The Rabbit Girls(36)

I kissed her neck. ‘I’m handing myself in,’ I said, and it was a great weight that lifted. ‘I’ll hand myself in tomorrow. You and Emilie will be free.’ I drew her as close to me as I could. I couldn’t look up into her face, so I buried my head in her chest.

Her heart beat angrily at me.

‘What did Emilie say?’

‘I haven’t told her. I didn’t know myself until I was kissing your neck.’

‘Then you go to Emilie, you pack a bag and you leave, just as she planned.’ She pushed a hand on my chest.

‘I can’t.’ Tears threatened again. ‘This way you are both safe.’

‘Safe? And what about you? You just said if there was only one—’ She shook the thought away. ‘But there isn’t, there are two. And there is you. It’s time you understood that we both love you. We need you to survive. You’re saying you’ll offer yourself up; that’s suicide!’

‘I can’t keep hurting you. Both of you.’

‘Look at me, my love. You are not hurting me. This is my choice as much as it is yours,’ she said gently. I turned my head back to her. ‘This isn’t something you have to take as yours alone. Hurting Emilie hurts you, therefore it is hurting me.’ She kissed me on the forehead. ‘What did you say on that bench at the Spree?’

She drew my face up to her lips and kissed the tears as they fell. I nodded, the inaudible shrieking within me contained by Frieda’s heaviness surrounding me with her arms, her legs; her heart beat hard and I felt it in mine.

And like a switch, an utter exhaustion dulled the ache in my body and I placed my hands on her thighs.

‘I said you were light,’ I mumbled as she moved her body over mine, pressing herself into me so that I was breathing through her too. Fully compressed by light itself. She pressed her mouth on mine to stifle the new sobs, the deep anguish that was crushing my chest.

‘Without darkness there is no light,’ she said in my ear.

‘But, Frieda, I am the darkness, look at—’ But she cut me off.

‘Give me a few days, Henryk.’ She said my name so that I felt it resound deep in my belly, lower.

‘A few days,’ I agreed.





MIRIAM

‘Miriam.’ Her father’s voice punctuates the dark. She rouses herself, having dozed off curled up in the chair.

‘Miriam, I . . . you. Frieda,’ he says again and lifts his hand. She holds it and tries to wiggle her absent toes.

‘I . . .’ he starts. ‘I. Killed.’

Her feet scream back into life, then tingle.

‘Frieda,’ he says.

‘Frieda? She is here in the letters,’ Miriam says.

‘I. Killed. Frieda,’ he says and deflates into a grief so raw it cannot be heard.





15





MIRIAM


I killed Frieda.

Miriam rocks on the spot.

‘No.’ A reflex response. It’s not true. It can’t be true.

‘Look, Dad.’ She places the letter on his chest. ‘It’s a letter, a letter from Frieda. It was hidden in the dress. She loved you. Dad, can you hear me? You didn’t kill anyone.’ But she looks at the page.

How did the dress end up in Mum’s wardrobe? She reels back into the chair. She cannot make his statement untrue.

Her father could never have killed anyone, not him. He was incapable.

He collected spiders in cupped hands if one had crawled into the house. He protected it from Mum poised with book or shoe, and rehomed it.

He spoke to wasps or bees and thanked them for taking time to visit. Her father could not even hurt someone, let alone kill them.

She collects the letter from his chest.

‘It isn’t true,’ she says. The next letters, transcribed by Eva, will prove her right.

Henryk,

We have moved. We hoped to get a place in a block. There are so many women in the holding tent and the blocks are made from brick and stone, sheltered with a corrugated iron roof.

My boots were taken in the holding tent. I was barefoot for two days, then we found some shoes on the body of one of the dead. Hani now has a pair of clogs that fit her feet and I have shoes again.

Hani and I are in Block 15, but we did not have a bunk to start with. The wooden shelves attached to the wall were full of women. Six to a shelf. The sound of cat cries, calls, nightmares, shouts and taunts pulls and pushes. The shelves are stacked. There are three shelves up and eight across on each side of the block, A and B.

When we arrived, there was no space for us so I talked to the Blockova, an old hardened prostitute. She hit me so hard my head reverberated against the side of a shelf and I was tossed into a small space in the centre of the bunk just behind the entrance. I came around to find myself in a toilet, a small sink, Hani behind me, and a mirror in front of me.

In this toilet cubicle, above the toilet, are makeshift shelves. The shelves women have created; they look sturdier than the others. There seems to be space here too. We found out that they have ‘lost’ two women in the last few days and we sit and take in this wonderful sight, three shelves and now six people.

For we have been welcomed. Without question.

A large lady, in voice and spirit, helped mop the gash on my head and I saw my reflection for the first time.