The Rabbit Girls(6)

I stayed, I kept my head down, I taught what they said I could teach. ‘German – Nazi approved.’ German language. German history. German literature. I swallowed it whole. Emilie wanted a baby, I needed to provide for a family. But it was a bitter pill.

I looked at my class, each student a replica of the next.

Surrounding the students, desks facing me, were propaganda images. All eyes following me around the room. I was under scrutiny, a light reflecting all the sharp angles of the sun, and me in the spotlight.

Alone.

Until Frieda.

The secret whisperings of her voice drew me to the university day after day. I played the games the faculty required so that I could stay on. I taught the approved literature and didn’t quibble when my book list for each term came back from the head of department with half the books crossed off it. I did all these things for the conversations in English or French with her. She had me up long into the early hours recalling what she had said and rehearsing what I could say next.

I read with a ferocity that I couldn’t understand; I consumed all the books I owned that were written in English and French; I read aloud to myself and Emilie who, although she loved me for my idiosyncrasies, thought I may have gone a little far with my new obsession with language.

I wanted to teach, really teach, so I handed Frieda my copy of Ulysses in English, hidden within the end-of-term papers. She said nothing, as though the heavy weight of the volume passed to her was undetectable.

The following week we talked in hushed whispers, in English, while the other students worked, and I realised that I had not found a willing pupil to teach as I had hoped. Instead Frieda, who was ten years younger than me, challenged me and continued to surprise me far beyond any of my peers. More often than not, we talked long after class had finished, the rest of my students leaving without me noticing.

We talked in books, in words, in secrets. Never venturing off the texts, but exploring and pushing the other in our examination of them. Les Misérables, French edition, but only volume two; neither one of us could find the first volume. Hemingway neither of us liked. Then the most battered, smouldered and falling-apart André Gide, and I knew possessing this literature would have us both imprisoned. The risks were growing with every week that passed and every book that we exchanged.

Then, at the start of spring term, she handed me Karl and Anna. I had never read Leonhard Frank. I made a pretext to call her into my office so we could look at the book together.

‘It’s too dangerous,’ I said. ‘No more. This could cost me my job, and you your place here.’ I handed her back the book, desperate to read it, to hold it, to turn its pages and get lost in prose that was banned; a prose that was free. ‘It’s over. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s never over,’ she said, and left.

Leaving the book behind, a heavy weight on my desk.





MIRIAM

As the evening draws in, she turns him on his back, offers him water and empties the catheter bag. The silence of the apartment grows into a roar. She pulls out a bottle of wine with a coating of dust on its neck to pour into a large glass and returns to his side with both the glass and bottle.

‘Do you remember when I came home early from the zoo? When I fainted that time?’

She drinks and the liquid both soothes and burns.

She thinks back to first meeting him. A white, open-topped shirt, sunglasses tucked into the tip of the ‘V’. His chest hair tickled her cheek as he lifted her away from the heat, the sawdust and the punctuated way the bird kept looking at her. He’d taken her outside where the air was blue and fresh with grass.

Her friends followed and stood around watching. But he spoke to her. He was older and tall and his eyes had been on her alone. He had treated her like a woman. For the first time, she had felt seen and the object of admiration. ‘Beautiful,’ he had called her.

But not for long.

She takes another sip, which turns into a gulp.

‘It was such a long time ago.’ She paces the room, taking large swigs from the glass then topping it up from the bottle. ‘I introduced him to you and Mum that Christmas . . .’

An internal tick of diminishing time. Wanting to hold each moment, but knowing every day brings him closer. She has no fear of death; the thought of dying is a nothingness.

She shivers and drinks half a glass to try and drown the echo of memory. To try and stay present.

‘Was Frieda your mother’s name? A sister maybe?’ She sits heavily back in the chair and lifts the glass to her lips as her breath ripples, red, along the surface of the wine. ‘I didn’t know anything, did I?’

Caressing her thumb across the veined and spotted skin of her father’s hand, it wrinkles, almost reptilian; she smiles tightly.

‘I am still here,’ she says, more to herself than to him, watching the change of his skin moved by her thumb.

‘You must.’ His voice wraps around her in the dark and the drink spills on to her hand as she sits sharp.

‘You must . . . leave.’ His voice soft, each word a wisp, leaving dry lips. He rests his head back on the pillow. Skeletal bones, loosely covered by skin, are all that remain. Head drawn back, jaw slack, his eyes still closed, lips parted. She moves to touch his face, but brings her hand back, unsure where to put it.

‘I did leave, Dad. I have left him. It’s over now,’ she says, and she means it.