by Anna Ellory
She stands abruptly and walks to Dad’s office, the place most of her memories of Dad reside.
Opening the door, his office smells old, stagnant as a library in summer. Full of words and thoughts, committed to paper, then forgotten. She heads straight for his heavy, walnut desk and looks for his matches. The desk occupies the entire end of the room. The writing pad still holds indents of words written by his hand.
A photo of his parents, sepia. The creases along the centre and through the middle divide, yet the picture is one of togetherness. Held in a frame, the only ornament. Mum’s touch never entered this room.
The desk obstructs the sash window, which overlooks the street lined with skeletal oaks and horse chestnuts. The cafés have their red, green and blue awnings rolled in and their tables and chairs stacked away, but the bakery, she can see, has its billboard out announcing fresh loaves.
The bricks of rye, wholemeal and country bread are walled up behind the glass counter and she remembers that sweet treats line the inner counter. She had pushed the door to a sing of the bell and, with both hands on the glass, deliberated over which iced doughnut was for her, and which would be for Dad, while Mum chatted with the baker about holding with traditional rising agents and such.
Her stomach grumbles as she turns from the window.
Bookshelves full of heavy titles in many languages line either side of the room to the back wall, which is bare. Four imprints in the carpet are shadows of where the chair had stood.
She finds the matches in the top drawer of his desk and lights one with shaking hands, kissing the flame to the corner of the polaroid. Then, as it catches, she places it in his ceramic ashtray at the back of the desk and watches as the picture curls and folds, blackening first the image and then, finally, her name.
The smoke hangs in the air and strangles her.
She opens the window as the ashes curl grey and she thinks of the chimneys. The images of smoke and ash. The camps. And her father, there.
Standing in his study, where everything is him, she starts to rummage in the drawers, pulls out ledgers, thick books, paper and more paper. Looking for answers.
She scans each document for his handwriting. The papers seem to be accounts with dates starting from the sixties, some notepads in shorthand, mostly scribbles in pencil.
Miriam discards all she looks at into a pile in the middle of the floor. Before long she is lost in a warren of his work, puzzling her way through notebook after notebook. When all the contents of the desk are on the floor, she moves to the bookshelves.
She scans along the titles, many shelves full of texts in German, English and French. Educational as well as fiction. Poetry, essays and plays.
Translated collections of Yeats stand resolute, side by side with English originals. She picks one up, Michael Robartes and the Dancer, and rubs her fingers over her lips. The shelf just under it has more Yeats. The same book. The entire shelf full of the same volume, in many editions and translations. She pulls out one at a time and looks at them, opening the cover. Property of Berlin State Library. And another. All the same. She counts twenty copies. Most from the library. What had her father been doing? Why did he need so many?
She carries one back into his room and drops into the chair.
The rhythm of his breathing becomes hypnotic. She opens the cover and wafts the pages around his face. Old, worn and good. ‘The last sense to go is smell,’ said one of the ever-changing faces in the hospital.
She flicks through a few pages and comes to the first poem, named the same as the collection.
She reads and the words dance around the alcoves of the room like a child’s hanging mobile. Knights with spears, dragons and the lady she imagines with a tall hat and veil.
After the first stanza, she looks up.
‘I remember this one, do you?’ She reads on, gently touches the golden sheets of paper as the book bends in her hands. A muscle memory for her fingers of when she had held the pages before.
‘Get yourself to school, Miriam,’ Mum had said, leaving the apartment. ‘I’m on a twilight, I’ll see you in the morning.’
‘What about Dad?’ Miriam picked up toast from the table.
‘He’ll sort himself out.’
She went to his room. Curtains closed and air clotted with sleep. He was in bed.
‘Morning,’ she said, and bounced on the bed next to him, kissing his head. He smelled over-warm, his soft skin unwashed.
It was an episode.
She kicked off her shoes and shimmied up the bed to sit on the pillows and put her feet under the duvet.
‘What shall it be today?’ she asked, but saw the Yeats on the table. ‘Oh, this is my favourite.’ Picking up the book she said, ‘If you are sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin . . .’
And she had, she read to him, always during his episodes, she would skip school and spend the day by his side, making him better. She had never thought why he had episodes of inertia, he just did. She thinks back to the childhood version of herself. She hadn’t questioned it. It was just as it was. She read poetry to him. And it worked.
Her mother never knew.
‘They say such different things at school,’ she finishes the poem.
Tears wet her face and the words on the page swim around. If this helps, then this is what she will do: read to him to help him come back.
She has never thought to ask him about his life before her. Hitler killed Jews and her parents weren’t Jewish. She has never thought about it any more than that. History, as horrific as it was, has never been this close to home.
HENRYK
Frieda and I stood not far enough away from the university building on what was my last day. Her hair was floating towards me, over her neck and shoulders, on the air of early spring. It wasn’t cold yet she was in a heavy cotton dress, beads of perspiration threaded through her hairline.
‘Haven’t you done enough?’ I said.
