The Rabbit Girls(3)

The snow fell in heavy sheets outside the window and the class was fractious, bored; like a bundle of puppies they wanted to be outside.

I was pacing around behind my desk, chalk in hand. I had written Schmerz – Pain – on the blackboard and my fingertips were dusty. I had delivered the theory behind death, dying and ‘the greater good’. All acceptable. Then I happened to glance at her and took a huge risk.

I went off track. For her.

To see if she had a reaction.

‘When thinking of pain . . .’ I formed the words, rolling them in my mouth before committing to them. ‘Contemporary writers cannot depict pain like those in earlier centuries.’

She looked up, directly at me, and I stopped, frozen to the spot right in front of her desk, but continued: ‘Pain is an old entity and . . . well, perhaps we could learn something from the Russians after all.’

‘How to starve,’ said one of the men to a slight chuckle. I looked at him until he sank back in his seat.

‘Russian writers feel their pain to allow their readers to suffer,’ I said.

The class laughed, although I wasn’t sure I was being funny.

‘They’ll all feel the pain of the Führer soon,’ another student offered.

‘No,’ she interrupted. ‘Surely you mean that we feel their pain as if it were our own.’

It was the first time she had spoken out and the rest of the class looked at her, as I did, with intrigue, astounded she had spoken at all. One of the students wolf-whistled and the class dissolved into laughter and chatter.

Yet she had spoken, to me, and she continued, lowering her voice conspiratorially, and I leant closer. ‘The power of the writing is not in the words or the actions, but a creation of every nuance of feeling that another has felt, do you agree, professor?’ she asked in French.

I checked the class, but they were busy mocking her. I perched on my desk.

‘I agree,’ I said, carefully framing my words in French, thinking this may be a trick. The French words felt refined but rusty in the back of my head.

‘If we look at Russia, France and Ireland, we can explore a pain that we cannot imagine.’ She was speaking in a loud, husky voice that belied her age, still in French. As I listened the language became fresh, exciting, freeing. The class was fidgeting again and watching our exchange.

I lowered my voice. ‘Our history is also full of pain.’

‘It is,’ she said. Then changing from French to English she added, ‘But our history is also subject to whomever is in charge; it becomes less fact and more fiction, open to the whims and fancies of a flatulent Schwachkopf.’ She used the word in German and the shock on my face reverberated around the class. None of them could understand the rest of our exchange, but that word Schwachkopf seemed to ricochet. She looked at me. Challenging me.

‘Look at page seventy-six,’ I said to the class in English. She laughed and I switched to German, giving the instruction again, adding, ‘Discuss with your partner the techniques employed by the author to describe pain.’

The class rustled and mumbled about it, before lively chatter ensued. I moved closer to her desk and bent low.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘It is only when we understand language that we can truly immerse ourselves in the collective pain of that culture and read the text as it is intended. Not like these assholes.’ She went back to speaking French. ‘These connards. Factory-made buffoons who cannot think for themselves: yes sir, no sir,’ she mimicked, and as I looked around many students were looking out of the window and others flicking through the text in front of them.

‘This is very risky, Fr?ulein,’ I said in English, again following her shift. English landed better on the tongue, but it was slower to form in my head. I cherished the complexity of the languages that I hadn’t had an opportunity to practise in years. Switching back and forth was incredibly difficult, yet my brain sparkled with the challenge.

‘Risky?’ She smiled as though the thought of taking a risk amused her. ‘I would have thought, as a professor, that you would want an actual conversation. A . . .’ But then she changed into another language and I was lost; I watched her lips as she spoke, but I didn’t understand.

She laughed. ‘Not Dutch then, maybe . . .’ She reeled off words so fast they sounded like bullets.

‘How many languages do you know?’ I asked.

‘A few,’ she replied, in French this time.

‘You need to be careful speaking the language of the enemy at this time,’ I said, lowering my voice, speaking English again.

‘Are they the enemy?’ she asked slowly. ‘Or the people who are going to free us?’

I looked around, but the class was busy chittering away and when I looked back at her she had returned to looking at her book as if she hadn’t spoken at all.

‘Thank you, Fr?ulein . . .?’ I said, wanting to keep her talking.

‘It’s Frieda,’ she said, not looking up.

‘Frieda.’





MIRIAM

Frieda? she thinks. Who is Frieda?

Her father’s hand still rests on the watch. She goes to unclasp it, but changes her mind, not wanting to disturb him again. Her hands work as fast as her heart to button his nightshirt.

His eyes, although closed, swell from their sockets, held by paper-thin eyelids like hot air balloons tethered by pegs. His mouth is wide open and she moves away from the direction of his breath, yet guilt forces her to remain. And woven into that guilt to remain by her father’s side is her mother.