by Anna Ellory
Miriam is about to offer condolences, but she sees the woman from the bus, Eva, sitting at the same table in the chair Miriam had sat in when she was here last week. Wearing a red T-shirt covered by a navy cardigan, and beige trousers, she has thick, black boots that come up to her shins, and her hair partially covers her face, which is lowered, inspecting something through a magnifying glass.
‘Nonna,’ he says triumphantly as they reach a large, round table.
Miriam can see that Eva is poring over pictures and two newspapers that are strewn across the table. She doesn’t look up.
‘Nonna,’ the man says again. ‘This lady would like some help with a letter, in French, she thinks.’
‘Jeff,’ Eva says irritably. ‘I’m busy.’
‘I know, but it won’t take a minute, Nonna. You can help her,’ Jeff says with enthusiasm, despite Eva’s expression.
‘Hi,’ Miriam says tentatively.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ says Jeff, patting Miriam on the back and making a thumbs-up gesture. ‘Good luck.’
With a sigh, Eva looks up. ‘I know you,’ she says, the words practically bristle from her lips.
‘Yes, I met you the other day, here . . .’
‘Miriam, right?’
Miriam nods.
‘Funny to run into you twice.’ The word ‘funny’ sounds hostile as Eva leans back in her chair.
Miriam, unsure what to say, waits.
‘I don’t believe in coincidences. Who sent you?’
‘Oh, no one. Your grandson . . .’
‘Grandson?’
Miriam turns around to the empty space the man vacated. ‘Jeff?’ she says.
Eva nods. ‘Jeff is . . .’ She leans forward resting her hands on the table. ‘You were talking about your father when we were on the bus.’
‘Yes, and thank you so much for your help.’
Eva sighs.
‘Also, I found some letters and I cannot read them, they are written in French. Jeff offered your assistance to translate them, maybe? I would pay of course.’
‘How much?’ Eva looks at her until Miriam feels beads of moisture form on her top lip.
‘Um, well – you see, there are quite a few.’
‘How many?’
‘Around twenty or so . . .’
‘Fifty,’ Eva says, unmoving. ‘Fifty Westmarks.’
Miriam offers her the letter in her hand, but Eva doesn’t take it, so she places it on the table and rummages in her bag. She pulls out half of the French letters, wrapped in her mother’s handkerchief.
‘I have about the same amount again at home. How quickly can you do this?’
‘I suppose Jeffrey told you that I have nothing to do?’
Miriam smiles.
‘I can do these in a few days for you; you’ll want them sooner?’
‘My father is . . .’ She pauses. ‘Old now, and I think these letters hold something for him that he is searching for.’
‘I’ll do it. I can work on them for you. Write your address here.’ She passes a clean sheet of paper and pencil over.
Miriam bends and with shaking hands writes her father’s address.
‘Miriam what?’
‘Voight,’ she says, and writes her name down under the address.
She goes back into her purse and pulls out two twenty-Westmark notes. ‘I’ll give you the rest . . .’ But Eva waves a hand at her.
‘Come to the library Wednesday. I’ll have some of these done for you, and bring the rest.’
‘Thank you.’
But Eva turns back to her magnifying glass and photos, and doesn’t answer. The letters sit on the edge of the table and Miriam finds it hard to walk away from them. Nothing happened as she had expected. Should she return for the letters? But they are useless if they can’t be read.
The German letters sit on her table at home, she can read them, she’ll go home and try and work it all out that way.
She walks away and as she nears the top step, turns to find Eva unwrapping the handkerchief. Miriam exhales heavily and walks down to the lobby. Jeff is talking to a young boy at a table as she passes.
He stands and comes to meet her. ‘Could she help you?’
She nods. ‘Thank you. You know, I’ve never met a socialist before, she’s quite . . .’ But Miriam cannot find an appropriate word.
‘Socialist? Nonna? Oh no. She still has East habits, you know. She came over with one bag and her old Trabant, but the car’s in the garage. I can’t make the ruddy thing go. You know what it’s like?’
