The Rabbit Girls(23)

I sat back. ‘Your evidence?’

‘Take “Leda and the Swan”. It’s about the rape of a country, not of a woman. His love is all about Ireland. A dreary spot of land he calls home. You place me in your way. Instead your love of Germany is what keeps you here, not me.’

I took both her hands in mine and rubbed my thumb over her knuckles. Slowly. ‘Don’t insult me.’

‘They say Yeats loved women, but what he really did was love his country, a broken country, over anything else.’

‘Is that wrong?’

‘No, I’m just putting forward the argument that if you searched your soul you would see that I represent everything that makes you think of Germany, the good and the bad.’ She looked away. ‘And therefore you cannot leave one without the other.’

‘That is true, but I am not leaving you. The country can go to hell.’

‘It already has.’

‘Well then, have you finished?’ We were nose to nose and if I moved at all I knew I’d lose eye contact and we would continue our conversation physically.

She pulled back. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I haven’t finished.’

‘Carry on then, please. Don’t let me stop you.’ I placed my hand over hers again and pulled her closer, my legs weaved in between hers, touching.

‘The best lack all conviction,’ she started.

‘While the worst are full of passionate intensity,’ I finished for her and traced my thumb over her wrist.

‘Exactly. That represents men,’ she said.

‘You are saying I have no passion?’

‘No, you have no conviction.’

‘Really?’ As I spoke I could feel her lips touch mine, a featherweight of expectation. But I was losing her eyes and they were brighter and greener than ever. ‘Yeats represents humanity, the human condition, man not men.’

‘Well, as you well know . . .’ She touched my chin and lifted my gaze, which had dropped to a strand of hair fallen to her shoulder. ‘I have both intense passion . . . and conviction.’ She smiled.

‘You,’ I said. ‘You are a break in the mould.’

She kissed me, pressing her entire body into me. She proved her point as my hands were given permission to explore the rest of her body.

And as our bodies spoke, in rest and exertion, we didn’t part.





MIRIAM

She takes out the dress and sits with it on her lap beside her gently snoring father. The poems, the collection, when all is ruin once again. The stark reality of the Berlin Wall falling, the impossible happening she had left, and . . . the hollow faces of the Holocaust, to be carved on a stone . . . to not be forgotten. She unfolds the letter.

Maybe the dress was not Mum’s at all? The glimmer of hope in the dark has Miriam reading the letter again, she doesn’t even know where Lublin is.

She touches the dress, her fingers running over the coarse cotton. She plays each finger in turn along the stripes as though she were playing a piano. Thumb, fore, middle, ring – now ringless, she thinks – baby, and then back again. The whiteness of exposed, shrunken skin on her ring finger shimmers under her father’s light.

She walks her fingers across the stripes of the uniform until she gets to the pocket. A thread stands out from where Miriam found the letter. She tries to poke it back in and searches with her finger. There must be something more to this.

As her fingers poke into the frayed pocket they touch only fabric and are tainted by the smell of misery.





10





HENRYK


Frieda left my side first. I think she had to because, after all, I always left her. We sipped water.

‘You have to go. It’s just before curfew,’ she murmured.

‘I could stay,’ I suggested half-heartedly.

‘We both know you can’t.’

She dressed lazily, her blouse not buttoned but tucked into a skirt with nothing underneath.

I wrapped my arms around her from behind and pressed my nose into her hair. ‘In another world,’ I said.

‘In another lifetime,’ she sighed. ‘You know the line in that Yeats poem that sticks with me most?’

I shook my head to bury further into her hair.

‘The ceremony of innocence is lost.’

‘Drowned,’ I corrected and kissed the skin on the back of her neck I’d uncovered.

‘The ceremony of innocence is drowned,’ she said.

I nodded as I blew on the damp skin my kiss left behind.

‘The ceremony of innocence is drowned,’ she said again. ‘That is so true.’

‘I have to go.’

‘You have to go.’ She turned her head so I could kiss her mouth again.





MIRIAM

The smell of the dress hangs in the air as night falls around them and, although defeated, she checks each corner of the pocket for anything, anything at all that would make sense of why her mother had a uniform dress with a single letter that means nothing to Miriam and, as far as she knows, is nothing that her parents ever mentioned. And as despondency takes hold, her fingers uncover a flap of fabric inside the pocket itself, and she can feel another piece of paper.

Sitting up in the chair, she tries to grasp the paper hidden in the pocket with her fore and middle finger, but it doesn’t budge.