Sisterland

by Linda Newbery

  ‘Yes, Gran.’ Hilly lay back limply on the pillow. ‘Yes, I do.’

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Out of the Blue

  When you’re unhappy you laugh, and when you’re hungry you sing.

  Jewish saying

  Dear Rachel [Hilly typed],

  I’m sorry if this gives you a shock. I’m not sure if you even know I exist. Probably not.

  My name is Hilly Craig, and I believe you are my grandmother’s sister. My mother, Rose, I think is your niece – she is the daughter of Sarah Reubens, who changed her name to Heidi when she came to live in England. My grandmother showed me your address and e-mail in the birthday card you sent her. Till the last couple of weeks, I had no idea you existed. We knew nothing of Gran’s real past, only the version she made up to hide the truth, which is what we’ve always believed. And we’re not sure how much we know now. We didn’t know she was Sarah Reubens, and had a sister. We didn’t know she had come to England as a refugee before the war. We found some photos and she started talking about Rachel —you —and that’s how it started to come out. But it was only yesterday I found out you’re, well, alive, and in Israel. After all the wondering and puzzling we’ve done, it’s hard to believe you could get this as soon as I press SEND.

  Sadly, Gran has Alzheimer’s, and has come to live with us now. She’s getting more and more forgetful. This means that everything will soon be lost, and you’re the only one who can fill in the gaps for us. I hope you don’t mind me asking …

  ‘Sarah – Heidi! Open the door! I’ve made you some nice toast and dripping.’

  She gave no answer. A hand outside turned the knob and rattled the door against the chair she had rammed against it. She didn’t answer to Sarah; Auntie Enid ought to know that!

  Her name was Heidi now. It was on her adoption papers – Heidi Thornton. Everyone was supposed to have new names, because Auntie Enid and Uncle Donald had decided that really she ought to call them Mum and Dad, since she had no other parents. Sometimes she remembered, but more usually she thought of them as Auntie Enid and Uncle Donald.

  ‘Heidi, don’t be silly! Let me in!’

  Sometimes they just didn’t understand! They really expected her to be delighted with the news. Instead she had retreated into silence, just as firmly as she had when the first reports came from Bergen-Belsen. More than a year had passed since then, and she never wanted to think about that again. No one was allowed to remind her that she was Jewish – not Patsy, not the Thorntons, not Kenneth, who met her each afternoon after school. He held her hand and carried her bag for her, and sometimes she let him kiss her cheek: not every day, not enough for him to take it for granted, but as a special favour. At first he had tried to apologize for being so mean to her, back in the junior school. She had put a hand over his mouth, insisting that she didn’t remember him ever being horrible.

  Sometimes she believed her own story: that she had somehow, carelessly, lost her parents and come to live with her aunt and uncle; that her new life had begun on the date shown on her adoption papers; that she remembered nothing before then.

  The letter, addressed to Auntie Enid, had looked harmless enough when Heidi picked it up off the doormat, with two others. But she should know by now that letters usually brought bad news, like the one from the Red Cross that said Mutti’s and Vati’s names were on a list of people sent to the gas chambers at Chelmno.

  As usual, Auntie Enid put the mail for Uncle Donald beside his place at the table, for him to open when he came in at tea time. Her own envelope she slit carefully with a knife. She gave a small gasp as she read it; glanced at Heidi, looked back at the typed page.

  ‘No – no!’ said Auntie Enid, holding the letter close, then at arm’s length. ‘I don’t believe it! Sa—Heidi, it’s the most amazing news …’

  ‘What?’ said Heidi, feeling her heart thud in her chest as mad supposings took her over.

  ‘It’s about Rachel – your sister! She’s alive – oh, Heidi, it says she was in Aushwick, one of those dreadful places, but she was one of the survivors – oh, the poor love, losing her mum and dad, and going through all that – But, Heidi, this is from the Refugee Committee – it seems she wrote to them to find out where you are, and—’

  ‘She’s coming here?’ In one instant Rachel had been changed from someone dead, burnt to ashes, into someone who threatened Heidi’s stability.

  ‘No, but she is coming to England! To London. Yes, really! Wants us to go down and meet her there. Oh, lovey, what a marvellous surprise for you! I don’t wonder the cat’s got your tongue. It’s too much to take in, isn’t it?’

