The Rabbit Girls Read online

  She laughed. ‘Not Dutch then, maybe . . .’ She reeled off words so fast they sounded like bullets.

  ‘How many languages do you know?’ I asked.

  ‘A few,’ she replied, in French this time.

  ‘You need to be careful speaking the language of the enemy at this time,’ I said, lowering my voice, speaking English again.

  ‘Are they the enemy?’ she asked slowly. ‘Or the people who are going to free us?’

  I looked around, but the class was busy chittering away and when I looked back at her she had returned to looking at her book as if she hadn’t spoken at all.

  ‘Thank you, Fräulein . . .?’ I said, wanting to keep her talking.

  ‘It’s Frieda,’ she said, not looking up.

  ‘Frieda.’

  MIRIAM

  Frieda? she thinks. Who is Frieda?

  Her father’s hand still rests on the watch. She goes to unclasp it, but changes her mind, not wanting to disturb him again. Her hands work as fast as her heart to button his nightshirt.

  His eyes, although closed, swell from their sockets, held by paper-thin eyelids like hot air balloons tethered by pegs. His mouth is wide open and she moves away from the direction of his breath, yet guilt forces her to remain. And woven into that guilt to remain by her father’s side is her mother.

  Her mother would have cared for Dad better, known what to do, what to say. Mum never blundered or froze; she was always there with exactly the right thing, but when Mum had needed her, Miriam hadn’t been there.

  She wasn’t there when Mum died and won’t believe that she also suffered like this. Instead she imagines a single window shimmering dust like glitter across a starched, white sheet. Perfectly covered by blankets in her ‘good’ nightdress. The back of her father’s head bowed as he knelt holding Mum’s hand in both of his.

  Miriam holds Dad’s hand in both of her own and looks at the watch; it reads ten past four. Hands still, but the watch itself has moved. Miriam sees an ashen line of skin at the top. She turns the arm over, alert to any reaction from him.

  And sees it.

  She has seen this before in textbooks and on the television.

  But now. Here. Black on white, hidden under gold.

  On her father.

  Numbers.

  Grey-black numbers, each one no more than a centimetre in length, perfectly square, tattooed into his skin.

  He was there.

  She returns the watch to its usual position and squeezes his hand tight as tears form. Bending to kiss him on the head, she changes her mind and gives his hand a final squeeze before turning away.

  In the kitchen, she turns the tap and allows the water to flow before resting her head on the cool work surface. Rat feet of fear scuttle up her spine. The numbers. She recalls the videos and pictures she saw as a child, of stripes, hollow faces, piles of bodies. She cannot imagine her father’s face as one of the many.

  She thinks of Mum. The only one who could help her right now. Wishing for her, for just a moment.

  A moment where she wasn’t so alone.

  Closing her eyes, she sees her. So clear and so deeply felt, the memory turns back time. An apron covering one of her most beautiful sunflower-yellow dresses, her high heels clicking on the floor of the kitchen, where food had nourished the soul before it was tasted on the lips.

  Turning off the tap she wipes her face in the rough mashed-potato smell of an old tea towel. Holding the tea towel to her side, a comfort to hold something, she is drawn into her mother’s room. Thin, yellow cotton curtains allow what light there is outside in. The walls and furniture floral and the room made up, blankets and sheets on the bed and the wardrobe full.

  Full of Mum.

  She sits down in the large wardrobe, pushing the shoeboxes away. The curtain of dresses closes in, a rainbow of colour and texture, shrouding her in the scent of orange blossom and sweet pastry. The dresses hang still, as though waiting for her return.

  She sees Mum’s hand, the way she held a lipstick brush, her baby finger raised as if she were drinking a fine tea. The hand pale, like a glove, then as she grew older becoming flecked and marked. The twist and turn of inspection of a new dress in the full-length mirror hidden in the old wardrobe. Mum resting her leg across the opposite knee, pressing first her toes then heels into a pair of shoes, as carefully as if they were glass slippers.

