The Rabbit Girls(10)

‘Once I’d taken the first step, well, I thought they would kill me. Shoot me right there and then,’ he continues. ‘But I just kept walking.’ He looks away from the camera back to the Wall behind him. ‘And I won’t be going back.’ The camera pans back to the reporter as the man is carried off on the wave of the crowd.

‘And the festivities continue. Christmas really has come early here at Checkpoint Charlie.’ The reporter signs off and they cut back to the studio.

As pictures of Helmut Kohl, Gorbachev and President Bush flash on the screen, Miriam hears the post arrive through the letter box.

She turns the television off and leaves half a cracker on the kitchen side before collecting a letter addressed to her father in close-knit writing, familiar.

Herr Winter, it says, but it’s for her.

It seems to weigh heavily as she stumbles back to his room.

Dad sleeps.

She is alone.

She kisses his papery cheek. ‘Please don’t leave me,’ she says, smoothing hair off his face, and places an extra blanket from her mother’s bed over him. She picks at the scab that has formed over her thumbnail and stares at the floor, the effort of breathing is enough. She cannot do anything else but wait.

Time pressed down on her before, like a silent companion, but after last night it has started to tick. And it’s loud.

‘I’m sorry I haven’t been here for you,’ she says to her father. ‘I want to help you.’ She slices the envelope open. It doesn’t matter what is inside. She knows it’s from him.

She pulls out the back of a polaroid. Reading her name in tight print. Frau Voight on the back, the only content.

Frau Voight. The back of the picture reads. But Dad’s name is written on the envelope.

‘He sent this to you,’ she says, alarmed at the image of herself. A heat starts in her chest and races to the top of her head.

She stands abruptly and walks to Dad’s office, the place most of her memories of Dad reside.

Opening the door, his office smells old, stagnant as a library in summer. Full of words and thoughts, committed to paper, then forgotten. She heads straight for his heavy, walnut desk and looks for his matches. The desk occupies the entire end of the room. The writing pad still holds indents of words written by his hand.

A photo of his parents, sepia. The creases along the centre and through the middle divide, yet the picture is one of togetherness. Held in a frame, the only ornament. Mum’s touch never entered this room.

The desk obstructs the sash window, which overlooks the street lined with skeletal oaks and horse chestnuts. The cafés have their red, green and blue awnings rolled in and their tables and chairs stacked away, but the bakery, she can see, has its billboard out announcing fresh loaves.

The bricks of rye, wholemeal and country bread are walled up behind the glass counter and she remembers that sweet treats line the inner counter. She had pushed the door to a sing of the bell and, with both hands on the glass, deliberated over which iced doughnut was for her, and which would be for Dad, while Mum chatted with the baker about holding with traditional rising agents and such.

Her stomach grumbles as she turns from the window.

Bookshelves full of heavy titles in many languages line either side of the room to the back wall, which is bare. Four imprints in the carpet are shadows of where the chair had stood.

She finds the matches in the top drawer of his desk and lights one with shaking hands, kissing the flame to the corner of the polaroid. Then, as it catches, she places it in his ceramic ashtray at the back of the desk and watches as the picture curls and folds, blackening first the image and then, finally, her name.

The smoke hangs in the air and strangles her.

She opens the window as the ashes curl grey and she thinks of the chimneys. The images of smoke and ash. The camps. And her father, there.

Standing in his study, where everything is him, she starts to rummage in the drawers, pulls out ledgers, thick books, paper and more paper. Looking for answers.

She scans each document for his handwriting. The papers seem to be accounts with dates starting from the sixties, some notepads in shorthand, mostly scribbles in pencil.

Miriam discards all she looks at into a pile in the middle of the floor. Before long she is lost in a warren of his work, puzzling her way through notebook after notebook. When all the contents of the desk are on the floor, she moves to the bookshelves.

She scans along the titles, many shelves full of texts in German, English and French. Educational as well as fiction. Poetry, essays and plays.

Translated collections of Yeats stand resolute, side by side with English originals. She picks one up, Michael Robartes and the Dancer, and rubs her fingers over her lips. The shelf just under it has more Yeats. The same book. The entire shelf full of the same volume, in many editions and translations. She pulls out one at a time and looks at them, opening the cover. Property of Berlin State Library. And another. All the same. She counts twenty copies. Most from the library. What had her father been doing? Why did he need so many?

She carries one back into his room and drops into the chair.

The rhythm of his breathing becomes hypnotic. She opens the cover and wafts the pages around his face. Old, worn and good. ‘The last sense to go is smell,’ said one of the ever-changing faces in the hospital.

She flicks through a few pages and comes to the first poem, named the same as the collection.