  ‘Let me see.’ Heidi reached out for the letter. ‘Will she come and live with us? I don’t want to share my room,’ she said, in a sullen voice. Eric, obligingly, had got married to a dull girl called Violet soon after being discharged from the army, and had gone to live with her at her parents’ house in Rushden. It would be inconvenient if Rachel wanted to move in.

  Auntie Enid gave her a shrewd look. ‘You’re shocked – I’m not surprised. You sit there and let me make you a nice mug of hot sweet tea. Oh, but isn’t it exciting! I don’t suppose she’s thinking of coming to live here. But you’re going to have so much to tell each other – so much to catch up on!’

  She made it sound as if Rachel had been on holiday. Heidi finished reading, folded the letter back in its envelope and sat tracing the pattern on the tablecloth with her forefinger while Auntie Enid bustled about, chatting all the while. ‘You needn’t rush, I’ll write a note to explain why you’re late for school—’

  ‘No! You mustn’t – I don’t want anyone to know!’ It burst out of her, angrily. ‘I won’t be late. It’s just a normal day.’

  Auntie Enid stood with arms folded, head on one side, scrutinizing her. ‘I’m wondering if you ought to go to school at all. It’s a big shock. For me, let alone you. And we’ll need to make plans …’ She looked back at the letter. ‘Saturday week, it is. Can you tell them at the shop, take Saturday off? I’ll have to see about train tickets …’

  Heidi had not been to London since her first arrival in England. The war years, London’s battering by German bombs, put a buffer between Heidi now and Sarah Reubens then. The news about Rachel was dragging her back, making her behave like a child again – a grumpy, sulky child who kicked her feet at the table leg and pushed out her lower lip and wouldn’t look at anyone.

  But I’m fourteen now, she thought. It’s too late for going back. Far too late. And she was frightened of Rachel. She imagined an ash-grey, skeletal figure, with twiggy arms and legs sticking out from those pyjamalike garments they wore in the photographs, the nearly-dead people who had reached out to the soldiers and begged silently. Eyes would be black holes in a skull-like face, there would be wisps of dead hair. Her parents had gone there, where Heidi’s mind would not go. And now Rachel was coming to drag her back to them.

  Auntie Enid was cutting bread, her back turned. Heidi turned and ran up the stairs to her room, and wedged the chair against the door. She flung herself on the bed, face pressed into the pillow. She stayed there all day, ignoring Auntie Enid’s pleading, sneaking out only for the toilet. She spoke to no one.

  Dear Hilly,

  I cannot tell you how much tremendous surprise to receive your e-mail. You must please excuse my English, it is not my first language nor my second.

  I had given up hope of ever hearing from my sister Sarah. Around the time of her seventieth birthday a friend showed me news of a reuniting of the Kindertransport children, all in their seventies as they are now (the Kinder, they call them) and of a book written about them. Now there is e-mail and the internet, it makes contacting people so much easier. Sarah would never wish to be part of a reuniting, but the organizer was able to give me her address and new name, which I think the Thorntons have passed on at the time of her marriage. I sent the card with my address and e-mail thinking that after so long she might contact me, but she did not.

  It is onl
y from you that I know of my English family. You will not know that you have family here too in Israel. I have not spoken to Sarah, or heard a word of her, since October of 1946 on my one visit to England. That was not a happy meeting. She did not wish to be remembered of the past …

  For the next week, the Singer sewing machine had whirred late into the night as Auntie Enid worked at the dress she was making for Heidi, with fabric bought from the market. Heidi tried to remember how old Rachel would be. In her mind Rachel was always eighteen, not that much older than Heidi was now. The real Rachel, the Rachel resurrected from the dead, hauled back from behind the wire, would be twenty-four, grown up. I won’t know her, Heidi thought: don’t want to.

  Auntie Enid and Uncle Donald dressed for the occasion as if they were going to a wedding. At Charing Cross Station, selfconscious in the green dress that gave her a new shape, Heidi scanned the faces of people hurrying to and from the platforms. Trains. Always trains, carrying her out of her old life, carrying her parents to the extermination camp; now a train was bringing her dead sister to her. The rattling of train wheels punctuated her life. When I’m grown up, she thought, when I get married, I’ll go everywhere by car, and then I need never go on a train again.

