The Rabbit Girls(48)

‘How did the meeting go?’ Eva asks.

‘Not good.’ Her voice fatigued. ‘I’m done. I can’t do this anymore.’ Miriam stares at the front door, her father waiting inside, but cannot move herself to him.

‘Do what?’

‘Life. This.’ She gestures to the door.

‘You don’t have a choice. You have your father.’ She holds Miriam’s hand. ‘He needs you.’

‘He does,’ she says remotely. ‘Will you help me find out what happened to Frieda? It’s all he’s living for now, I’m sure of it.’

‘And you?’ Eva asks, standing and helping Miriam to her feet too. ‘What are you living for?’

She doesn’t answer.

‘I’m living for him,’ she says finally, looking up. ‘My father. That’s it. I have no one else.’

Eva places a hand gently on her shoulder. ‘You are not alone,’ she says, swallowing hard, and hugs Miriam.

‘I don’t know what I would have done without you. These letters, knowing you are reading them too . . . they are just so awful, but I couldn’t have worked it all out without your help.’

‘I have a few more,’ she says, tapping her bag. ‘Let’s go in.’

After checking on her father, Miriam leaves his door open. She finds Eva in the living room, placing a selection of pastries out and pouring golden breakfast tea from a pot.

‘Have you eaten?’ Eva asks.

‘You didn’t need to do this,’ she says and Eva looks wary. ‘I mean . . .’

‘I can go if you would prefer?’

‘Oh no, it’s just . . .’

‘I don’t want to intrude, but if I’m honest, it’s nice for me. Jeff said he spoke to you the other day, at the library.’

‘He said you came over from the East, but you told me that yourself, he said you needed time to settle.’

‘In the East, the Holocaust never happened. It was never talked about. The communists believed that East Germans were in no way to blame, even in part, for the Holocaust. Every citizen was completely exonerated from blame, thought or examination. And the victims left without any support. Communism was peace-loving. We had to believe these fictions as fact.’

Miriam listens, it’s the most Eva has said. Only the other side of the Wall and the world was such a different place.

‘Reading these letters, they feel fresh and yet incredibly long ago. A time forgotten.’

‘The letters are awful, just terrible what people do to each other.’ She picks absently at her fingernails until Eva starts watching her. She tries to keep her hands still, but focuses on weaving the tie of her blouse over and around her fingers instead.

‘She was just twenty-one, in the letters,’ Miriam says, swallowing. ‘But still she was going to expose the rabbit girls. How do you live with yourself after doing something like that?’

After a long pause Eva asks, ‘Can you remember what it was like being twenty-one?’

‘No, it was a lifetime ago.’

‘Only just a woman and responsible for yourself and the opportunity to leave there? We like to think we wouldn’t, but all of us would. It’s about survival, and that is why so many people don’t share their stories, because they don’t want to be judged by those who cannot possibly know.’

‘Do you know? From personal experience?’ Miriam asks cautiously.

Eva picks up her cup with a tremor in her hand and spills tea on her trousers.

‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have pried. It’s not my business,’ Miriam says, rushing to take the cup.

‘I wanted to ask you, if I can,’ Eva says, drying her trousers with her handkerchief. ‘I’ve been thinking about the dress and you cut away all the seams. Can I sew them back together?’

Miriam looks at the woman, her legs crossed at the ankle. Her back straight, her face serious, worn by the sun but still full; her smile brightens.

‘It just feels wrong to leave it empty and cut open like that. After all, it has been preserved so well,’ Eva says, a little bashful.

‘Yes of course. I’ll read and you can sew?’ Miriam fetches the dress from her father’s room.

Eva says nothing more and takes up the dress.

Miriam watches her as she folds the dress in her lap, then threads a needle that she finds in her bag and bites the end of the thread with her back teeth.

‘I married Axel at twenty-one,’ Miriam says slowly. ‘I was na?ve and very young.’

‘It is easy to judge with older eyes.’

Miriam would scream at her younger self, ‘Don’t do it. Don’t marry that man!’ But she knows she wouldn’t listen. At all.

‘They were so young,’ Miriam says and finds the next letters from the table where they are scattered like snowflakes. ‘It plays on my mind about Dad. I have no idea what he saw, but I’m sure now that Mum wasn’t there, she just couldn’t have been. It makes me think about what they must have gone through as a couple, with these letters to Dad. Frieda really loved him, I think.’

‘The best relationships endure the hardships to test strength. Your mother and father prove this? All the challenges will make the relationship, or break it if it isn’t strong enough.’