Miriam doesn’t, but smiles sympathetically nonetheless.
‘She thinks the walls can hear, does our Nonna. No one can be trusted, you know the thing. She’ll be fine once she’s settled. Maybe helping you will be just the thing. You need a hobby in later life, that’s what Mum thinks anyway.’
Miriam nods to the boy watching them. ‘Thank you, Jeff. I’ll let you get back to your day.’
‘See you again,’ he calls.
On her return home, a food parcel is in the hallway from the Smyth sisters at number 2. A large pot of something and a few rolls on top. She opens the door and the white feather floats down in front of her to the floor.
Collecting the food, she locks the door and replaces the catches, then steps over the fallen feather before she lifts the heavy, still-warm pot into the kitchen. The smell of stew wafts through the air. She takes one of the rolls and nibbles it as she walks back to the door.
To replace her fallen feather.
She finds an appointment card on the floor. It’s Hilda’s card with the medical centre logo. A note is scrawled on it: ‘Dr Kenny: Tomorrow 9 a.m.’ It’s signed ‘Hilda’ and there is a cross under her large scrawl. On the other side she has written, ‘Taking care of you too.’
Miriam places it on the kitchen side and returns to her father. She moves him, offers him water and then goes straight to the table. She picks up a letter at random and notices something: a tiny number written in the top corner. She looks at another, then another. Every one of them has a number.
She spends the afternoon putting them in order and marking which letters are absent or in French with a white slip of paper. She wraps the remaining French ones back up in another of her mother’s handkerchiefs and leaves it to one side. A package she will deliver to Eva on Wednesday. It feels like a lifetime to wait.
She finds the next letter in the sequence that she can read.
Dearest Henryk,
I had the last scraps of bread in my jacket – the one you gave me as we were parted. I am ashamed that I did not think of you being without a jacket. Now all I think about is how the wind must have whipped your skin, how your second-best cardigan was not enough to protect you wherever you were going. I am sorry, I am shamefaced and so selfish. Even if I had argued with you, it would still have been over my shoulders on the journey, fast losing the heat of you.
I do not know how long we travelled, but there was no food, no water, nothing. Just bodies: women, young and old. We waited for news, we clung on to hope when someone would claim we were going here or there, somewhere better than where we currently were. We talked at the start, tried to find similarities – who we were, where we were from. We didn’t talk about our losses, the absence of children in a space of so many women was enough, and we were thinking positively about how partners, children, parents would all be waiting at our destination. I did not speak the truth, I hoped we would be reunited.
I said you were my husband.
The lie tasted so sweet on my tongue, the adrenaline of it. I talked much in those early days, all lies, but they nourished me.
After the first night, we were sure they would tell us where we were going but by daybreak, we were still at the station. Waiting. We heard talking, jeering, boots, shouting, crying. We heard the voices of the ones we had loved and lost, a communal suffering. Still we did not move.
The second night, we started fighting. Where would we sleep and how. We were so pa
cked in that we were standing only. Propping each other up.
The guards rolled back the doors once, we thought to give us water, or food, but they fired their weapons into the sky, making us cry out in alarm, and ordered the bodies of those who had died to be rolled out on to the tracks. By the time the train finally screamed, metal on metal, there was room for us all to sit.
We had stopped talking. Everyone was lost in a void. Women held photographs to their chest like drops of water.
There was a gypsy on the train, on her own – the only gypsies I have ever seen were in a crowd. She plaited the fringes of her scarf over and over. She was beautiful. Dark hair and long, like waves of black silk or thick black paint, dark eyelashes and thick eyebrows, she looked the same age as me.
After a few days she cried out, ‘We die!’ She was loud after the wagon had been so quiet except the murmurs of the dying and the prayers of the living. ‘We die, all of us die.’ The gypsy’s voice rang out loud and strong and foreign. ‘Death to everyone! We are going to hell!’