‘Actually, I haven’t done nearly enough.’ She squeezed my arm. The same place Herr Wager had gripped, she warmed. ‘Here.’ From the satchel heavy on her shoulder she drew out book after book, launching them into my arms. All the covers and first few pages had been ripped off long before they had come into my possession. But I knew them as well as my own hands.
‘How did you get these?’
‘I stole them back for you; you’d have been arrested if they’d found them.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Returning them. I wasn’t sure which ones, so I got as many as I could and all the papers from the locked drawer in your desk.’ She paused. And like a parent who finds their lost child, I felt both infuriated and yet relieved beyond measure.
‘Here, you may as well have the bag.’ She took the bag off her shoulder and passed it to me, but with my briefcase and the books stacked in my hands I couldn’t take it. She laughed, a deep rumble, which I mirrored in an instant smile. As she smiled back at me, her face changed. Her eyes, unframed against pale lashes, were large and emerald.
‘Let me help,’ she said, and placed the books back into the satchel before handing it to me. I was surprised by its weight. ‘I couldn’t get everything,’ she continued. ‘I only found out this morning and it took me ages to get into your office.’
‘I thought the burning of books was over. I should never have kept them in my office,’ I said, placing the satchel over my shoulder.
‘If they burn books, it’s not long before they burn people too,’ she said with an emptiness in her voice. She looked to the ground and I followed her gaze the full length of her dress to her brown shoes. And before I knew what I was doing I placed my fingertips to her chin, palm up, and raised her head to draw her eyes back to mine.
I jolted in shock at the charge of the connection beneath my fingertips. And like forked lightning, flames of electric heat stunned me and I took a step back, dropped my hand but not my gaze.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Why are you helping me?’
She beamed. ‘I also have a leaving gift.’ She blushed scarlet, which only made me want to touch her skin again, to radiate in its heat. She pulled out a desperately weathered book from her backpack. Michael Robartes and the Dancer. ‘Do you have it already?’ I looked around, aware of my surroundings now. Uncertainty made me pause, but she placed the book into my hands.
‘Yeats? No, I haven’t,’ I said, admiring the slim volume. ‘Thank you.’
‘See you again, professor,’ she said, looking relieved, and walked away.
But she was walking my way. I held back, aware of the contraband I was carrying. Now they were in my possession again I wanted to get them home, not past the university, nor further into the belly of the beast. When she obviously wasn’t going back into the building I had no choice but to follow her path.
‘Excuse me, Fräulein Hasek,’ I called over-formally. ‘We are heading the same way and it looks like I am following you. Perhaps you could slow a bit and I can escort you instead?’
‘My name is Frieda,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘Then don’t call me by my family’s name when you know mine.’
‘I . . .’
‘We all have a family,’ she continued, ‘but that doesn’t mean I want to be associated with mine, does it?’ And although her words were hostile her eyes shimmered.
‘Apparently not,’ I started. ‘So, Frieda?’
‘Yes.’
‘May I escort you for as long as our paths remain the same? I’m Henryk,’ I said.
‘Nice to meet you, Henryk.’ Her voice became lower, deeper and more sensual than anything I had ever heard as she said my name.
We walked in silence. I didn’t know what to say to her, nor what I would say when I returned home, but what was really playing on my mind was how I could get her to say my name again.
‘You went to a lot of risk getting these.’ I tapped on the bag.
‘Not really. I do some filing for Herr Wager and I overheard his conversation before class this morning, so I slipped into your office and took everything I could.’
‘Still, you could have been caught,’ I said.
‘One small act of defiance.’
‘Stealing my books was political then?’
‘No, it was judicious,’ she said.
I couldn’t reply as I followed the well-trodden path home. I turned on to my street as she continued walking.
‘Thank you, Frieda,’ I said.
‘See you again, Henryk.’ And she smiled before walking away.
I wanted to shout back, But when?
I walked up the path to the front door, knowing I had just experienced a life-changing moment. The thought fleeting, yet the apparent cliché didn’t make it any less true. I watched the main road, hoping to see her silhouette, hoping she would return and hoping to delay the inevitable truth. That I was now under suspicion, that Emilie and I were in danger and I would now have to make it real, by speaking it out loud.
Feeling my feet centred on the concrete step, the key felt heavier in the lock as it turned and the door hushed open. The smell of wood polish and orange blossom, Emilie, drifted through the door.
The road was empty as I looked back for the second time, and I knew that to taste heaven would lead me to hell. Heaven and hell? I shook my head, trying to shift the fog that had gripped me.
A fog by the name of Frieda.
5
MIRIAM
She comes to a line of poetry that he uttered last night.
‘The ceremony of innocence is drowned.’ It is in this collection, and all the other copies he has from the library. There is something more to this poem, but she doesn’t know what. Maybe this is the way to Frieda, to find out what happened to her father, maybe this will help him to move on.
‘Move on,’ they say. But what they mean is die. But maybe, just maybe, there is a way to get him back?
She shakes the notion away.
‘Hope doesn’t belong at a deathbed,’ Mum had said in her matter-of-fact way after difficult shifts, and she was right, of course. ‘All we can do is offer a peaceful, unburdened passing.’
