Seeing that I wouldn’t talk, Ribble let out a big sigh, then left me alone. A key turned in the lock.
The first thing to break into my melancholy recital of Mozart was a tea-cup. It was a tiny little thing with dots of painted forget-me-nots. The tea-cup appeared as a hand swiped the snow off the windowsill. It was followed by a tiny saucer and a tiny teapot, each pushed into place by tiny, grubby fingers.
The music stopped. I clambered up on the table and saw the sill was set for tea. Tea for two. Nellie Varley was standing on tiptoe to pour the pot and push the cup closer to me. Dear, silly girl. She saved my life last night, her and Andrew. They held me up when I was being strangled, before Joe pulled me from the dark lake waters. This was her way of making things right again – with a brew.
The next bit of magic for the senses was far more punchy than forget-me-not crockery. Towards noon – the Summerland clock could be heard dimly chiming each hour – I smelled spices.
Paprika. The scent conjured up wild, joyful Hungarian dances by Brahms. It stirred memories of Mama and – was this real? – my papa, dancing around a room to gramophone music while I stood looking through the bars of a cot.
Paprika was the hot, rich orange spice of a home I’d once had, one of many homes before there was no such place. I remembered sausages and stews and … goulash. That was what I could smell.
Knock knock. Another visitor.
‘Good morning,’ said the woman who had appeared so disastrously on New Year’s Eve – Francine.
Wide, low and frog-like, the woman who’d blown my world apart was nothing very extraordinary. Even so, she filled the room as she entered, with Ribble a silent mountain range behind her.
‘How shall we talk? I am tired of English already and I will not speak the language of the Nazis. Do you know Hungarian?’
‘Just Helló and Szeretlek.’ I dragged the words from a time before the war. Where had we been? Budapest?
‘Hmm. Hello and I love you. That won’t do. How about Polish? Czech?’
‘I speak Czech. Polish also. My French is good.’
‘Ah, we’ll settle on French. I like the French. They make beautiful clothes. Eh, Monsieur Police, you can go.’
Ribble folded his arms. Francine shrugged and set a basket down. The chair creaked as she sat.
I noticed one of Sophie Rover’s tea towels in the basket. It brought back memories of Joe draped in a red check cloth and not much else.
‘She is a good cook, Madame Sophie,’ said Francine, all in rough-cut French. ‘Her kitchen is clean and she has sharp knives. Spices – meh, not so many. Strong onions and a little paprika. We cooked together. We understand each other. She says you are a good girl. Is that true?’
No. ‘Why are you here?’
‘To feed you goulash if you like. When you have answered my questions.’
Constable Ribble shifted uneasily. ‘It’s all very well for you two to parley-vooz. I can’t comprendy a word of it, unless goulash is that stinky stew.’
Francine wrinkled her nose at him. ‘I ask about Brigitta Igeul. D’accord?’
‘Ask away. You’re not the only one wants to know. I’ve had a queue of people pestering all morning, half asking if she’s Hitler’s long-lost daughter, the other half – including His Lordship – demanding she gets released with balloons and a marching band.’
Francine unbuttoned her coat and spread herself wider. I moved away, standing under the window, where I hoped the cold would stop me feeling anything.
Francine said, ‘Miss Brigitta Igeul, she was my friend, do you understand? I went through hell with her, literally. Into Auschwitz and back out again, and then lost her somewhere on the other side. My Brigitta, she was a sweet little thing – Hedgehog, we called her. Always curling up and putting prickles out. Sewed like she had a spell on her fingers. Not a mean bone in her body. Now what I want to know is this …’ She jabbed a finger at me as she asked her question: ‘What have you done with her …?’
What had I done with Brigitta?
I had hidden her. Kept her safe.
‘Do you have scissors?’
Francine stared at me. ‘Do I look like someone who just carries scissors around with me?’
‘Yes.’
‘As a matter of fact, I do. Once a dressmaker, always a dressmaker. You won’t get very far stabbing me with these dinky things, not with all my rolls of blubber, ha ha. It doesn’t matter how much I eat, I never feel full after years of starvation in the war.’
