The Rabbit Girls

by Anna Ellory

  She wakes in the middle of the night. Guilt crawls at her skin as she quickly attends to her father’s needs, offers him water, which he gulps down, and some food, which he doesn’t eat. Once he has resettled she looks out of the window. Saturday night. She hears sirens and voices, but her street is quiet. Under cover of night she gently moves his watch.

  She looks at the number for some time. As if to seek the answers from the grey lines that mark his skin.

  The newspaper article from earlier today shouted Freedom. The Wall may be coming down, but had her father ever been free? She covers him again and goes into the kitchen to unpack the forgotten shopping and washes the dishes that have accumulated on the side. She cannot find the tea towel, nor a clean one in the drawer. She dries her hands in the bathroom and takes a deep breath before switching the light on in Mum’s room.

  The mess she made the day before remains and she finds the tea towel amidst the dresses that heap and overflow from the wardrobe. When she was little she hid in this wardrobe trying on Mum’s shoes and playing with the tassels and fabric of the dresses that fell around her like rain as she waited out the impending storm brewing in the rest of the apartment.

  She places the shoes back in their boxes and hangs Mum’s dresses back up on the rail, they are creased and she feels guilty as she smooths them, trying hard not to touch them with her damaged fingers.

  She stacks her mother’s shoes: dancing shoes, best shoes, summer and winter shoes. Even the shoes Mum wore to Miriam’s wedding. All immaculate and cared for. But something has been dislodged and they won’t stack straight. Miriam takes them all out and starts again, but finds the handle of an old carpet bag that has fallen over at the very back, which topples the boxes.

  It is heavy and nothing she remembers seeing before. Putting it to one side she restores order to her mother’s wardrobe. Turning to find the carpet bag waiting like a patient lapdog, she twists the clasp with a flick, popping the mouth of the bag open.

  She pulls out a yellow sheet, dull, like a faded daffodil, and sits on the end of the bed. The more she unfolds the sheet the stronger the scent of urine, sweat and soil rise out of the cloth. The sheet is large and the contents drop into her lap. A navy-and-grey striped shirt. Miriam pulls the fabric out and the shirt turns into a dress. It is long and thick, coarse cotton.

  It has a triangular collar, and three buttons down the centre. She opens the yellow sheet fully to a single-bed size, gets up and lays the sheet out on the floor, before placing the dress on top.

  Like a shadow in the sun, she cannot look away.

  The dress has holes in it, frayed in places and creased as though it has been kept folded for a long time. It is a striped dress. A uniform.

  She carries it into his room.

  ‘What happened to Mum?’ she says. ‘Dad . . . I found . . .’ she starts, then folds herself into the chair, dissolving into tears of exhaustion, loss and something else.

  Fear.

  HENRYK

  I stayed at that bench by the Spree for what felt like all day and watched as ducks flew by and herons waited for a catch. I watched the world move. Finally, when I knew Emilie would be home, I got up. Thinking the entire walk back about how I could tell her, how I could frame the feeling so that she could understand. I had always told Emilie everything. Like breathing, we talked. Not telling her this seemed unthinkable, but despite my meandering walk home, I hadn’t come up with a single thing I could say.

  ‘Henryk, is that you?’ she called, anxious, from the tiny space that was now the kitchen. Our flat had become a boudoir, stuffed with all the little luxuries that had been spread out in our old house, but here flowers, paintings and books were hoarded everywhere. And there was my wife, in her apron, strings loose at her back.

  ‘Hi.’ I walked to her and kissed her cheek.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she asked.

  ‘Walking.’ I pulled the loose knot and retied it, smoothing out the hospital uniform underneath. I placed my hand on her wrist and spun her into my arms. I guided her small body out of the kitchen and into the overcrowded lounge. I hummed tunelessly as I led her into a rather fast waltz.

  ‘Henryk, what are you doing?’ she laughed.

  ‘I’m happy,’ I said, and was about to explain, to allow the words to dance out, to share this feeling with her and make her part of it with me, when she stopped abruptly.

