The Rabbit Girls(5)

For now.





2





MIRIAM


She sits in the old chair, relocated from the office when he had first come home. It was a chair she’d sat in when her feet couldn’t reach the ground. One on which she twirled the loose fabric at the seams between newly painted fingernails. She had retreated into it on many occasions with a cushion held tight to her chest.

The rain patters on the window, Miriam turns the dial and tunes in the radio as the pips chime out.

‘This is the eleven o’clock news.’ The newsreader’s voice is loud and she turns the volume down. ‘East Berliners are exercising their new-found freedom to travel into the West and long queues can be found along all the major checkpoints. This freedom . . .’

She zones out the reporter and thinks of freedom. How has she exercised her new-found freedom?

There is a little café across the road and the coffees and selection of cakes, she recalls, used to be wonderful. It has been a long time. Would it still be the same? Could she go?

Standing at the window she watches the far corner of the street where people are milling around and she thinks perhaps she could collect something and return home, she wouldn’t be more than a few minutes and Hilda says he can be left for a few hours. She says it a lot, but Miriam hasn’t left the house.

Until now.

‘I’m going out,’ she says, and is surprised by the surety in her voice. ‘I won’t be long.’ Bringing the smell of fresh coffee into the house will do him good, she thinks. As she pulls on her boots and takes her coat off the hook, the phone rings. Its shrill noise pierces through the flat and stops Miriam dead; she is taken back to a month ago, another phone call and another door . . .

That night she picked up the phone, the news was still showing images of people dancing on the Wall, drinking and singing.

Unbelievable to think that was a month ago, and yet . . .

They had been watching the scene for hours from the sofa, two hours away from Berlin, two hours away from her father.

‘Frau Voight?’ a woman on the other end asked.

‘Yes,’ Miriam whispered.

‘You are named as the next of kin for Herr Winter. I’m sorry to say your father is gravely ill.’

As the woman kept talking Miriam sat on the stair, her eyes on the back of his neck. He was watching the television. He didn’t turn around.

She listened as the woman spoke. Stroke. Inoperable. Prognosis.

His hairline nestled in the collar of his shirt.

The front door was ahead of her. Directly in front of her. Five footsteps and she would be at the door. Six, she would have left.

Five steps. She imagined each one, how they would feel; would they be any different because they were walking her to freedom? In the end, however, they had been five steps too many.

Miriam heard the dial tone in her ear yet still held the phone tight. At the front door, her shoes and coat were next to his, a matching pair hung side by side, never quite touching. And then he was in front of her.

He took the phone from her ear and listened.

‘Wrong number,’ she said, and stood, not looking up, before returning to the sofa. He replaced the phone, his footsteps soft as he walked up behind her. She took a deep breath and could smell his hand, both paper and oil, as it gripped her shoulder.

The faint smell of oil still clings to her, arresting her, and she steps back. Taking off her boots she checks the door is locked.

Then returns to the chair and to avoid giving her fingers rein to crawl and scratch at her skin, pulls a cushion to her chest. The day passes in a blur of Bach, Brahms and symphonies she hasn’t heard before, punctuated with the pips from the radio and the same news, over and over again.

As the haunting strings of the Kinderszenen play out, a lump forms in her throat. ‘I didn’t know,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know you were . . . there. Why didn’t you tell me, Dad?’

She reaches out to touch his hand. ‘I don’t understand why, how . . . and Mum?’ She shakes her head and starts turning him over so he is facing the chair.

‘You were right, about everything, I’m sorry.’ A voice long lost, emerging. ‘And it’s too late now.’ She pulls the blanket and curls his white hair behind his ear.

‘This is the final journey, Dad. So please let me help you.’ She sits and squeezes his hand in hers, feeling the bones.

‘Please, Dad, if you can hear me. Who is Frieda?’

He makes no response. She watches his eyelids flicker and tries again.

‘Is this Frieda someone you knew when you were . . . imprisoned?’ she varies the sentences, over and over.

Nothing.

‘Where were you? Auschwitz? Bergen-Belsen?’ There were many, she thinks, all over Europe, but she cannot remember the names. ‘It was so long ago,’ she says. Trying hard to recall her school years. She can only remember the lesson about the rise of the Third Reich and her entire class silent under the heavy weight of knowing that their parents and grandparents had lived in a time of fascism, and may well have been supporters of Hitler. Even her father, a teacher himself, hadn’t spoken to her of the war at all.





HENRYK

Emilie and I considered it lucky that by the spring of 1942 I still had a job. The expulsion of professors at the university had started almost as soon as I arrived. Some forced to leave, others through ‘choice’.