I had no intention of stabbing her, certainly not with the little shears she fished out of a felt sewing kit. As calmly as I could, I asked Constable Ribble for my coat.
He left and came back with it quickly enough. I saw him patting the pockets before he handed it over. They were empty. I kept my secrets better hidden than that. I tested the lining of the coat at a certain spot then, snip, cut through a few threads, just enough to reach for the flat bundle within – papers and pictures.
I spread everything across the table for Francine. There was a birth certificate and a letter of commendation from a milliner in Vienna. An identity card bearing the name Brigitta Sara Igeul, stamped with a blood-red J. Jew. Two undated letters from an older brother, full of ink-blotched love, hope and rage. I had kept company with the photographs for so long they were part of my memory, as if I had known Brigitta and her family. They showed a Hanukkah meal with potato latkes and lit candles. A wedding portrait, dated 1925 – her parents, before Brigitta was born. A studio shot of Brigitta herself, dated 1942 – a girl roughly my age, with fine dark hair, shadowed eyes and a shy smile.
Francine stared longest at this photograph. She nodded several times, but could not speak at first. Then she tapped the picture.
‘When I knew her, in Auschwitz concentration camp, she only ever smiled with her hand over her face. Some beast had punched half her teeth out. I saw her last in January 1945, in the snow. Colder than it is now. All of us driven on by whips and gunshots, staggering from one hell to another. I lost her somewhere among the frozen corpses. You can’t know what it was like. Nobody can. Are you even Jewish?’
I nodded.
‘Were you in the camps?’
I shook my head.
She hissed and pulled away. ‘So you are a liar.’
‘Yes.’ The word was rough on my throat.
‘You stole her identity. Is this her coat? You stole that too?’ She was breathing hard now.
‘I don’t know. I think it was hers. I mean, I was given it, towards the end. I had nothing. The Nazi Women’s League, they were handing out charity clothes for bomb victims in Berlin. I took this. I had something precious, which I wanted to hide, so I thought I could put it in the shoulder pads. When I unstitched the coat lining I found all these things in the pads, among the horsehair. Brigitta must have hidden them there.’
‘Huh. Possibly true.’ Francine took her time mulling this over, then nodded. ‘We all hid our valuables when we knew we were being deported. Wore our smartest clothes too, for the train journey. Got to that stinkhole anus of a place – Auschwitz – and everything was stripped from us. I knew girls who worked in the warehouses at Auschwitz, sorting through all the stolen goods. Who’d’ve thought they were shipping the loot back to Germany?’ She shook her head.
‘I swear I didn’t know where the coat came from, or the other things they gave me. A skirt. A blouse. A cardigan. Shoes.’
‘Dead women’s things. May the murderers rot for ever after. Amen.’
‘I’m sorry about your friend. I took her name so that the Red Cross would look after me. I had no one. They set up refuges for Jews after Berlin was liberated. Going there for help meant coming out of hiding. I needed an identity. Taking on Brigitta’s meant I had to declare myself as Jewish again, when this had long been … you know. A death sentence.’
Francine nodded, beginning to understand. ‘You were one of the Jews who hid or passed as non-Jews to avoid the round-ups? Most of the people I knew who trie
d that got denounced by their neighbours and shot on the spot or packed off to be gassed anyway. You were one of the lucky ones.’
‘Lucky? Living under floorboards or in a wardrobe?’ Anger boiled for a moment. Then I remembered. I had been lucky. I’d had my mama. Music in my head.
Francine slumped. ‘I’m sorry you’ve had it rough, kid, but I’ve been across Europe looking for Brigitta and she’s not even here. I saw her name on the Red Cross lists in Berlin and tracked her – you – to England.’
‘But how did you know I was at Summerland? I ran away from the Red Cross in London.’
‘Someone reported a Brigitta Igeul to the police. Looks like they contacted the Red Cross, so Brigitta’s name got put on a contact list for anyone searching.’
If Francine could find me, others could too. I looked up at Constable Ribble, who was squinting hard at us, as if that would somehow translate our words into a language he could understand.
‘You told them I was here,’I said in English. ‘You knew I’d run away.’
