They breathe and whisper words of endearment to each other. ‘My darling.’ ‘Love.’ ‘You beautiful girl.’ Sometimes Julia doesn’t know if she is the one saying the words or hearing them. They touch each other’s faces, tracing features with fingertips – eyebrows, lips. They kiss fingertips. Eyes. They caress the curves of each other’s bodies. They stroke each other’s hair until their fingers become entangled in it. Julia is astonished at how Suzanne’s face seems to change when she comes close to orgasm.
And in the morning when they wake, Suzanne says simply, ‘I love you, Julia.’
42
‘How do you know?’ asks Julia.
‘How do I know what?’ replies Suzanne.
‘You said this morning that you love me. How do you know?’
It is evening. Work is finished, they have eaten and are sitting on the grassy ramparts of Theresienstadt in the May warmth. The setting sun has turned Suzanne’s skin a sort of golden-orange colour.
Julia has never felt so confident about her relationship with another person. She has no fears about it; no fears that Suzanne will go out of her life or do something to hurt her. She feels she can say anything to Suzanne and this is what she is doing now. She also sees that she wants Suzanne to talk about what has happened between them. She wants to hear it confirmed not out of any sense of unease but just for the sheer pleasure of hearing what it looks like from Suzanne’s side.
‘It’s like I got a letter,’ says Suzanne.
Julia raises an eyebrow.
‘A letter?’
‘You get a feeling and something tells you that it’s right, that you can trust it. Remember I told you about the boy next door to where I was hiding, the fellow that I thought betrayed me? Well, when he was asking over the wall, who was there, I had a feeling, a really strong feeling, that nothing good would come of replying to him. It was like I got a letter, the feeling was so strong. And I see now I didn’t get that feeling with Adolf.’
‘No letter,’ says Julia.
‘Exactly. No letter.’
‘And you got a letter with me?’
‘I did,’ says Suzanne.
She takes a deep breath.
‘When I was in school, I fell in love with a girl in my class. For a brief time – maybe a week or two – it felt wonderful. But then I realised – I’m in love with a girl. I was terrified. What if people found out? And even if they didn’t, what was wrong with me? There was nobody I could turn to. I tried praying but that did no good. It was like I was talking to the air – to nothing. And so I tried to be ‘normal’. I started to walk home from school with a boy but he seemed so uninteresting and he soon lost interest in me. After that, whenever my father asked me whether there was anybody in school that I fancied, I would invent a boyfriend.
‘So I poured myself into studying. I didn’t have many friends and I kept to myself. I was afraid I would get too close to somebody and that my secret might get out. One summer there was a girl – in Pompeii, actually – on a dig. An Italian girl. She was so beautiful. But I said and did nothing, just longed to be with her all the time I was there and pined for her for years afterwards.
‘That whole thing with Adolf. I think it was one last effort to be “normal”. To want to be with boys, just like other girls. But now I know I’m not ... I’m not that way. And will never be. Couldn’t be. You know, looking back on it, I think wanting to sleep with him was just to confirm that I wasn’t interested and would never do that again. Have you never had a feeling like that, Julia? A certainty?’
After a long silence, Julia says, ‘I know now that what happened with my father ... I knew it wasn’t right ... that I should have gone to somebody. My mother. The Rabbi. The police. Somebody. Even if they all hadn’t believed me, even if they had tried to lock me up in a madhouse, I should have shouted it from the rooftops. If I could put the clock back now, that is what I would do...’
Julia’s voice drifts off.
‘You were a child,’ says Suzanne. ‘How could you have known?’
‘I got a letter – just like you say. But I tore it up. Or hid it in a drawer. It’s taken all this time to come out.’
‘But now it’s out,’ says Suzanne. ‘And you’ll never ignore a letter again.’
‘No, I won’t.’
That night Julia has a dream. When she wakes in the morning she only has fragments of it – a bicycle leaning against a wall by a back door painted red. A little plot of ground that has been dug over, raked and seeded with vegetables. The plot is criss-crossed with string upon which strips of newspaper or rag have been tied. The strips flap and keep the birds away from the seeds. As they are walking to work and as Julia tells Suzanne about these images, other details return to her so that she is able to reconstruct the dream in full.
‘It is where we are going to live after the war,’ says Julia. ‘You and I. It is a little cottage in a little village or maybe a small town. It is maybe outside Amsterdam. Or it could be in Amsterdam. Or somewhere else altogether. One of those places that gets swallowed up by a city but never really loses its feeling of being a village. It has a small sunlit square where you can go and just sit for hours. Have coffee or a drink. It’s one of those little places where everybody knows everybody else. Everyone smiles. Strangers say hello.
