The Broken Girls(61)

She carried the book to class for the rest of the day, and that night she put it under her pillow, still blank. She liked it blank right now, liked to know that it was waiting, listening. Just like her friends.

In the end, she told the book the same story she’d told her friends. The only story she knew, really. The only story she had to tell. And she added pictures.

She had been fair at drawing before the war. She’d drawn her mother dozens of times, as she sat reading or sewing. There had been so many things in those days that kept a person still, that required perfect concentration for hours on end. It had been easy to draw portraits. Her mother, her father, the cat who came to the window looking for food. Then, when she got quicker, her teachers and classmates.

That had stopped. But now she uncapped her pen and wrote in her private notebook, and she told it everything, page by page. And alongside the words, she drew pictures. She drew her mother from memory, and then her father. She had to stop for a day after that, but then she got the itch again, and she opened the book and wrote down what she remembered.

She drew Ravensbrück.

Once she started, she couldn’t stop, the edges of her memories sawing at her as she sat at her lessons, as she did her homework and ran pitifully around the hockey field and ate her tasteless meals in the dining hall. The memories weren’t the overwhelming ones she’d had that had made her sick. These were like a violin bow grinding along the edge of a single string, shrill, waiting for some kind of resolution to make it stop. The only thing that worked was writing.

She mapped the camp. She drew it from several vantage points, looking over the dormitory buildings, looking toward the crematorium with its plumes of smoke. She drew every face she remembered: inmates, women who came and went, blockovas, guards, her mother. Her mother. She drew the man who came to inspect them, the tall man with the silver SS on his uniform collar and the long black coat. She drew the landscape in summer and winter, the bodies. She drew the face of the first person she’d seen the day the camp was liberated, a man in a Soviet uniform with a wide, fat face. She’d fled from him on sight, running barefoot as far as she could. She’d wanted nothing to do with soldiers.

She drew the bombed-out church she’d slept in that first night. The woman, the fellow prisoner, who had found her and joined her. The family that had taken them in. Their two children, their thin faces, their wide eyes. There were certain things her memory refused to yield up to her—blanks of time, some of them frustrating, some of them possibly merciful. Her mother standing in the Appelplatz—she could not recall that, not clearly. What angle had she watched it from? Had she been in front of her mother, or behind? It wouldn’t come, and Sonia started to wonder if she’d only heard about it, though she could have sworn she’d seen it. It was all so confusing.

Her friends noticed what she was doing, of course. She told them honestly what she was writing about, but she didn’t offer to show them at first. Even now, after so many nights lying on the floor with them, listening to CeCe’s radio and talking, she felt shy about what was in the book. But eventually she showed Roberta, and then the others. Roberta was silent and grim when she read it; CeCe, whose notebook it was, shed big, fat tears down her cheeks and hugged Sonia long and fierce when she was finished.

But Katie had read the notebook with an expression that went harsh and white, impenetrable as concrete. She was sitting on the edge of her bunk, the notebook open on her lap as she paged through it in silence. Sonia sat next to her, her feet curled up beneath her, biting the edge of her thumb. It was an offering, giving Katie the book, and she could not read Katie’s response while her eyes were down and her lashes lowered. She waited.

Katie used her palms to clap the book shut with a snap that reverberated through the room, a big gesture, just like all of Katie’s gestures. “You should be a writer,” she said.

“What does that mean?” Sonia asked.

“You have talent,” Katie said. She looked down at the closed notebook, the whorls of flowers on the cover. “You can draw. You can write. This is talent, Sonia. Talent can be used to make money.”

Sonia dropped her thumb and felt her jaw gape open for a second. “You mean like a job?”

“You could be a writer,” Katie said again, patiently, as if she knew it was difficult for the idea to get through. “You could write books, articles. You could be published. Then you wouldn’t have to get married.”

The girls had talked, more than once, about how none of them wanted to get married. The only waverer was CeCe, who said she’d like to have children but was terrified of the kissing-and-sex part. The other three agreed that they had no use for boys whatsoever, except that they had no idea how to get by in the world without a husband, without being a terrifying spinster like Lady Loon. It was a problem the four of them had yet to solve, not least because their severe lack of information—aside from Lady Chatterley’s Lover—hampered their ability to make a decision.

“I can’t write a book about Ravensbrück,” Sonia said. “I can’t.”

Katie glanced at her, those dark, bewitching eyes missing nothing. Katie was so beautiful it was hard to look at her sometimes: the raven black hair, the pure perfection of her forehead, the gull-wing slashes of her brows, the straight nose and mouth that almost never moved to express a single emotion. If you wanted to read Katie, Sonia had learned, you had to watch her eyes carefully, as the rest of her face would never, ever give her away. “Why not?” Katie said.