doesn’t notice his breathing change. She doesn’t notice the shift of movement. She doesn’t notice his other arm move.

  She doesn’t notice any of these things until an icy hand grabs at her wrist.

  She looks to his face, his head still slack. His eyes still closed.

  Until they are not.

  His grip tightens and transports Miriam to a younger, brighter version of herself. Late teens at the zoo with friends. A big group of blurred faces, forgotten names. A colourful image of tie-dye, eye shadow and feathers.

  The ‘petting area’ was a small enclosure with a shin-high wooden fence. The air was hot and thick with the sawdust that covered the floor. She was pushed forward to face an enormous bird of prey. She looked to her friends who had ‘volunteered’ her and felt claustrophobic. The gloves provided did nothing to disguise the solid bird on her arm with its leather-like feet and sharp claws. The bird’s eyes moved this way and that. Everyone was watching her. People started to move across her vision, creating a kaleidoscope. But the bird held on, even tightening its grip as everything went dark.

  Miriam tries to use her free hand to loosen his, but knocks the bowl to the ground and the suds splash up in a wave. Having grown comfortable looking at his eyelids, his open eyes are too white and too deep. She wants to look away. Anywhere else. But his gaze holds her, he is staring through her.

  ‘What is it?’ she asks gently, although his grip is tight. He pulls on her wrist. Again, her body moves closer as he pulls himself up the bed higher until they are level.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  His breath has a rancid, sweet smell, like decaying fruit. She tries to pull herself away, yet it spirals on her cheek. She feels her pulse quicken in the trapped hand then thrum as the circulation slows. Her eyes are still locked into his when his look changes and he focuses on her. His features soften.

  ‘It’s okay. I’m here.’ Her voice splinters as it rushes out.

  ‘Frieda,’ he says like the whisper of a fallen leaf. ‘Frieda.’

  His voice reminds her that this is Dad, the man who sang her to sleep, read stories and smoothed her hair. Dad, the man to whom she has not spoken for ten years.

  She clears her throat. ‘Dad, it’s Miriam,’ she says gently.

  A millisecond of recognition and she places her free hand on top of his, which still grips on hard. He coughs and the sound vibrates around the room.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Frieda!’ he calls like a long, low foghorn over a crowd. ‘Frieda!’

  His body won’t cooperate as he tries to move out of the bed. He struggles, scrabbles, plucks at the fabric, unable to get free. An act so futile, she cannot look away. He calls out ‘Frieda’ once more before slowing. Deflated. Eyes closed. His right hand now lies over his left wrist, holding the watch.

  She waits for his inhale.

  Exhale.

  Pause.

  Inhale.

  And she exhales shakily. Not moving for some time, just watching his chest rise and fall, a rhythm to suffer by. His face relaxes and saliva dribbles from the side of his mouth. She wipes it away with a cloth.

  HENRYK

  ‘Dad,’ she calls. I can hear a woman’s voice as soft as lilac.

  But I am lost . . .

  Lost in the past.

  Lost with Frieda . . .

  It was 1942 and she had been in my class almost six months. She rarely spoke, never smiled, but listened with an intensity that would make any professor feel exuberant, any professor, that is, not teaching within a Nazi regime.

  Instead, her acute awareness of the subjects I taught, the texts we studied, made me more and more nervous.

  She was attractive in the same way everyone in the class was. Male and female. Fair and strong. But she commanded my attention, and I was desperate to know what she was thinking. What did she think about the texts? So far, I had yet to hear a single word from her mouth.

  The snow fell in heavy sheets outside the window and the class was fractious, bored; like a bundle of puppies they wanted to be outside.

  I was pacing around behind my desk, chalk in hand. I had written Schmerz – Pain – on the blackboard and my fingertips were dusty. I had delivered the theory behind death, dying and ‘the greater good’. All acceptable. Then I happened to glance at her and took a huge risk.

  I went off track. For her.

  To see if she had a reaction.

  ‘When thinking of pain . . .’ I formed the words, rolling them in my mouth before committing to them. ‘Contemporary writers cannot depict pain like those in earlier centuries.’

  She looked up, directly at me, and I stopped, frozen to the spot right in front of her desk, but continued: ‘Pain is an old entity and . . . well, perhaps we could learn something from the Russians after all.’

  ‘How to starve,’ said one of the men to a slight chuckle. I looked at him until he sank back in his seat.

  ‘Russian writers feel their pain to allow their readers to suffer,’ I said.

  The class laughed, although I wasn’t sure I was being funny.

  ‘They’ll all feel the pain of the Führer soon,’ another student offered.

  ‘No,’ she interrupted. ‘Surely you mean that we feel their pain as if it were our own.’

  It was the first time she had spoken out and the rest of the class looked at her, as I did, with intrigue, astounded she had spoken at all. One of the students wolf-whistled and the class dissolved into laughter and chatter.

  Yet she had spoken, to me, and she continued, lowering her voice conspiratorially, and I leant closer. ‘The power o
f the writing is not in the words or the actions, but a creation of every nuance of feeling that another has felt, do you agree, professor?’ she asked in French.

  I checked the class, but they were busy mocking her. I perched on my desk.

  ‘I agree,’ I said, carefully framing my words in French, thinking this may be a trick. The French words felt refined but rusty in the back of my head.

  ‘If we look at Russia, France and Ireland, we can explore a pain that we cannot imagine.’ She was speaking in a loud, husky voice that belied her age, still in French. As I listened the language became fresh, exciting, freeing. The class was fidgeting again and watching our exchange.

  I lowered my voice. ‘Our history is also full of pain.’

  ‘It is,’ she said. Then changing from French to English she added, ‘But our history is also subject to whomever is in charge; it becomes less fact and more fiction, open to the whims and fancies of a flatulent Schwachkopf.’ She used the word in German and the shock on my face reverberated around the class. None of them could understand the rest of our exchange, but that word Schwachkopf seemed to ricochet. She looked at me. Challenging me.

  ‘Look at page seventy-six,’ I said to the class in English. She laughed and I switched to German, giving the instruction again, adding, ‘Discuss with your partner the techniques employed by the author to describe pain.’

  The class rustled and mumbled about it, before lively chatter ensued. I moved closer to her desk and bent low.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘It is only when we understand language that we can truly immerse ourselves in the collective pain of that culture and read the text as it is intended. Not like these assholes.’ She went back to speaking French. ‘These connards. Factory-made buffoons who cannot think for themselves: yes sir, no sir,’ she mimicked, and as I looked around many students were looking out of the window and others flicking through the text in front of them.

  ‘This is very risky, Fräulein,’ I said in English, again following her shift. English landed better on the tongue, but it was slower to form in my head. I cherished the complexity of the languages that I hadn’t had an opportunity to practise in years. Switching back and forth was incredibly difficult, yet my brain sparkled with the challenge.

  ‘Risky?’ She smiled as though the thought of taking a risk amused her. ‘I would have thought, as a professor, that you would want an actual conversation. A . . .’ But then she changed into another language and I was lost; I watched her lips as she spoke, but I didn’t understand.