The Rabbit Girls(75)

‘Surprise indeed,’ Miriam murmurs. ‘Lionel, my husband and I are separated. Please do not let anyone into my’ – then thinking about what she is saying – ‘my father’s apartment without checking with me first. Not ever.’

He opens and then closes his mouth and Miriam shakes her head as she walks back up the stairs.

Back to the letters. The next two are written on the inside of an envelope, the waxy strips burnt amber, and covered in writing on both sides.

Henryk,

There is a pressure in my chest. I imagine this is how a lion feels before it releases a roar which shakes the ground. I do not roar, nor do I cry. I cannot relieve this pressure. It builds and builds, then falls away only to grow again but from deeper, stronger, bigger.

Wanda has found a new vocation. There is a block opened for babies, a nursery, where the mums can be with their newborns and still work.

Block 22 holds infant babies, mothers can work and return to feed their babies in their break. They are cared for by the prisoners. Wanda is one of them. This fills me with dread. Parting with our child? I cannot imagine. While it grows within me it is safe. As safe as I am.

I cannot survive what is to come. The death of our child. For here there is only death. No child is born and lives, even most in the nursery die. I listen to talk of liberation and think about walking back to you. Then I see the shadow of Emilie and I know that my happily ever after does not exist.

All outcomes are impossible.

I try to survive the day, every day. For it is my hope that I see you again. A small foot nudges me from within and I am reminded that you exist, that we exist.

Until tomorrow.

She picks up the next letter without pause.

Wanda looks at me as if she knows. She talks of bowels, bowls and bread. She bores us with detailed descriptions of them all. The value of a bowel movement entrances her as if we were babies again.

But every now and again she looks at me, maybe it’s just my perception of her look, how I am interpreting it, but it’s different, as if she knows.

She has changed in the past weeks while I have been recovering from the bunker. Since starting the job she has told stories, stories that had they come from anyone else I wouldn’t have believed.

A three-kilogram baby born. A mother given a glass of milk at birth. A mother washed and cared for during her delivery.

Eugenia covers her eyes and pretends to sleep. She cannot believe that things are changing, that there is some humanity in this place. She cannot believe it to be true. She cannot let herself have hope. Block 22 disproves her belief that all Nazis are monsters.

Eugenia and Wanda are at war over Block 22. Some days no peaceful words are passed between them, yet under the words and tensions there is utter devotion.

Wanda talks of nurses and caring for babies. She talks of the cloth they are swaddled in, paper as nappies. Mothers queuing up to see their babies in their breaks. She talks of holding them, soothing them, she talks of chubby hands, rosy lips, healthy newborns. Every word like nectar to my soul, soothing my worries away. I pray she is right.

Three kilos?

Miriam’s baby had been measured in grams. Held, soothed, but not chubby, not rosy and not alive.

Unable to keep reading the letters, unable to walk down the path that leads to that day, the day she lost him, Miriam goes out to meet her new solicitor, David Abbott. She doesn’t check the streets; she doesn’t care anymore. David Abbott accepts the hefty cheque she has written and says that Axel should have received notification.

He is stuffy and old and in every respect a typical solicitor; she feels grubby just being around so much handled paper. The floor, the table, the chairs, everything covered in yellowing paper. His fingers, his eyes, his not-so-white hair, all tainted yellow.

She walks home contemplating her name, she had changed it to marry and she will change it to divorce too. There feels some symmetry to it. Like going full circle, back to the beginning again.

In the hospice, she reads more letters to her father, in her own hand the letters are easier to read and she gets to the end of them quickly. She makes conversation with the nurses, she helps to care for her father and he talks, very quietly. Words she cannot understand, but he is talking. She takes that as a good sign; she sees her advert in the paper and holds on to some hope that someone might know something of Frieda.

Finally, back at home she finds a new key on the desk with Lionel and a bright, shiny new lock on her door. Inside, on her dining room table, the invoice is folded over. Beside it is a note in Hilda’s large handwriting:

Sorry to have missed you. Please call me, Hilda x

The next day follows peacefully. Miriam walks to the hospice, she tends to her father’s needs, then takes a bus to the library to find Eva, to apologise, to understand, but mainly to feel like she doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

The library is closed.

To distract her hands from pulling the tiny line of new skin apart on the underside of her arm, she walks into shops with garments and bags showcased in the window. Long, oblong bags with tassels and bright dresses in the latest fashions. Miriam smiles as she purchases some gloves, silk gloves, unaware of fashion choices; what she does know is that she is missing colour. She buys a pink scarf, the identical colour to the deepest shade of the lilies. A reminder that she made a choice and she did it alone. And returns to the till with a purple scarf too, thinking of Stella’s rainbow.

Her taste for freedom slightly satisfied, she returns home, pours a glass of wine and reads more letters, each one taking her further and further into something that feels inescapable.