She spoke Dutch, and although crass and strange from her mouth, just to hear another language again . . . It may have only been days, but the sweet joy of hearing Dutch filled me with warmth after the German threats and insults. Even though the gypsy was talking about the fiery pits of hell, the language was welcome.
Still I only watched her, several of the women kicked her, told her to shut up or called her ‘vermin’, ‘scum’.
A large woman slapped her hard across the face.
Her cries stopped.
The last crumbs were in my pocket, the wagon rocking, holding up against the wind.
Everyone was trying to sleep. The comforting bliss of being elsewhere. Not here. Eyes closed, dreamless, or just hoping that when we opened them we’d find that the reality was just a dream.
But the gypsy, her dark eyes were open. She stared at me as I touched the dry crusts of bread in my pocket, not too much that they turned to ash, but enough so that I knew they were there.
When I could not wait any longer, I looked directly at her as I picked one crust up and placed it in my mouth, like it was a decadent chocolate.
I did the same with the second piece. She didn’t waver, watching me. Once I’d chewed and chewed and swallowed, she smiled a small smile, relaxed her entire body as if dissolving into the panels of the wagon and closed her eyes.
I started praying in the wagon, not to a God that I did not believe in, but to a truth, a right in the world that will help me survive the wrongs.
This is my punishment.
For Louisa.
The taste of the bread has gone but the feeling of cruelty survives. Who am I?
‘I don’t quite understand this. She said she was your wife? Languages and cardigans? And to not share the bread . . . Who am I? indeed,’ Miriam says and looks at Dad who is dressed in a clean nightshirt, creases and folds still visible on his immobile body.
‘You were never warm, were you?’ she asks, tucking the knitted blanket closer around him.
‘Can you remember how Mum would click her tongue, not in a tut, but more in disbelief every time you wore a cardigan to the beach on holiday?’ She smiles.
‘Can you not wear a short-sleeved shirt, at least?’ Miriam says in a higher tone like her mother’s, but then stops her imitation.
Dead.
She sees her mother saying those same words, standing in the hallway of their holiday rental in a flowery dress and enormous hat.
‘No.’ And, ‘I’m a lizard, me, can’t absorb heat from the sun, even when I sit in it. Hey, Miriam? Your papa’s an old reptile!’ He would look to her to laugh, which she duly did to break the thread of strain pulled taut between them.
When the cardigans lost their shape and holes emerged through the elbows, her mother would darn them and buy another, so he could transition to the next one and the next. Never without. An evolving wheel of green and brown cardigans, all in some form of disarray, and the watch, she realises now, hidden underneath.
On their summer holidays, Miriam would walk up the beach from the sea and drip salt water on to hot sands. Dad would be sitting under an umbrella, a kerchief knotted on his head, socks on his feet and more often than not, the cardigan. All the other dads were wearing shorts, their bellies large and brown.
‘I loved you, Dad,’ Miriam says, walking to his old wooden chest. She rummages around for a cardigan in the worst shape she can find. Green. Holes in the elbows and a threadbare sleeve.
‘I’m moving you,’ she says, turning his body on to first the right side, sliding the fabric of the cardigan under him, then rolling him back over before manoeuvring his other arm into the sleeve. It isn’t an easy task. His arms are stiff and unyielding.
Yet, although wonky, he is in his cardigan. The small change brings out the man he was, rather than the body he is confined in.
12
MIRIAM
The next letter. A page of text, maybe from a French book, but the handwriting, in German, runs in the margins and across the blank back too. She moves the lamp slightly to try to illuminate the page as the room darkens.
Henryk,
I have become numb; numb to humanity, indifferent to loss.
They held me down, hard at first then less when they realised I was in too much shock to move. And a woman, like me, shaved the hair from my head.
She had no hair. Recently shaved too. She wore a white kerchief, prisoner stripes and a black triangle.
I knew at that moment all was lost. Do the guards even force them? Will I be doing this soon? Volunteering even?