‘That I did,’ he answered, unflustered. ‘Not much gets past me, flower. I saw a photo of you on the front page of the London paper. I like to keep abreast of what’s happening in the city, seeing as I’ve got family down south. I just thought I’d let the Red Cross know you were here, safe and sound. They said you’d no business to be at Summerland, but if you’d found work, then that was all well and good.’
That wretched photograph! If they hadn’t taken it, or no one had seen it, I could have been safe here at Summerland for as long as I wanted, and no one would have been any the wiser.
Except maybe that wasn’t true. I couldn’t hide forever, could I? Not the way things were going, the way I was changing. It was better to be myself, whatever danger that brought, than to live a lie for the rest of my life.
Ribble said, ‘I put off saying anything for a while. Thought I’d watch and see what you were up to. Things at Summerland seemed to be working out all right. Next thing I know, half the village are out in the woods on New Year’s Eve looking for you.’
‘They found me.’ I rubbed my sore neck.
‘I don’t mind telling you, this has put me in a bit of a spot. It would help get to the bottom of all the fuss and bother if you’d just tell me your real name.’
I said nothing. Only Joe knew how completely I’d been hidden.
‘Constable Ribble – Her Ladyship’s asking for you …’ Mrs Rover called from the kitchen.
Ribble left. Francine reached into her basket and pulled out a warm pot and two spoons. She set them on the table, having gently moved the documents aside.
‘I might’ve known it was too good to be true, having Brigitta alive and well and living the high life in some fancy English house. Still, I did hope, and you’ve got to hope, right? I was all ready for me and her to go to America, to work in one of the New York factories where they need immigrants who can sew. I got tickets and sponsors and everything. Stupid.’
‘You might still find her.’
‘The boat sails in a week, and I’ll be on it. Nothing to keep me here. My family were all murdered in the camps. The only people I care about now are the friends I made in the sewing workshop at Auschwitz. Brigitta in particular. So far I haven’t tracked down a single one of them. Dead or scattered to the winds, I suppose.There’s no place for Jews in Europe. Every lungful of Old World air makes me choke. Tastes of smoke and ash. So – to take the taste away, let’s feast! Hungarian goulash like my mama never made it – she was a terrible cook! – and bread from your friend Madame Sophie.’
We ate goulash. We ate memories.
Finally, when we were both full, she belched comfortably and asked for my real name. Surprising even myself, I told her: first name and family name.
‘Mon dieu!’ she said, drawing away from me a little. ‘That complicates things horribly, doesn’t it?’
Rabbit Pie
Angela and Andrew had danced about to a song once. They said it had been popular during the war – something about a farmer with a gun and a rabbit that had to run and run and run.
I wanted to run. Running, hiding, that was what I knew. Now I was facing something more frightening than a gun. The truth.
‘What do you want me to tell those people, the English?’ Francine asked me as she prepared to leave. ‘I can say it’s a mistake, that you’re Brigitta, all is well.’
‘Alles ist kaput,’ I said, shaking my head. It’s all ruined.
When she’d gone, I sat for a long time watching the shadows draw closer. Ursula came to sit with me. I’d miss her when I left, and I did have to leave. Summerland wouldn’t welcome me now.
I called out for Constable Ribble. He’d obviously been keeping toasty in front of the kitchen range while helping polish off party-food leftovers.
‘I want to see Lady Summer.’
As Ribble looked down to brush crumbs off his uniform, I sprang for a knife – one of Sophie Rover’s big slicers. It wasn’t planned. I didn’t know what would happen. I was a rabbit – terrified. I ran past the ballroom and the beautiful grand piano, making Mrs Rover shout as she swept up party garlands. I ran up the grand staircase, making Vera Baggs squawk as she came to see what the noise was. I ran along the corridor to the Blue Room. To the wardrobe.
Part of me imagined I could step inside, curl up like a child and be safe like before. Most of me knew the time for hiding was over.
‘Stop there,’ I told Ribble, who had followed me and was huffing in the doorway. I didn’t take my eyes off the mirror. ‘Stop,’ I told Joe, who ducked past Ribble into the room.