  ‘What is there to be happy about?’ she asked, standing on her tiptoes, her eyes so deeply etched in pain, it sliced me to the quick. She placed her hand on my cheek and kissed me, before walking back to the kitchen. And the truth of it hit me so hard I felt winded: the reason for my happiness would be the very thing that would devastate Emilie.

  MIRIAM

  The dress, the uniform, is on her lap. Dad is sleeping and night hangs in every corner of the room. She touches the buttons, smooth and round. The front pocket is frayed and something is poking out of the corner. She places her hands inside the dress and the fabric rustles, but there is nothing on the inside that would explain the sound. Nor an opening to the pocket.

  ‘There’s something in here,’ she says, her voice rebounding in the darkness.

  Miriam retrieves her mother’s sewing scissors from the drawer in the living room. She feels the cold silver seep into her warm hands, the soft way the steel curves at the handles, the tiny screw that allows the blades to be held together, yet move apart. Her fingers caress the blades until she reaches the tip, barely touching it, she hovers her fingertip over the point.

  The pressure of the metal pinches into her flesh and as soon as blood oozes, her body relaxes as if lowered into a warm bath. She watches the drip as it forms on the tip of her finger. She breathes deeply. An unnamed mass of something unravels.

  Its familiarity welcome. An old friend.

  She clears her throat and places her finger in her mouth. The iron taste a pinpoint on her tongue, its warmth lining the roof of her mouth.

  Taking the scissors to the seam, she cuts a few inches, reaching her fingers inside she finds a slip of paper, folded. No bigger than a match box.

  Unfolded it is exercise-book size, but as thin as tissue paper. The writing is in the tiniest script Miriam has ever seen. It is almost illegible. She places the letter on her lap and turns the lamp so that it showers light down on her, and the dark of her skirt allows the grey pencil to stand out. The paper has no margins, no paragraphing, just corner-to-corner writing. Both sides.

  She looks closer. Pinpricks shiver up her arms. Miriam lifts the paper into the light, an intricate spiderweb of words, and reads.

  Dear Henryk,

  Eugenia Kawinska believes she no longer exists, she died the moment we became nothing more than a number.

  Actual dying and turning to ash is irrelevant now.

  I listen to her, but I cannot let her words penetrate. I am trying to maintain hope. But hope, here, is like wishing on stars; a whimsical, childish fantasy. It is naivety. It is no more than a memory.

  A memory of the red-brick bridge of Gleis 17, of a time before.

  Now we are swallowed by the fumes of our bodies. The wool blankets seem to rise, cloaking us in an unwanted fabric of stagnation. The only movement is my breath hanging, limp and dull, in the summer twilight. I hold my pencil, to guard it with my life. While many pray, I cannot find any other way to keep being, to keep being me without this, so I press my pencil firm and strong to mark the paper and save a life.

  Eugenia started to speak, almost to herself, and held within the confines of our own air, we listened.

  She told of her capture.

  Hiding in a box, painted white and concealed behind curtains, in the back of a shop in her home town of Lublin, she waited. Listening to the earth quiver in rage as soldiers gutted, raped and burned the entire town. Every person was killed or shipped out.

  Eugenia said it felt like a bad dream, one where you need to run, but you cannot, legs numb and unmoving.

  It is how I feel here, ev
ery minute of every day, without you.

  Eugenia is a Catholic girl. You’d like her; there is something warm and comforting about her face. Before this I imagine she looked like the angels we saw in the picture of the Virgin of the Rocks: peace and calm beauty. Her face has endured the hardships, her brow furrows and her eyes move too fast, but when she speaks, she holds a room. She is so composed. Graceful. She even has the curls of an angel in the hair and the lips.

  Eugenia said that she switched off to the roar of the death march. No longer asleep nor awake. Hearing voices, whispers and fast feet, a separate compartment lid of the box she was hiding in opened and illuminated her. Unable to lift her head she looked ahead along the stretch of the wooden box. She saw shoes, blue shoes with green thread laced in the sides. Baby shoes. One lace loosely knotted, the other not tied at all. Little grey socks peeking over the rim, and pink, chunky legs.

