The Rabbit Girls(18)
‘There’s something in here,’ she says, her voice rebounding in the darkness.
Miriam retrieves her mother’s sewing scissors from the drawer in the living room. She feels the cold silver seep into her warm hands, the soft way the steel curves at the handles, the tiny screw that allows the blades to be held together, yet move apart. Her fingers caress the blades until she reaches the tip, barely touching it, she hovers her fingertip over the point.
The pressure of the metal pinches into her flesh and as soon as blood oozes, her body relaxes as if lowered into a warm bath. She watches the drip as it forms on the tip of her finger. She breathes deeply. An unnamed mass of something unravels.
Its familiarity welcome. An old friend.
She clears her throat and places her finger in her mouth. The iron taste a pinpoint on her tongue, its warmth lining the roof of her mouth.
Taking the scissors to the seam, she cuts a few inches, reaching her fingers inside she finds a slip of paper, folded. No bigger than a match box.
Unfolded it is exercise-book size, but as thin as tissue paper. The writing is in the tiniest script Miriam has ever seen. It is almost illegible. She places the letter on her lap and turns the lamp so that it showers light down on her, and the dark of her skirt allows the grey pencil to stand out. The paper has no margins, no paragraphing, just corner-to-corner writing. Both sides.
She looks closer. Pinpricks shiver up her arms. Miriam lifts the paper into the light, an intricate spiderweb of words, and reads.
Dear Henryk,
Eugenia Kawinska believes she no longer exists, she died the moment we became nothing more than a number.
Actual dying and turning to ash is irrelevant now.
I listen to her, but I cannot let her words penetrate. I am trying to maintain hope. But hope, here, is like wishing on stars; a whimsical, childish fantasy. It is naivety. It is no more than a memory.
A memory of the red-brick bridge of Gleis 17, of a time before.
Now we are swallowed by the fumes of our bodies. The wool blankets seem to rise, cloaking us in an unwanted fabric of stagnation. The only movement is my breath hanging, limp and dull, in the summer twilight. I hold my pencil, to guard it with my life. While many pray, I cannot find any other way to keep being, to keep being me without this, so I press my pencil firm and strong to mark the paper and save a life.
Eugenia started to speak, almost to herself, and held within the confines of our own air, we listened.
She told of her capture.
Hiding in a box, painted white and concealed behind curtains, in the back of a shop in her home town of Lublin, she waited. Listening to the earth quiver in rage as soldiers gutted, raped and burned the entire town. Every person was killed or shipped out.
Eugenia said it felt like a bad dream, one where you need to run, but you cannot, legs numb and unmoving.
It is how I feel here, every minute of every day, without you.
Eugenia is a Catholic girl. You’d like her; there is something warm and comforting about her face. Before this I imagine she looked like the angels we saw in the picture of the Virgin of the Rocks: peace and calm beauty. Her face has endured the hardships, her brow furrows and her eyes move too fast, but when she speaks, she holds a room. She is so composed. Graceful. She even has the curls of an angel in the hair and the lips.
Eugenia said that she switched off to the roar of the death march. No longer asleep nor awake. Hearing voices, whispers and fast feet, a separate compartment lid of the box she was hiding in opened and illuminated her. Unable to lift her head she looked ahead along the stretch of the wooden box. She saw shoes, blue shoes with green thread laced in the sides. Baby shoes. One lace loosely knotted, the other not tied at all. Little grey socks peeking over the rim, and pink, chunky legs.
It was a mama and a baby.
Eugenia tells of how the mama tried to hush the baby, but he squawked when she placed him in. The little shoes and their baby legs tried to leave the box, to clamber out, but he was too little. The mama spoke quietly. She told the baby to lie down, but he stood. He held a rag tight and reached up for his mama as soon as his bottom touched the ground.
The mother wore no shoes as she climbed in and, though only wearing a light dress herself, she took off her jacket, swaddling the baby twice over, like she was tucking him into bed. She lay down and curled around him – there was no space for her to lie flat. She positioned her body as if protecting him from every angle: his cushions, blanket and bed, all in her. They lay together and she pulled the lid shut. They were all in the dark again.
Henryk, I write her words here to capture them, for she speaks this in such a way . . . this is her story not mine.
‘I didn’t want to see her face. It was quiet for a while, the mama whispered to the baby, her words were soothing. Hearing the smallest tones of the simplest of pleasures, I felt this hollow dip grow in me. I was falling into it, turning my stomach upon itself. The baby must have asked for nursing, I heard the healthy suck and swallow, loud at first, then softer. He must have drifted off as the hurricane entered.’
Miriam leans back in the chair, silent.
8
HENRYK
The platforms at Berlin-Grunewald station were safe before the war started. A place that people flocked to for a chance to leave everything behind; for a chance of freedom. But 1944 was not a safe year and leaving was no longer a holiday.
Forced to travel. To a destination unknown.