The Rabbit Girls(17)
7
MIRIAM
‘Auschwitz,’ she says. Leaving the shopping in the kitchen, she offers her father water and moves him as he rests.
She spends a long time washing her hands, thinking of the word, ‘Auschwitz’. Three fingernails bleed by the time she has finished and she feels sick from the pain of the water.
Exhausted beyond words she pulls a blanket over her knees in the chair and falls into a dead sleep.
She wakes in the middle of the night. Guilt crawls at her skin as she quickly attends to her father’s needs, offers him water, which he gulps down, and some food, which he doesn’t eat. Once he has resettled she looks out of the window. Saturday night. She hears sirens and voices, but her street is quiet. Under cover of night she gently moves his watch.
She looks at the number for some time. As if to seek the answers from the grey lines that mark his skin.
The newspaper article from earlier today shouted Freedom. The Wall may be coming down, but had her father ever been free? She covers him again and goes into the kitchen to unpack the forgotten shopping and washes the dishes that have accumulated on the side. She cannot find the tea towel, nor a clean one in the drawer. She dries her hands in the bathroom and takes a deep breath before switching the light on in Mum’s room.
The mess she made the day before remains and she finds the tea towel amidst the dresses that heap and overflow from the wardrobe. When she was little she hid in this wardrobe trying on Mum’s shoes and playing with the tassels and fabric of the dresses that fell around her like rain as she waited out the impending storm brewing in the rest of the apartment.
She places the shoes back in their boxes and hangs Mum’s dresses back up on the rail, they are creased and she feels guilty as she smooths them, trying hard not to touch them with her damaged fingers.
She stacks her mother’s shoes: dancing shoes, best shoes, summer and winter shoes. Even the shoes Mum wore to Miriam’s wedding. All immaculate and cared for. But something has been dislodged and they won’t stack straight. Miriam takes them all out and starts again, but finds the handle of an old carpet bag that has fallen over at the very back, which topples the boxes.
It is heavy and nothing she remembers seeing before. Putting it to one side she restores order to her mother’s wardrobe. Turning to find the carpet bag waiting like a patient lapdog, she twists the clasp with a flick, popping the mouth of the bag open.
She pulls out a yellow sheet, dull, like a faded daffodil, and sits on the end of the bed. The more she unfolds the sheet the stronger the scent of urine, sweat and soil rise out of the cloth. The sheet is large and the contents drop into her lap. A navy-and-grey striped shirt. Miriam pulls the fabric out and the shirt turns into a dress. It is long and thick, coarse cotton.
It has a triangular collar, and three buttons down the centre. She opens the yellow sheet fully to a single-bed size, gets up and lays the sheet out on the floor, before placing the dress on top.
Like a shadow in the sun, she cannot look away.
The dress has holes in it, frayed in places and creased as though it has been kept folded for a long time. It is a striped dress. A uniform.
She carries it into his room.
‘What happened to Mum?’ she says. ‘Dad . . . I found . . .’ she starts, then folds herself into the chair, dissolving into tears of exhaustion, loss and something else.
Fear.
HENRYK
I stayed at that bench by the Spree for what felt like all day and watched as ducks flew by and herons waited for a catch. I watched the world move. Finally, when I knew Emilie would be home, I got up. Thinking the entire walk back about how I could tell her, how I could frame the feeling so that she could understand. I had always told Emilie everything. Like breathing, we talked. Not telling her this seemed unthinkable, but despite my meandering walk home, I hadn’t come up with a single thing I could say.
‘Henryk, is that you?’ she called, anxious, from the tiny space that was now the kitchen. Our flat had become a boudoir, stuffed with all the little luxuries that had been spread out in our old house, but here flowers, paintings and books were hoarded everywhere. And there was my wife, in her apron, strings loose at her back.
‘Hi.’ I walked to her and kissed her cheek.
‘Where have you been?’ she asked.
‘Walking.’ I pulled the loose knot and retied it, smoothing out the hospital uniform underneath. I placed my hand on her wrist and spun her into my arms. I guided her small body out of the kitchen and into the overcrowded lounge. I hummed tunelessly as I led her into a rather fast waltz.
‘Henryk, what are you doing?’ she laughed.
‘I’m happy,’ I said, and was about to explain, to allow the words to dance out, to share this feeling with her and make her part of it with me, when she stopped abruptly.
‘What is there to be happy about?’ she asked, standing on her tiptoes, her eyes so deeply etched in pain, it sliced me to the quick. She placed her hand on my cheek and kissed me, before walking back to the kitchen. And the truth of it hit me so hard I felt winded: the reason for my happiness would be the very thing that would devastate Emilie.
MIRIAM
The dress, the uniform, is on her lap. Dad is sleeping and night hangs in every corner of the room. She touches the buttons, smooth and round. The front pocket is frayed and something is poking out of the corner. She places her hands inside the dress and the fabric rustles, but there is nothing on the inside that would explain the sound. Nor an opening to the pocket.