‘So our cottage has a little garden where we’re growing vegetables. Well – we’ve just started. And it has a red back door. And two bikes. And in my dream it wasn’t the summer. It was cold and had started to rain so that the gardening had been called off. Actually, it was a slow Sunday afternoon where we have work the next day.’
‘What kind of work?’ asks Suzanne.
‘Dunno. Writers? Aren’t we going to be writers?’
‘We are,’ smiles Suzanne. ‘Words have power. We need to keep saying it.’
‘OK, so next day, we’ll be working on our current novel. But today we’ve lit the fire and we’re cooking. Or maybe baking. Stew or a cake or biscuits. The kitchen is full of the most wonderful smells.’
Suzanne pushes Julia playfully on the shoulder.
‘Stop,’ she says. ‘You’re driving me crazy.’
‘It’s going to happen,’ says Julia. ‘Just you wait and see. I know. That dream. I got a letter.’
43
‘So they land in Gaul,’ says Julia, ‘and then what?’
She and Suzanne are working side by side, mopping their way down the street outside the Magdeburg barracks. It is completely pointless work. Despite the deportations, this small town normally home to around five thousand people is housing many times more than that. It seethes with people. Anything that is cleaned will be dirty again an hour later. So this will all have to be done again many, many times before the important visitors come. But Julia and Suzanne don’t mind. They are together and they are talking about the book.
‘They go inland. They find a place to live,’ Suzanne says.
‘What kind of a place?’
‘By a stream or a river, so they can have water. I see an open, grassy area by the water’s edge and then beyond that a forest.’
‘Do they live by themselves?’
‘I don’t think so. I think they find a village and ask the headman if they can come to live there.’
‘And he lets them?’
‘He turns out to be a nice guy and he’s been fighting the Romans all his life. Birkita explains what the Romans did to her family and that gets his sympathy. Then, she tells them about Galena and the farm and everything that happened. And then you can imagine the headman roaring with laughter when she tells them how they let out all the animals and burned the farm. So yes, I think he would let them stay. Women and children aren’t any threat. And it’s always good to have women. Life was precarious then. Battle, disease, illness. The more women, the more babies. The more babies, the more likely the tribe are to continue and have a future.’
It makes sense.
‘So they should really just live happily ever after now,’ says Jul
ia.
‘That’d be nice,’ says Suzanne. ‘For them.’
44
Suzanne begins the writing of chapter thirty-two. She has already mapped it out with Julia. This will cover the arrival in Gaul, finding the village and the headman telling them they can stay. It will describe how the village bands together to build a hut for the new arrivals. Then will come the onset of winter and how Birkita’s little family is warm and snug and has enough food. The girls will pick up the Gaulish language very quickly and, in that way that children have, soon make friends.
At different times over the winter, young men in the village will approach Birkita and Galena but they make it clear that they are not interested. The headman will come to them and tell them that the men of the village are completely confused by these two women – something he finds hugely amusing. After a time, the approaches will stop.
The writing takes Julia and Suzanne into June and covers chapters thirty-two through to thirty-six. They alternate – when one feels they’re getting a bit tired or their ideas are drying up, the other takes over. They are working together most days and they do their writing after dinner in the evenings.
The days get longer, the weather is good a lot of the time. They are still achingly hungry but their weight loss doesn’t seem as dramatic now and Julia feels it may even have stopped. Whether it has or not, she has ceased to think about it much.
One evening, Julia writes the last few words of chapter thirty-three. Ever since they began writing, whenever they finished a chapter they always have a little celebration. It might only be a hug or to eat a piece of food that they had saved for the occasion. Then they always write the chapter heading of the next chapter. It is a reminder that they will have to do it all again tomorrow, that no matter how well they think they had done today or how far they have travelled, tomorrow – once again – the blank page will be waiting for them.
Julia is about to write the heading for chapter thirty-four when she does something else. Quickly she scribbles down, ‘For me, the last few days have been like reading the first pages of a big fat novel that I’ve not read before, hearing the opening bars of a symphony that I’ve never heard, seeing the first moments of a long movie that I’ve not seen: There is so much to be discovered.’
Then she writes ‘Chapter Thirty-four’ and draws a line under it.
‘May I see?’ asks Suzanne.
Julia hands her the book and watches while Suzanne reads. Then she looks up and smiles.
‘Me too,’ she says.
Later that night, after they have made love and lie sweating in the warm June night, Julia bursts into tears. One of the things she loves about Suzanne is that, when it really, really matters, she always seems to know the right thing to do or say. Now Suzanne just holds Julia while she cries.
When she has finished, Julia says, ‘Tell me about your childhood.’