‘Stop!’ ordered Lady Summer once she’d swept the policeman out of her way. ‘Whoever you are, put the knife down.’
‘Look, it’s all going to be fine,’ said Joe. ‘I told them you could explain.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Lady Summer. ‘It is time you explained.’
‘Yes,’ I said to the mirror. It was time everyone explained.
I told them about the bomb, about the coat, about the real Brigitta. About the Red Cross helping me; about coming to England.
Lady Summer grew impatient. ‘And Summerland? Why did you run away from the Red Cross and come here of all places?’
‘Don’t you know?’
She was so pale. So thin. I saw how her rings slipped on her fingers. ‘No,’ she said. She sounded genuinely baffled.
‘You had a friend – Hélène Jacobs. She came here before the war.’
She smiled faintly. ‘Yes, that’s true. Many years ago, when I was new to Summerland before Joseph was born. What a golden summer that was.’
‘Croquet and boating on the lake and strawberries with cream –’
‘Yes, but –’
‘Hélène wrote to you.’
‘Yes, many times, and I do not see what –’
I interrupted, impatient with her ignorance. ‘Just before the war. She wrote to you asking for help.’
‘Money, yes. And I sent some.’ Lady Summer looked more confused than guilty.
‘No! Not money. Something called sponsorship, so she could get a visa. With a visa she could come to England and escape the …’ What was the word? I needed my dictionary, and my grey glove. At least I had a knife.
‘Escape the Nazis?’ prompted Joe.
I nodded. ‘Die Verfolgung in German. Hunting. Attacks.’
‘Persecution,’ said Lady Summer in a hoarse voice.
‘When she didn’t hear from you, Hélène was desperate. They came for her.’
‘Oh God, you knew her? What happened? Her little boy …?’ Lady Summer was pale as death now.
‘They hid. For years. Every day hungry, every day afraid. Everyone else taken. At last in Berlin she was dead by a bomb, I mean, killed.’ I couldn’t stop myself looking at Joe. He wasn’t her killer but he might have been. But if he hadn’t bombed Germany how many more bombs would have fallen on England, making more Nellie Varleys motherless? God it was a mess, the whole stupid war and every
thing in it. And if I hadn’t been a Jew, would I have been fighting and bombing too, in the Hitler Youth, or as a partisan in the forest?
Lady Summer persisted. ‘And the child?’
I smiled. I let dim light play on the knife blade for a second then stabbed and sliced, sawing to and fro, and I didn’t care. When one hair braid was chopped off I did the second. I dropped them to the floor. God it felt good to ruffle my hair up and feel the back of my neck again. It had been years. First it had been short with a bow at the front. Then it was braided. Now it was gone. I looked in the mirror and saw myself.
‘My name is David Jacobs Golanski. I am a Jew. That is who I am. My mother was Hélène Jacobs. That is the truth.’
I said the words and waited. The world did not end. Summerland did not crack down the middle and collapse all around me. Police did not come hammering at the door. I was not shot on the spot. Did I feel different? Yes. I felt like me. Me in a dress. I found I was smiling.
Joe was too.
Lady Summer wasn’t.
‘You … You’re … I don’t believe it! You’re the boy? You’re David?’ Her hands trembled. She leaned against the door frame and hid her face. Then, ‘Why? How?’
‘Why do you think, Mother?’ Joe’s tone was harsh. ‘The Nazis went for the males first. Being a girl was safer, right?’
‘Yes.’ I nodded. ‘The police stopped to check the Jewish boys and men, their …’ I waved my hand in the general area.
‘Todgers,’ said Joe helpfully.
‘Joseph!’ exclaimed his mother. ‘You mean, circumcision, Brig— David?’
‘Yes, the circumshich … what you said. To see if they were Jewish. We called it the bris.’ My cheeks went pink. ‘This is why I had to be disguised as a girl.’
Mama passed on lessons from her expensive school in Switzerland. How to stand as a girl, how to walk and sit and curtsy. You can never whistle, or pee standing up, or swear, do you understand? You must learn all the female ways of speaking each language. You have to remember your new name, a new birthday, my new name. Forget everything else.
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