The Rabbit Girls(65)

‘Again?’ Miriam asks, but the emptiness at Eva’s words pulses in Miriam’s chest, echoing like the tower itself as Eva’s footsteps recede until they are gone.

Miriam looks down over the railings, really looks down. She stays there a long time gripping the bars.

Hard.





26





MIRIAM


She watches her step on the wet stairs as she descends from the tower. Despite numb toes she moves with speed. Turning each way, looking for Eva, her breath coming fast from lips white-tipped with frost. She moves towards the church, its domed roof lost in the night sky, she hears noises within and a slip of light filters through cracks in the door.

Miriam follows the trickle of people as they go into the church, it smells empty and damp and cold. She sits close to the door and looks at the broken and cracked floor tiles, once terracotta and green cut into diamonds but now smashed. She cannot recall any of the service. She sits until the people next to her stand. She stands, then sits when they do. She leaves just after them. Alone.

After the church, she gets a taxi with a decisiveness that she finds stimulating and terrifying equally. She travels through the Berlin streets: street lights bright and atmosphere buoyant as bars and clubs swell and throb to the dance of Christmas.

Miriam goes to the hospital in the dark for the last of the visiting hours. When on the ward, she takes out the bundle of transcribed letters and sits; the air is heavy from the whirring machines and clunky radiators. She kisses her father’s head and squeezes his hand, he has a tube up his nose and it curls around his face. He has been shaved. His skin is soft and he smells baby-lotion fresh.

If these are all the letters she has from Eva, then she will share them with her father; he deserves to know. And if Eva cannot help anymore, Miriam will find someone who can. Eva’s words clang in Miriam’s heart and she feels guilt that she cannot live up to Eva’s expectations.

‘I would always regret not doing this, but even now we are on pretty shaky ground, Dad. I hope you hear me, I hope you understand. I have these, from Frieda.’ She unfolds the thick paper and reads from the beginning.

‘I am alive, at least, I think I am alive . . .’

After she has read many of the letters, a tear falls down his cheek. She dries it with a handkerchief.





HENRYK

Miriam reads to me. I try to focus, to hear what she says. Time stops ticking and starts to flow and soon it races away. I know there is something I must hold on to.

We moved back into our old home in 1946 as Emilie had wanted, we lived within walking distance of what was left of our friends. If Emilie had asked for anything I would have done it, whatever she wanted.

She worked at the hospital to support our family. She was happy, and I did everything to keep it that way.

But I will always remember that time, in the tiny apartment, her face looking at me as I returned to her from Frieda. Sitting in the chair, her small frame shrouded in blankets, plucking at the fabric with both hands. I walked into the room and she looked up, disappointment and loss creased her eyes, and if there was a moment where I wished the ground would shake, in which I was removed from her life, and Frieda’s, I asked a God I didn’t believe in to grant it to me then.

Back in our old home, her face still contained her grief and everything we touched contained the memory of Frieda, and I wanted to claw back what I had lost.

She would look away and not look at me again for hours at a time. I would never ask for forgiveness, but I could do everything to give Emilie the life she had always wanted. We had Miriam, and that changed everything.

For fifteen years, I stayed home with Miriam. I marvelled at her incredible growth, her intuition and resourcefulness, and the years flew by so fast, although I remember the days to be long.

When she was at school, I’d walk her there, stand by the blue gates as she chatted with her friends, whom I liked very much. Girls and boys like colourful flowers growing together, an eternal spring; it was a privilege to watch them bloom. They’d ask me questions about life, sometimes love, and I would happily help with French or English homework.

As I was leaving one day, a teacher stopped me, he knew me by sight as Miriam’s dad. He asked me if I could join him in his office.

‘Miriam tells me you were, or perhaps you still are, a teacher?’

‘Yes, I used to teach.’ Immediately I was on my guard, felt imprisoned in the confines of his office, a boiling cup of insipid tea in my hands, sitting so deep in a seat I could see the imprints of my bony knees through the fabric of my trousers.

‘Miriam is an exceptional student.’

‘Thank you, I am proud of her.’

‘Obviously, she’d achieve more if she talked less.’ He laughed. The desk was full of papers, magazines, books. Herr Blundell, his name on the door. He was Miriam’s head of year, I think, or maybe I didn’t know that then, only after.

Time fills in the blanks as we know them to be, rather than as they were.

‘She’s a lot like her mother,’ I had agreed, because Miriam was such a sprightly thing, at the end of the day I couldn’t wait to sit in an empty room and let it fill up with the silence that had been driven out by the chatter of both mother and daughter.

‘I have three teenage girls,’ said Herr Blundell. ‘It’s a rocky road to travel as the only man in the house, I can tell you!’