  Each image, too great to be contained, flashes for only a second, like a lighthouse, before illuminating the next one. Spinning around each flare, shining a bright, white light on her loss. Now held, paused, as though seen through one frame.

  The tomb of absence that used to be Mum.

  Her heart, fisted, batters at its cage. Unable to quieten her mind, she crashes out of the wardrobe, pulls dresses down from the rail and knocks shoeboxes into the room.

  Avoiding the large mirror that hangs over the sink in the bathroom, she forces herself to slow down as she loosens the hot tap. She places her hands under the water, as if in an inverted prayer. The water is cold. It trickles over her fingers and into her palm. As soon as she can feel some heat, she turns the water on full.

  Then the soap.

  Held in her closed palms she waits for it to warm.

  She scrubs and rubs until she has achieved a great lather; placing the foaming bar back in its rack she scours her hands, scraping her fingernails and knuckles into her palm, rubbing and scrubbing and vigorously pressing her hands into each other. Enough that the soap, no longer silky, becomes coarse to her skin.

  Noticing the familiar pain build, she continues, allowing its voice to take over the others. Something concrete. Filling her where absence cinders like a forgotten flame, just waiting for a spark to ignite it.

  Her hands, held small in Mum’s. No more.

  The soap, like Velcro, pulls against the supple skin, removing memories of a touch that had been everything.

  She places her hands back under the water, and the heat from it makes her gasp, bringing her thoughts back to the present. She holds her hands steady. Allows every bubble to wash away.

  When her hands are bright pink, with no soap left on their surface, she stares at them for a long time. And imagines the pulse that runs violently under the skin. She takes the nail brush under the flowing water, and scrubs.

  Each nail brushed, left, right and top, but the bristle sticks into her thumb at the wrong angle. A small drop of blood flows a little pink and swirls down the drain.

  She rinses the brush under the steaming water before placing her hands, one then the other, under the tap. Under the scalding pain. She counts.

  Three.

  Two.

  One.

  Then slowly turns off the tap, tight, and tries to calm her racing heart. Placing her shiny hands into the towel to pat them dry. Drying each finger and inspecting the damage to her thumb.

  ‘It’ll be okay,’ she says to herself. And she feels calmer, relaxed and soothed by the water and the tingle of her hands. She allows her thoughts to surface, the panic subdued.

  For now.

  2

  MIRIAM

  She sits in the old chair, relocated from the office when he had first come home. It was a chair she’d sat in when her feet couldn’t reach the ground. One on which she twirled the loose fabric at the seams between newly painted fingernails. She had retreated into it on many occasions with a cushion held tight to her chest.

  The rain patters on the window, Miriam turns the dial and tunes in the radio as the pips chime out.

  ‘This is the eleven o’clock news.’ The newsreader’s voice is loud and she turns the volume down. ‘East Berliners are exercising their new-found freedom to travel into the West and long queues can be found along all the major checkpoints. This freedom . . .’

  She zones out the reporter and thinks of freedom. How has she exercised her new-found freedom?

  There is a little café across the road and the coffees and selection of cakes, she recalls, used to be wonderful. It h
as been a long time. Would it still be the same? Could she go?

  Standing at the window she watches the far corner of the street where people are milling around and she thinks perhaps she could collect something and return home, she wouldn’t be more than a few minutes and Hilda says he can be left for a few hours. She says it a lot, but Miriam hasn’t left the house.

  Until now.

  ‘I’m going out,’ she says, and is surprised by the surety in her voice. ‘I won’t be long.’ Bringing the smell of fresh coffee into the house will do him good, she thinks. As she pulls on her boots and takes her coat off the hook, the phone rings. Its shrill noise pierces through the flat and stops Miriam dead; she is taken back to a month ago, another phone call and another door . . .

  That night she picked up the phone, the news was still showing images of people dancing on the Wall, drinking and singing.