  Auntie Enid and Uncle Donald, she thought, looked out of place in London, as if they’d strayed here by accident and weren’t quite sure how to behave. They had arranged to meet Rachel by the newspaper stall, but they couldn’t help being in everyone’s way. People tutted, swerved, knocked against them. ‘She’ll soon be here, lovey, don’t you fret,’ said Auntie Enid, looking at her watch yet again, squeezing Heidi’s hand.

  Heidi didn’t think Auntie Enid would ever stop treating her as a child. But I’m nearly grown up, she thought, making herself taller, pushing her breasts against the green fabric of her dress. I shall leave school next year. I shall have a job. In a few years I shall get married and have babies, English babies with an English father. No one can decide for me, no one can make me go anywhere I don’t want to go. I’m not going back, ever.

  ‘Sarah? Mr and Mrs Thornton?’ said a gentle, accented voice behind them.

  … She could not hide the shock of seeing me. Partly I expected that. I had put on flesh since being freed from Auschwitz, but the three years I was there had taken from my ableness to recover. You would not know now, but then you could not help but see. The kind foster-parents, Mrs and Mr Thornton, they quickly cover up. Sarah did not try to cover, did not get over her look of revolution [Hilly puzzled over this before realizing that Rachel must have meant revulsion] the whole of the time we were together. I disgusted her. This I saw in her face, and it was hard. It was not, after all, my own choice to be prisoner in that terrible place, to be ill, cold, famished, loused, to be brought to such desperation that there was hardly any spark of life still in me. I truly believe these two things kept me alive. One was the far possibility that my parents might be brought here where I was. That did not happen. Two was knowing my little sister was safe in England and that if I live, some day I may find her again …

  It was Auntie Enid who talked to Rachel as they made their way to Lyons Corner House in the Strand. ‘This is unbelievable – like a miracle!’ she kept saying. Heidi walked on the other side of Uncle Donald, as far from Rachel as possible, looking down at the pavement. In the café, they found a spare table near the back. Auntie Enid motioned Rachel to sit, and Heidi opposite; she summoned a waitress.

  ‘Choose whatever you like – here.’ She pushed a ten-shilling note into Heidi’s hand.

  ‘You are going?’ said Rachel.

  ‘I think we’ll leave you girls to talk on your own for a bit. You must have so much to say to each other!’ said Auntie Enid, smiling indulgently. ‘We’ll be back in an hour.’ Heidi gave her a beseeching look – don’t leave me with her!– but it went unnoticed. With a wave of her hand, Auntie Enid followed Uncle Donald out towards the street.

  Now Heidi had nowhere to look but at Rachel’s face. It was not quite like the living skeleton of her dreams, but never had she seen a person whose skull was so close to the surface, whose eyes were sunk deep in their sockets yet looked out at her, bright and expectant. Rachel’s wrists looked too frail to support her hands. She wore a jacket and skirt of navy fabric with a dark red thread in it, a neat white blouse underneath. Her hair – much thinner and less luxuriant than Heidi’s – was brushed and looped back into a bun; she wore small gold earrings. She was making the best of herself. But, Heidi thought, it’s like decking winter twigs with false blossom. Everyone looking at us will see what she is. They will know. They will smell the ashy smell of death she brings with her. They will move away, to avoid breathing the air she breathes.

  ‘Sarah, please!’ Rachel said in German. ‘Look at me – I’ve come all this way to see you! We are together at last, after so many years!’

  She reached across the table for Heidi’s hand. Heidi withdrew quickly, folding her arms, tucking both hands out of reach. ‘Talk in English,’ she said. ‘I don’t speak German any more. And my name’s Heidi now. You must call me Heidi like everyone else.’

  ‘But to me you are Sarah! And my English is not good. You must speak German, or we will never understand each other! You cannot have forgotten!’

  Heidi thought she had, and was dismayed how easily the sounds flowed into her brain. A waitress came to the table, pad and pencil poised. ‘Tea for two, please,’ Heidi said, in English as correct and unaccented as she could possibly make it. ‘And a selection of cakes.’ I can pay, she thought, with Auntie Enid’s ten-shilling note. I want Rachel to see that I’ve got money and I can pay.