He will die. But perhaps he’s holding on for something? She looks at what he has become and as she turns and offers him water, she thinks of what Hilda said. There were records. Maybe her father was searching for something within the library itself, and if not, maybe she can understand a bit more about his past. After all, it is one that is shared by millions, although few as lucky as her father to have survived.
She looks at her father’s sleeping form before collecting her coat and boots. She stares at the front door. ‘I won’t be long,’ she reassures herself. ‘Just a few bits, and the library. I can do this.’
He knew where she was, but she had left him. That was the hard part and now . . . now, she was going out.
She replaces the white feather between the frame and door, its plume thick and missing in parts, the quill bent at the end. She draws her finger enticingly over the surface, feeling the internal snap, made without creating a sharp edge.
The key turns in the lock. It crunches and clunks. She moves away, feeling the comfort and pull of home even as she walks through the empty hall, down the stairs. Lionel is at his desk.
‘Afternoon,’ he says, looking up. ‘Christmas shopping, Fräulein?’
Miriam nods.
‘How’s your father?’ he asks.
‘Stable,’ she says, pushing the main doors.
The rain of yesterday has eased. A carpet of autumn cushions the road as she walks through the landscape of her childhood.
Nothing has changed, structurally, yet the feelings it evokes have altered. No longer safe, every corner is a risk, an unknown. When she gets to the main square, the shops and cafés are loud: voices, music and lights. Kids playing on the street, carrying portable machines that boom at her, and cyclists splash water up near the curb.
They all blur into one thing. Not him.
Once on Neufertstraβe she is treading in unfamiliar territory, her eyes searching not for landmarks, but for recognition. She allows her feet to walk while she scans all who pass her from shoes to face. She is looking at everyone. Behind every hood, under every hat, she searches for his eyes, his face.
Him.
The shop on the corner is full of people, trolleys, food, radio blaring from speakers. Her thoughts swirl, her eyes wander, darting from one thing to the next. Holding an empty basket, she stares at the shelves and finally collects brands that are vaguely familiar. At the counter she picks up a newspaper: ‘Freiheit’, the headline shouts at her. Freedom.
Miriam fumbles for the money and walks away without her change. Taking some deep breaths back outside on the street she takes a step. ‘The first step was hardest’ – she remembers the East Berliner’s words – ‘but they got easier.’ She must keep going.
To see if she can find any answers.
HENRYK
I didn’t have to wait long to see Frieda again. After a turbulent week when Emilie wept in my arms each night, we tried to work out what to do next. Neither of us slept. She had found us a new place, a tiny apartment with an open loft hatch. We weren’t in hiding and yet we had found an apartment which could hide us. Emilie paid six months’ rent in advance and gave her maiden name to the landlord.
To leave Berlin under suspicion meant greater risk. To be caught trying to leave meant certain arrest and, since neither of our hearts were in leaving the only city we had ever called home, we stayed. Telling ourselves that the only way was to wait it out.
We said goodbye to our home, reluctantly leaving the key with Frau Voss, who clicked her teeth in what I hoped was sympathy, but may have been eagerness to ‘care’ for our neglected belongings.
I wasn’t sure we would ever see the house again and I felt empty. With a lot of bags, we moved into the half-apartment where we were safer. Emilie still sobbed, but the tears brought her sleep. I listened as her breathing relaxed, and held her
as she slept. I couldn’t rest, knowing they were on every corner and up every street; it only took one wrong turn and they would be after me.
I didn’t know what was next and had no idea, under every eventuality I could imagine, how I would protect her.
Emilie was nervous to continue her work, but she went every day, and she held her head high. Nursing was what she did, it was who she was, and nothing would keep her from her job.
When she left for the hospital I would walk, trying to find a bit of peace, knowing that if I didn’t force myself to leave the apartment, I wouldn’t.
MIRIAM
The bus from Sophie-Charlotte-Platz is full, everyone heading to the centre, bursting with lively talk and cheer. She rolls her ticket between her fingers, shopping in her lap, and allows the conversations to roll over her too.
Her feet echo heavily on the marble floor of the library entrance, the pillars blocking the view of those snuggled into sleeping bags, escaping the rain. She notices the bullet marks on the inner wall, a reminder of the past; untouched. She has never been here before, there seemed no need, what with her father having a library at home.
A wet heat envelops her as she wanders around the library shelves, like walking into an open book. Many people are milling around and she feels a little out of orbit.
A woman in a warm-pink cardigan is at the desk, a long queue forms behind her. ‘And what I am saying . . .’ the woman says hotly, leaning her arms on the counter.
Miriam walks past the desk to study the dark shelves. The building is vast and illuminated over multiple levels; stairs reach around and jut out of nowhere, taking Miriam up and around a different floor, before finding another staircase again. She follows a sign for ‘History’, then ‘Europe’.
There are a lot of books and she feels intimidated by the sheer volume of them. Her eyes jump to ‘Holocaust’ written in large, bold letters. She takes the heavy book and sits at a table close by. Her hands shake and she chews on her inner cheek until she can taste blood before turning the page.