It took a surprisingly long time to cut my hair off. The scissors pulled and sliced through my thick locks, fistfuls at a time. All we heard was the metallic scraping, metal to metal, cutting through hair.
And Miriam recalls the sensation of scissors cutting through her hair . . .
It was the end of her first work Christmas party, when she was employed by a large school as their administrator. She had worn a wrap-around red dress. Black tights and black heels.
Unbelievable, now, to think she had dressed up in such a way, her hair curled and in a scrunchy. Incredible to think back on herself as impossibly carefree; a life of before, when she could have a great time, laughing and dancing with her colleagues.
Being employed and being Axel’s girlfriend and very quickly his wife had happened all at the same time. It was a whirlwind romance: love at first sight, just like her parents. He had taken most of her attention, right from the beginning. He was attentive, charming, funny and sensitive. Having lost his father when he was small and been raised by a callous and cold mother, Axel needed her and she loved the feeling of being needed by him.
She stumbled into the house later than she had intended, after bouncing her way around at a dance where a rather sullen DJ played the new Bowie record repeatedly until asked to stop. Her feet ached and her face hurt from smiling as her co-workers got more and more drunk.
She entered the quiet house, trying not to make noise. Slipped her feet out of her shoes without putting on the light and was about to take her coat off.
‘Had a nice evening?’ Axel said, coming out of the living room and making her start. He switched on the light.
‘Oh, Axel, it was so much fun,’ she laughed, shaking her coat off and sprinkling him with rain.
‘So much fun, you say?’
His eyes were dark and he stood under the light so she couldn’t see his face.
‘Do you know what time it is?’
‘It’s late, I am sorry.’
‘I have been sick with worry,’ he said, monotone.
‘You have? You knew I was out with the girls.’
‘The girls?’
She nodded, feeling guilty without cause, and hoping the schnapps she had drunk wasn’t too noticeable on her breath.
‘The girls,’ he said, and left the room.
She stood still, waiting, for what she wasn’t sure.
‘You know,’
he said, returning with something in his hand that she could not see. ‘Dane’s wife used to say that she had been out with the girls. But it turned out she was fucking another man behind his back.’
‘What?’ Miriam stepped back, alarmed, and saw his eyes were red, from crying, she imagined. ‘Axel, it was a Christmas party, you were invited. I haven’t . . . I wouldn’t . . .’ she said stunned.
He brought a hand to her face, she flinched back.
‘Are you scared of me, Miriam?’ he asked, touching her cheek.
A silver thread wound its way into her bones. She shivered and shook her head.
‘I would never hurt you.’ He pulled her hair loose and wrapped it around his fingers. It was long and weaved across his pale skin. ‘I would never hurt you.’ He leant in and kissed her tenderly at the same time she heard the unmistakable slice of scissors. ‘You won’t ever leave me, will you? You can’t leave me when I need you so much.’
She stepped back, alarmed. The hair that had been woven through his fingertips was still there. Scissors glinted in his other hand.
‘I couldn’t understand why,’ she says to her father, getting up to turn him. ‘I still don’t.’ That was the first time he had ever . . . she can’t think of the right word as she mulls it over, straightening the sheets and smoothing Dad’s hair.
Axel didn’t hurt her, he didn’t hit her, but . . . he had frightened her, taking scissors to her hair was nothing in the scheme of things, but it had only got worse. Unable to face the interrogation about her day, every day, Miriam left her job, leaving her friends and her freedom behind.
She picks up the letter and continues, unsure she wants to know what was done.
The journey from prisoner to inmate took place in the time it took to cut my hair. It wasn’t the hair itself, it was the person cutting it.
Another prisoner, newly arrived, had protested, she lay comatose and bleeding on the ground while a further prisoner shaved her head too. My blonde hair falling into a sea of dark.
The woman cutting my hair was dead behind the eyes. I wanted to ask her how long she had been here, yet I could not bear to know the answer.
The gypsy, the one from the wagon that I refused to share my bread with. She and I have stuck together.