The Rabbit Girls(28)
To replace her fallen feather.
She finds an appointment card on the floor. It’s Hilda’s card with the medical centre logo. A note is scrawled on it: ‘Dr Kenny: Tomorrow 9 a.m.’ It’s signed ‘Hilda’ and there is a cross under her large scrawl. On the other side she has written, ‘Taking care of you too.’
Miriam places it on the kitchen side and returns to her father. She moves him, offers him water and then goes straight to the table. She picks up a letter at random and notices something: a tiny number written in the top corner. She looks at another, then another. Every one of them has a number.
She spends the afternoon putting them in order and marking which letters are absent or in French with a white slip of paper. She wraps the remaining French ones back up in another of her mother’s handkerchiefs and leaves it to one side. A package she will deliver to Eva on Wednesday. It feels like a lifetime to wait.
She finds the next letter in the sequence that she can read.
Dearest Henryk,
I had the last scraps of bread in my jacket – the one you gave me as we were parted. I am ashamed that I did not think of you being without a jacket. Now all I think about is how the wind must have whipped your skin, how your second-best cardigan was not enough to protect you wherever you were going. I am sorry, I am shamefaced and so selfish. Even if I had argued with you, it would still have been over my shoulders on the journey, fast losing the heat of you.
I do not know how long we travelled, but there was no food, no water, nothing. Just bodies: women, young and old. We waited for news, we clung on to hope when someone would claim we were going here or there, somewhere better than where we currently were. We talked at the start, tried to find similarities – who we were, where we were from. We didn’t talk about our losses, the absence of children in a space of so many women was enough, and we were thinking positively about how partners, children, parents would all be waiting at our destination. I did not speak the truth, I hoped we would be reunited.
I said you were my husband.
The lie tasted so sweet on my tongue, the adrenaline of it. I talked much in those early days, all lies, but they nourished me.
After the first night, we were sure they would tell us where we were going but by daybreak, we were still at the station. Waiting. We heard talking, jeering, boots, shouting, crying. We heard the voices of the ones we had loved and lost, a communal suffering. Still we did not move.
The second night, we started fighting. Where would we sleep and how. We were so packed in that we were standing only. Propping each other up.
The guards rolled back the doors once, we thought to give us water, or food, but they fired their weapons into the sky, making us cry out in alarm, and ordered the bodies of those who had died to be rolled out on to the tracks. By the time the train finally screamed, metal on metal, there was room for us all to sit.
We had stopped talking. Everyone was lost in a void. Women held photographs to their chest like drops of water.
There was a gypsy on the train, on her own – the only gypsies I have ever seen were in a crowd. She plaited the fringes of her scarf over and over. She was beautiful. Dark hair and long, like waves of black silk or thick black paint, dark eyelashes and thick eyebrows, she looked the same age as me.
After a few days she cried out, ‘We die!’ She was loud after the wagon had been so quiet except the murmurs of the dying and the prayers of the living. ‘We die, all of us die.’ The gypsy’s voice rang out loud and strong and foreign. ‘Death to everyone! We are going to hell!’
She spoke Dutch, and although crass and strange from her mouth, just to hear another language again . . . It may have only been days, but the sweet joy of hearing Dutch filled me with warmth after the German threats and insults. Even though the gypsy was talking about the fiery pits of hell, the language was welcome.
Still I only watched her, several of the women kicked her, told her to shut up or called her ‘vermin’, ‘scum’.
A large woman slapped her hard across the face.
Her cries stopped.
The last crumbs were in my pocket, the wagon rocking, holding up against the wind.
Everyone was trying to sleep. The comforting bliss of being elsewhere. Not here. Eyes closed, dreamless, or just hoping that when we opened them we’d find that the reality was just a dream.
But the gypsy, her dark eyes were open. She stared at me as I touched the dry crusts of bread in my pocket, not too much that they turned to ash, but enough so that I knew they were there.
When I could not wait any longer, I looked directly at her as I picked one crust up and placed it in my mouth, like it was a decadent chocolate.
I did the same with the second piece. She didn’t waver, watching me. Once I’d chewed and chewed and swallowed, she smiled a small smile, relaxed her entire body as if dissolving into the panels of the wagon and closed her eyes.
I started praying in the wagon, not to a God that I did not believe in, but to a truth, a right in the world that will help me survive the wrongs.
This is my punishment.
For Louisa.
The taste of the bread has gone but the feeling of cruelty survives. Who am I?
‘I don’t quite understand this. She said she was your wife? Languages and cardigans? And to not share the bread . . . Who am I? indeed,’ Miriam says and looks at Dad who is dressed in a clean nightshirt, creases and folds still visible on his immobile body.