Night Angels(87)

“Lola! I was worried about you. What happened to you? What have you been doing?” I stammered, my voice hoarse, my throat rusty after months of disuse.

She straightened, laughing, dabbing at her eyes. “You’re so thin. Your face. Your arms. So thin,” she said.

Her voice. So loud. Intimidating. Confusing. Had I been in isolation for so long, sick for so long, that I was too weak to accept a human’s voice? “I’ve been sick.”

“I can’t hear you, Grace.”

“I don’t have much strength. I can’t raise my voice that much. Can you hear me now—?”

“I’m almost deaf. I lost my hearing.”

“How?” I had cramps again and the awful sensation that my blood was draining from my insides. My hands trembled; I couldn’t focus.

“What happened, Grace? Do you have paper and a pen? Could you write it down?”

I could certainly write it all down. How I had missed her, and how I longed for her company. I scrambled for something on the nightstand but stopped as a sharp pain stabbed my lower abdomen. Each twist of muscles, each stab of pain, was a sharp retort to my will.

Lola spun around and went out, and a moment later, she returned with a pen and a piece of writing paper. From the door, Fengshan peered at me, sighed, and went back to his room.

I held the pen. Suddenly, I didn’t feel like doing anything. Writing down the incident word by word. Explaining what happened sentence by sentence. What was the point? My body had been destroyed, and my future as well. But Lola. This was for Lola. I wrote slowly. I had a terrible accident and had a miscarriage. They removed my uterus.

Had I told her about my dream to be a mother? I was sure I had.

“You’ll recover, and you’ll grow strong, Grace,” she said.

I can never have children again, I wrote.

She took the pen, dipped her head and wrote, But you’re still alive. I’ve watched so many shot or beaten to death. Many lost their children and their families. Many Jews were driven apart and cruelly murdered.

I let the pen slip from my grip. Was this all she could say to me? Was my loss anything less because of the losses of others? By the light coming through the windows, I saw my friend had changed after a year. Her plump face sharpened, her green eyes were huge; there was a flinty look and a steely intensity in her that belonged to those who had been caged and trapped.

“What happened last year? I went to the building in the slum, but you were gone,” I asked, forgetting her hearing problem. So I wrote the words down.

“I lost the tickets you gave me. So I was ordered to get on a train to the Mauthausen camp with the others in the building. The train ran into cattle and flipped. We were rescued by Theo. Since then I’ve joined him to complete missions.”

Who’s Theo? What missions?

“Smuggling. Living on the edge of death and horror and betrayal, in and out of the country.”

For almost a year, she had been saving people’s lives. While I had been worried that she’d been arrested or killed.

Why did you come back now? Holding the pen, I scribbled on the paper, each word untidy, childish, squiggles of shadows. How exhausting this form of conversation was, spelling out the letters.

“I was severely injured during a mission and my hearing was impaired. I’m no longer useful. It’s time to start a new life. I wanted to see you. Here’s your Dickinson. I kept her with me all these months.”

The book felt heavy in my hand and warm with her touch. Do you like her poetry?

It was an easy question, but Lola didn’t pay attention. She picked up the bottle of morphine on my nightstand and mumbled something in German.

“Lola?”

She didn’t answer, immersed in her silent world. Perhaps she didn’t realize she was speaking German; perhaps it was no longer important for her to include me; perhaps this was all that we had come to be, creatures of aloofness, apart from others, adrift from the world.

I put down the pen, tired, my body numb from bedsores. How had it happened? All these months, I had thought of her, but somehow I wished she hadn’t returned. Or had I been poisoned by morphine? I only wanted someone to commiserate with, cry with, and wipe tears with. But the person was not Lola.

She had changed, but she was still agile, still young, and she looked strong, healthy, with her baggy outfit, her boots, and her scar. She had lost her hearing during a mission, but she could still be a mother, start a family and live a blissful family life; she was unlike me, a useless, pathetic thing.

What was happening to me? Where did those unhealthy, bitter thoughts come from?

Fengshan came in. “Grace, I’m afraid Miss Schnitzler has to go. The Gestapo officers are coming.”

“Gestapo?”

“It looks like they are searching for her.”

He handed Lola a note, and she raced to the window, looked out, returned to Fengshan, and jotted something on the paper—she was too adroit, too swift—and he nodded. Eichmann—I caught the word in something she said, and Fengshan wrote something quickly down. They were debating, discussing something.

Their silent communication was not well coordinated, but they were compatible enough. Fengshan appeared urgent and Lola alert; it was like watching a silent movie.

I was thirsty. I should ask for water—Lola couldn’t hear, but Fengshan would undoubtedly get it for me. Yet I didn’t feel like asking. It all seemed irrelevant: quenching thirst, or asking what they were talking about, or getting away from the Gestapo, or even Lola.