  Unbelievable to think that was a month ago, and yet . . .

  They had been watching the scene for hours from the sofa, two hours away from Berlin, two hours away from her father.

  ‘Frau Voight?’ a woman on the other end asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Miriam whispered.

  ‘You are named as the next of kin for Herr Winter. I’m sorry to say your father is gravely ill.’

  As the woman kept talking Miriam sat on the stair, her eyes on the back of his neck. He was watching the television. He didn’t turn around.

  She listened as the woman spoke. Stroke. Inoperable. Prognosis.

  His hairline nestled in the collar of his shirt.

  The front door was ahead of her. Directly in front of her. Five footsteps and she would be at the door. Six, she would have left.

  Five steps. She imagined each one, how they would feel; would they be any different because they were walking her to freedom? In the end, however, they had been five steps too many.

  Miriam heard the dial tone in her ear yet still held the phone tight. At the front door, her shoes and coat were next to his, a matching pair hung side by side, never quite touching. And then he was in front of her.

  He took the phone from her ear and listened.

  ‘Wrong number,’ she said, and stood, not looking up, before returning to the sofa. He replaced the phone, his footsteps soft as he walked up behind her. She took a deep breath and could smell his hand, both paper and oil, as it gripped her shoulder.

  The faint smell of oil still clings to her, arresting her, and she steps back. Taking off her boots she checks the door is locked.

  Then returns to the chair and to avoid giving her fingers rein to crawl and scratch at her skin, pulls a cushion to her chest. The day passes in a blur of Bach, Brahms and symphonies she hasn’t heard before, punctuated with the pips from the radio and the same news, over and over again.

  As the haunting strings of the Kinderszenen play out, a lump forms in her throat. ‘I didn’t know,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know you were . . . there. Why didn’t you tell me, Dad?’

  She reaches out to touch his hand. ‘I don’t understand why, how . . . and Mum?’ She shakes her head and starts turning him over so he is facing the chair.

  ‘You were right, about everything, I’m sorry.’ A voice long lost, emerging. ‘And it’s too late now.’ She pulls the blanket and curls his white hair behind his ear.

  ‘This is the final journey, Dad. So please let me help you.’ She sits and squeezes his hand in hers, feeling the bones.

  ‘Please, Dad, if you can hear me. Who is Frieda?’

  He makes no response. She watches his eyelids flicker and tries again.

  ‘Is this Frieda someone you knew when you were . . . imprisoned?’ she varies the sentences, over and over.

  Nothing.

  ‘Where were you? Auschwitz? Bergen-Belsen?’ There were many, she thinks, all over Europe, but she cannot remember the names. ‘It was so long ago,’ she says. Trying hard to recall her school years. She can only remember the lesson about the rise of the Third Reich and her entire class silent under the heavy weight of knowing that their parents and grandparents had lived in a time of fascism, and may well have been supporters of Hitler. Even her father, a teacher himself, hadn’t spoken to her of the war at all.

  HENRYK

  Emilie and I considered it lucky that by the spring of 1942 I still had a job. The expulsion of professors at the university had started almost as soon as I arrived. Some forced to leave, others through ‘choice’.

  I stayed, I kept my head down, I taught what they said I could teach. ‘German – Nazi approved.’ German language. German history. German literature. I swallowed it whole. Emilie wanted a baby, I needed to provide for a family. But it was a bitter pill.

  I looked at my class, each student a replica of the next.

  Surrounding the students, desks facing me, were propaganda images. All eyes following me around the room. I was under scrutiny, a light reflecting all the sharp angles of the sun, and me in the spotlight.

  Alone.

  Until Frieda.

  The secret whisperings of her voice drew me to the university day after day. I played the games the faculty required so that I could stay on. I taught the approved literature and didn’t quibble when my book list for each term came back from the head of department with half the books crossed off it. I did all these things for the conversations in English or French with her. She had me up long into the early hours recalling what she had said and rehearsing what I could say next.

