The Rabbit Girls(60)
The wide and older nurse, perspiration on her top lip, with a name tag with ‘Dawn’ on it and a sticker of a yellow sun, stays throughout the process. Miriam thinks Dawn looks like she needs to see some sun herself. Almost grey from head to toe, uniform, pallor and hair. Only her black shoes shine.
Cold instruments prod with as much care as stainless steel can command. Miriam is numb all over, so although it smarts, she finds the humiliation worse. She thinks of the rabbit girls, the stainless-steel scalpel making cuts to their legs.
She thinks of Hani, lost. She thinks of fighting back, of being on the record. Just like Frieda did when she wrote the letters. All the letters. Miriam takes deep breaths and imagines the faces of the women lost. Each woman she can see so clearly. And Stella, little Stella.
Dawn stays with her while her genital injuries are catalogued meticulously by the doctor on a diagram of the female anatomy. Miriam has never seen it so bold and vivid on the page before, almost like a flower.
Once Sarah has completed her findings, she turns the clipboard. Miriam looks at what she has found and wants to tear the page out. Remove every line, every red mark, all the hatched lines depicting what, she didn’t know. When Sarah asks if she can talk through the injuries, new and old, so Miriam understands what all the red markings are, Miriam averts her gaze.
‘So, the hatched lines are scar tissue,’ Sarah starts. ‘And the thicker lines are the tears that are recent. Miriam, how often has your husband done this to you?’
‘A while,’ is all she says as Sarah recommends a course of antibiotics to prevent infection which Miriam agrees to. Her head feels full, her mind imprinted with the diagram of genitalia in black, covered with the doctor’s drawings, marking out all her imperfections in red.
When the female officer arrives, she has no idea what to say.
She speaks the truth. All of it. Dawn at her side speaks quietly, gently telling Miriam to slow down or rewind a step. She is calm yet firm and Miriam listens and explains the best she can, feeling more and more that everything should make sense, yet nothing does. Every question judging her further.
Finally, the police officer gives her a card – Officer Müller.
She says, ‘You have been very brave.’ Like a dentist would say after a long procedure in the chair.
When Sarah gives her the tablets and calls for a taxi, Dawn helps Miriam to the door.
‘I hope you get home safely,’ she says as they wait for the cars to move along and the taxi to come around to the entrance. A plume of blue smoke settles low as patients litter close to the entrance, in their wheelchairs, holding drip stands, dressed in hospital gowns with cigarettes in hand.
‘Can I say something to you, some advice that my mum once gave me?’ Dawn asks.
Miriam watches the rain mist around them, seeming not to fall but to rise, as if the tiny drops were suspended in the air.
‘She used to say that if you give a man what he wants, he’ll never take what he needs.’
Miriam says nothing as a black car turns into the entrance space. She opens the door and gets in without looking back.
The shame washes over her in huge heavy waves, she goes straight into the bathroom, deposits all her clothes into a small pile and turns the shower to a scalding heat. It burns her scalp like tiny needles.
Looking down at her body, she feels his handprints, like tar, marking her body. Where he touched her, where he hurt her, his paint on her canvas. His hands on her body. The shower cascades like oil over water, she cannot erase his unwanted touch.
Her hands scream and withdraw from the water as it burns through the broken skin. It takes days for the smell and taste of him to leave her, no matter how much she washes.
She once tried bleach, but it looked like her skin had been removed with sand paper and then set upon by bees. It singed her nasal passages too, it was all she could smell for five days, long enough for him to evaporate, at least from her body. But the scars and the scratching lasted an entire month.
Sitting on the side of the bath, a towel loosely draped around her, she watches as beads of pink water cascade down her legs, swallowed up by the dip in her ankle. She allows tears to fall.
Then, wrapping herself back up, she returns to Dad’s room and stands at the window for half a second, taking a glimpse at the same picture, its scene unmoving, yet everything has changed. She shuts the curtains tight and moves around the empty house, touches things, but doesn’t move anything. Her father’s absence fills each space and makes everything foreign.
She scrubs and scratches and her skin stings. She tries to remove him, she settles for distraction and sits carefully, looking at the letters, each as individual, as beautiful and as tragic as the last. Except these won’t just melt away like the women described within them. The untold women with untold stories.
Laid out on the table, her parents’ table. Having been held captive in a dress for decades. She wants to free them, to find out how they survived.
If they survived.
24
MIRIAM
Dearest Henryk,
Wanda Bielika and Bunny are from the same village, Lidice. The Nazis did what they did to Lublin a year later: they tore it to the ground.
Wanda told me, when we had a rare moment alone outside in the shadow of a block, that she had known Bunny before they met here.
She was a young mum called Neta-Lee. Wanda discovered it was her when they were lying side by side in the special treatment section of the revier.