  ‘I am only here in London for three nights,’ Rachel said. ‘Since the war ended I have been living and working in Poland. But soon I shall be moving on again. I’m going to Palestine. And – in two weeks I shall be married. So you see, life does begin again.’

  ‘Married!’

  ‘Yes. His name is Aaron Schönfeld. I can see what you’re thinking, Sarah – you’re wondering how anyone can want to marry such a scrawny scarecrow as you see opposite you. But Aaron does. We understand each other. What we have been through, you see, we have both been through.’

  ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘He is a little older than me. He is also from Köln. He was in Auschwitz, though we did not know each other there. We were both young and fit, so we were chosen for work. That is what saved us. We met later, through a kind Polish family who helped us when we were released. I have found work in an organization in Krakow concerned with the resettlement of survivors. Earlier this summer Aaron and I travelled back together to Köln to see if we could find out what happened to our families. We found nothing, neither Aaron nor I. All gone. Our flat, Sarah, our garden – there are other people living there. It is as if we never were.’

  Be quiet. Be quiet! Heidi willed her. Rachel would talk on and on, she would say terrible things in her gentle, matter-of-fact voice. She would say what she had seen: the things Eric had described, the things of the radio broadcast. Only worse, because those things had been Rachel’s world. Her entire world.

  Rachel looked down at her hands. ‘Many letters, many visits, many searching through lists, it took before I found out what happened to Mutti and Vati. Do you know?’

  ‘Yes. They were gassed,’ Heidi said, in an offhand voice.

  ‘Yes. They were deported from Köln to the Lodz ghetto, and from there to Chelmno. Not until I had the facts did I give up hope. Aaron’s parents also, killed at Sachsenhausen – they fled Köln only to be caught and imprisoned. But even then we were not alone, because we had found each other. And I had thoughts of you.’

  Heidi looked away.

  ‘I knew then, when I returned to Köln, that I could never stay in Germany. All the while, I was afraid. Someone would see us, know we were Jewish, hand us over. I could not forget that fear, not for one second. Things have changed now, but my skin and my blood and my nerves could never believe it was so. And Aaron the same – we
must for ever be watchful, for ever afraid. That’s what made us decide that our new life together will be in Palestine, in the new Jewish homeland. We will feel safe there.’

  The waitress brought cakes on a tiered plate, teapot, milk jug, cups and saucers.

  ‘Why have you come?’ Heidi asked.

  ‘Oh, Sarah, is there any need for you to ask that?’

  Heidi busied herself with the teapot and strainer, pouring two cups of tea. ‘Have some cake.’ She took an éclair and started eating it. Rachel looked sadly at the abundance of cakes, and took one shortbread finger, which she left untouched on her plate. Suddenly, for Heidi, it became important to eat hungrily: to show Rachel. Look, I’m alive, I’m healthy, I’m eating. This is what it’s like. I am plump and well fed.

  A silence fell between them. Heidi ate; Rachel looked at the walls, at the waitress, at the other customers.

  ‘So,’ Heidi said, finishing the éclair. She took a madeleine, and licked flakes of coconut off her fingers. ‘You’re marrying a Jewish boy, and you’re going to live in Palestine. You’ll have Jewish children. We’re so different now. The Thorntons aren’t Jewish, you realize that? And neither am I.’

  ‘Yes, I know. You have become less Jewish, and I have become more so. In the camp, we kept the faith. We kept the traditions, as best we could. We said the prayers, we kept the Sabbath. It helped keep us alive – gave us some sense of purpose, of continuity, of belonging to each other. The Nazis could destroy everything, our homes, our families, could even destroy us whenever they chose, shoot us, torture us, send us to the gas chambers, but the one thing they could not destroy was our faith. And through this my faith was strengthened. You have to understand that!’

  ‘Yes,’ Heidi said, with a faint shrug. ‘I don’t see how it affects me, though. What do you want from me?’

  ‘We belong to each other, too,’ Rachel said. ‘We are still sisters.’

  Their eyes met across the table. Heidi remembered last time: I hate you! I hope I never see you again! She had regretted it, then, almost immediately. But now she was thinking it again, without compassion: she was willing Rachel to know it, to read it in her eyes.