  It was a mama and a baby.

  Eugenia tells of how the mama tried to hush the baby, but he squawked when she placed him in. The little shoes and their baby legs tried to leave the box, to clamber out, but he was too little. The mama spoke quietly. She told the baby to lie down, but he stood. He held a rag tight and reached up for his mama as soon as his bottom touched the ground.

  The mother wore no shoes as she climbed in and, though only wearing a light dress herself, she took off her jacket, swaddling the baby twice over, like she was tucking him into bed. She lay down and curled around him – there was no space for her to lie flat. She positioned her body as if protecting him from every angle: his cushions, blanket and bed, all in her. They lay together and she pulled the lid shut. They were all in the dark again.

  Henryk, I write her words here to capture them, for she speaks this in such a way . . . this is her story not mine.

  ‘I didn’t want to see her face. It was quiet for a while, the mama whispered to the baby, her words were soothing. Hearing the smallest tones of the simplest of pleasures, I felt this hollow dip grow in me. I was falling into it, turning my stomach upon itself. The baby must have asked for nursing, I heard the healthy suck and swallow, loud at first, then softer. He must have drifted off as the hurricane entered.’

  Miriam leans back in the chair, silent.

  8

  HENRYK

  The platforms at Berlin-Grunewald station were safe before the war started. A place that people flocked to for a chance to leave everything behind; for a chance of freedom. But 1944 was not a safe year and leaving was no longer a holiday.

  Forced to travel. To a destination unknown.

  Sweating and with a thirst that smothered the rising bile of hate in the pit of my stomach, Frieda and I found a small place to sit, but we could not rest. Moved and jostled and moved once more.

  It wasn’t until late on the night we were arrested, after being marched through streets for hours, that we leant our backs against the red brick of the station bridge. Looking out at the wooden cattle wagons lined up on the tracks, I felt able to look at Frieda. Her eyes were wet with tears, but none fell.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  We were in the eye of the storm. Waiting. Gleis 17 held hundreds of people, all like us. Keeping out the night chill the best we could. The hushed tones of uncertainty were punctured with leather boots on cobbles, shouts and shots. Hundreds of people together, some with luggage, most, like us, with nothing but each other. She was shrouded in my coat, its navy collar turned up around her ears and her hair falling loose over it. I felt her heart beat as though connected by an invisible thread, each pulse charging my own. A conversation of hearts.

  With Frieda, my words never allowed me to articulate freely in the manner I was accustomed to. I hid behind the words of great poets, the best artists time had offered us. I could not rely upon my own words, for they cracked my lips and coarsened my tongue. I should have spoken words that were my own to her, but often, I did not need to. I would mumble and falter to tell her how raw and new my feelings were. She would challenge me with her eyes, drawing my gaze away from my own fingers, busy knotting themselves up, and see me. Right into the depths of me.

  For a professor of literature, a man proficient in three languages, I found myself devoid of any skill. As frustrating as using water for ink, I jabbered senselessly. She, however, led me to understand the language of silence and the poetry of eye contact.

  I closed my eyes to the world around me and just listened to the beat of her heart, like rain pounding on the open road.

  She smelled of a warmth that was home.

  I couldn’t sleep waiting at the platform, so I laid my fingers on the rough collar of my old coat. I held Frieda close to me as I cocooned myself in memories, because to live in the past meant I could survive the night.

  MIRIAM

  The phone rings.

  She stares at the paper lying on top of the dress, the uniform, at the end of his bed until the haze of morning casts it in shadow.

  ‘Both of you?’ A tear falls, but she doesn’t wipe it away. She allows it to drop and become swallowed up in the fabric of her skirt.

  The phone rings again, but this time it doesn’t stop. Miriam leaves the dress, the letter and her father to answer it.

  ‘Hello?’

  There is only static on the other end.

  ‘Hello?’

  Nothing. Her heart hammers in her ears. ‘Who is this?’

  Goose pimples rise at the nape of her neck. As the silence grows louder, it seems to shake the walls around her and she drags the phone from her ear and rests it on the hook. Her hand clutches the plastic.