  I read with a ferocity that I couldn’t understand; I consumed all the books I owned that were written in English and French; I read aloud to myself and Emilie who, although she loved me for my idiosyncrasies, thought I may have gone a little far with my new obsession with language.

  I wanted to teach, really teach, so I handed Frieda my copy of Ulysses in English, hidden within the end-of-term papers. She said nothing, as though the heavy weight of the volume passed to her was undetectable.

  The following week we talked in hushed whispers, in English, while the other students worked, and I realised that I had not found a willing pupil to teach as I had hoped. Instead Frieda, who was ten years younger than me, challenged me and continued to surprise me far beyond any of my peers. More often than not, we talked long after class had finished, the rest of my students leaving without me noticing.

  We talked in books, in words, in secrets. Never venturing off the texts, but exploring and pushing the other in our examination of them. Les Misérables, French edition, but only volume two; neither one of us could find the first volume. Hemingway neither of us liked. Then the most battered, smouldered and falling-apart André Gide, and I knew possessing this literature would have us both imprisoned. The risks were growing with every week that passed and every book that we exchanged.

  Then, at the start of spring term, she handed me Karl and Anna. I had never read Leonhard Frank. I made a pretext to call her into my office so we could look at the book together.

  ‘It’s too dangerous,’ I said. ‘No more. This could cost me my job, and you your place here.’ I handed her back the book, desperate to read it, to hold it, to turn its pages and get lost in prose that was banned; a prose that was free. ‘It’s over. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s never over,’ she said, and left.

  Leaving the book behind, a heavy weight on my desk.

  MIRIAM

  As the evening draws in, she turns him on his back, offers him water and empties the catheter bag. The silence of the apartment grows into a roar. She pulls out a bottle of wine with a coating of dust on its neck to pour into a large glass and returns to his side with both the glass and bottle.

  ‘Do you remember when I came home early from the zoo? When I fainted that time?’

  She drinks and the liquid both soothes and burns.

  She thinks back to first meeting him. A white, open-topped shirt, sunglasses tucked into the tip of the ‘V’. His chest hair tickled her cheek as he lifted her away from the heat, the sawdust and the punctuated way the bird kept looking at he
r. He’d taken her outside where the air was blue and fresh with grass.

  Her friends followed and stood around watching. But he spoke to her. He was older and tall and his eyes had been on her alone. He had treated her like a woman. For the first time, she had felt seen and the object of admiration. ‘Beautiful,’ he had called her.

  But not for long.

  She takes another sip, which turns into a gulp.

  ‘It was such a long time ago.’ She paces the room, taking large swigs from the glass then topping it up from the bottle. ‘I introduced him to you and Mum that Christmas . . .’

  An internal tick of diminishing time. Wanting to hold each moment, but knowing every day brings him closer. She has no fear of death; the thought of dying is a nothingness.

  She shivers and drinks half a glass to try and drown the echo of memory. To try and stay present.

  ‘Was Frieda your mother’s name? A sister maybe?’ She sits heavily back in the chair and lifts the glass to her lips as her breath ripples, red, along the surface of the wine. ‘I didn’t know anything, did I?’

  Caressing her thumb across the veined and spotted skin of her father’s hand, it wrinkles, almost reptilian; she smiles tightly.

  ‘I am still here,’ she says, more to herself than to him, watching the change of his skin moved by her thumb.

  ‘You must.’ His voice wraps around her in the dark and the drink spills on to her hand as she sits sharp.

  ‘You must . . . leave.’ His voice soft, each word a wisp, leaving dry lips. He rests his head back on the pillow. Skeletal bones, loosely covered by skin, are all that remain. Head drawn back, jaw slack, his eyes still closed, lips parted. She moves to touch his face, but brings her hand back, unsure where to put it.

  ‘I did leave, Dad. I have left him. It’s over now,’ she says, and she means it.

  ‘It’s. Never. Over,’ he says, the words peppered by static breaths.