  She runs a bath in the early morning light and shivers as the steam rises. She is entombed. Frozen. Deep in the bath water her goose pimples are scalded away. Like single drops of water, her thoughts accumulate until they flood.

  Dressed in a lined cotton skirt and a pullover, she returns to the room. The phone rings again. She picks it up slowly and places it to her ear.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Miriam,’ a voice answers. A familiar voice. His voice.

  Axel.

  Miriam quickly replaces the receiver. She stares at it, at the perspiration made by her palm. She unplugs the cord and stands over the table: the lamp with its oversized shade, the box of tissues, a pad of paper and now the phone.

  Silenced.

  She sits in the old chair, reupholstered more than once, now covered with a corduroy fabric. Her small, thin fingers run across it and then back, changing the texture of the surface from a deep maroon to a wine red.

  Back and forward.

  Over the years, she has laughed and cried in this chair, talking to her father’s back, or to his face.

  Back and forward her fingers move, faster and faster, over the ridges of fabric, digging her nails to create a satisfying crump. Her thoughts circle to the letter and the person who wrote it as her hands transform into paws to claw at the chair.

  Her wedding ring is the only blemish, its thick, gold band sucks her finger into it and then spits it back out again, making her knuckle look deformed. She stops pulling at the chair and starts pulling at the ring instead. Having never taken it off, not once, just the idea makes her look around the room.

  Dad looks peaceful, fast asleep, on his side.

  She nudges the ring up and over the knuckle. It pings off and lands heavily in her lap. Her finger now pale and open to the elements seems to shine a brilliant white. She smooths the new skin across her lips.

  Unsure what to do with the ring in her lap, she picks it up between thumb and forefinger and draws up her feet, her arms around her knees, the ring perched on top. She stares at the empty circle, its unending band.

  The intercom buzzes and as she jumps up, the ring skitters along the floor. She collects it from the corner of the room, where it glints at her, and places it in the silk lining of her navy skirt pocket for now.

  ‘Frieda,’ her father mutters; his feet twitch like a dog in sleep.

  The intercom is followed by a knock at the
door and a voice calls through the letter box. She cannot hear it over the noise of the bed and she doesn’t care.

  Actual dying and turning to ash is irrelevant now.

  She is Frau Voight, nothing more than a name as Eugenia was nothing more than a number. But the uniform, the letter, it means Mum was there too.

  Mum is gone. And Miriam never knew, and Dad . . . and who was Frieda?

  She is all alone with her questions.

  ‘It’s too late,’ she says. ‘I’m too late.’ There is nothing she can do to scrabble the past back, to ask the questions, to understand, to really know them. Because this . . . this dress, changes everything; every memory and everything she thought she knew has fallen away.

  There comes a bang at the door and a voice she knows.

  ‘Miriam,’ the voice calls, and on stiff, cold legs she wobbles out into the hallway.

  ‘Hilda?’

  Miriam opens the door and Hilda gently touches Miriam on the arm as she walks past and through to the bedroom. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I . . . was asleep,’ she says, following Hilda into the bedroom.

  ‘Of course. Your father looks rested.’ Hilda turns to her father. ‘And how are you this morning, Herr Winter. Henryk, you are looking good today.’

  Miriam rubs her eyes as Hilda blunders to the bedside.

  ‘I’ll make you a tea? Coffee?’

  ‘Coffee, please.’ She opens her bag.

  Miriam puts the kettle on and stands in the kitchen. When it screams and the water splashes on to the hob, she jolts to remove it, unsure how it came to boil so fast. A fragment of time, lost.

  Flick. Gone.

  She takes the boiled kettle off. ‘Sleep, I just need some sleep,’ she says and dabs the tea bag as it bobs around the cup.

  ‘Need any help?’ Hilda removes her gloves at the doorway as Miriam scoops the teabag on to the side sending an avalanche of tea over the edge too.

  ‘No coffee?’ Hilda asks.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking, sorry.’ She goes to pour the drink down the sink.