‘I was lucky,’ begins Suzanne. ‘My parents loved me. And they were well off. They had to work, of course, but they loved their work. To them it wasn’t like work. We lived in a nice house. We always had plenty. In the summers we travelled. It was perfect. I was lucky,’ she says again. ‘Very lucky.’
After a long silence, Julia says, ‘Every childhood should be like that.’
‘They should.’
The next silence is so long that Julia thinks Suzanne may have fallen asleep. She lies in the crook of Suzanne’s arm and looks up now to see. But Suzanne’s eyes are open and bright.
‘I don’t mean to make light of all you’ve suffered,’ says Suzanne, ‘but it’s made you who you are. You know that, don’t you? You wouldn’t be the Julia I love – in fact, we probably wouldn’t even have met if it wasn’t for your past and everything you’ve gone through.’
Julia knows it’s true. Had she had the same kind of loving family as Suzanne, she would never have left home. That would probably have meant she would have been rounded up during the deportations of 1942 and 1943. Or else she would have gone into hiding like Suzanne. But yes, the chances they would have met would have been miniscule.
‘I just wish I could leave it all behind me,’ she says. ‘All that ... that stuff. Everything that happened. I feel ... I don’t know ... cheated or something. No, it’s more than that. It’s like I was given something and then I lost it. And I keep looking for it even though I know ... I know I can never find it again. If I could just stop this stupid fucking searching...’
Julia goes silent. Her head lies near Suzanne’s breast and she can feel and hear her heart beating. It is rhythmic. Big. Solid. Almost permanent – like it might never stop.
‘You’ll find a way,’ whispers Suzanne. ‘I know you will. That’s what you do.’
45
Disaster is looming. As Julia and Suzanne have been writing, they have been getting closer and closer to the end of the notebook. Each night, they count the remaining pages. There is now only a handful. No matter how small they make their writing, they know they’re not going to have enough paper. They ask around on their barrack floor. Does anybody have a notebook they’d be prepared to give up? Or even sell – for food? When that fails they ask for paper – even loose sheets.
Suzanne says that Adolf would have paper and that she could go to him. She’d even be prepared to – but as she starts to say this, Julia silences her. They ask their workmates, some of whom are in other barracks but nobody has paper – or if they do, they’re not prepared to part with it.
Then Julia has an idea. What about Irena at the hospital? Maybe she could spare some paper. They go there after work but there is no Irena. It turns out she was deported in the May deportations. Beautiful, gentle Irena, who was given an impossible job and managed it with unbelievable dignity. Julia shakes her head. Is there no end to it?
A new woman is in Irena’s place – Eva. In her fifties, she has raven coloured hair without the slightest hint of grey in it. The girls explain their plight. The expression on Eva’s face changes from interest to intrigue until finally, she is smiling.
‘I think I may have just the thing,’ she says.
Eva uses the same desk and chair that Irena used to use. She reaches into one of the drawers and extracts – a notebook. It has a soft cardboard cover with pictures of fruit on it – peaches, cherries, apples, pears. Eva opens it. The first page has writing on it in blue fountain pen. Reading upside down, Julia can see that it is a diary. There are two blocks of writing each of which begins with a date. Eva turns the first few pages. There are more entries but then, after about the fifth or sixth page, they stop.
‘May the fourteenth, 1943,’ she says.
She looks up at them.
‘He either died then or gave up writing or was deported.’
Eva tears out the pages with entries on them and hands over the notebook.
‘Good luck,’ she says. ‘Oh, and here’s something else that might be useful.’
She gives them two rubber bands.
‘Keep your story all together.’
Outside the hospital, the girls are jubilant. The notebook is about half the thickness of the other one but it should be enough to finish the book. They know they’re coming into the closing stages of it.
‘We must celebrate,’ says Suzanne.
‘But maybe not tonight,’ says Julia, thinking of Irena.
They do the next night. That is the way in the ghetto. Always life has to go on. People have to find a way. They keep some of their food from dinner and on the first page of the new notebook, Suzanne begins writing the menu for the celebratory dinner. ‘Bean soup with noodles.’ Julia takes the book from her and writes ‘hearty’ in front of ‘bean soup’. Then she hands it back.
‘Roast chicken with spring vegetables,’ Suzanne continues, speaking as she writes.
‘We have to say what the vegetables are,’ says Julia.
‘Carrots, peas, roast potatoes. Golden brown. Very crispy outside and soft and fluffy inside.
‘Onions,’ adds Julia. ‘Lots of them
. Fried.’
‘Asparagus,’ says Suzanne. ‘The most perfect vegetable in the whole world.’
‘Gravy.’
And for dessert a selection of cakes. They spend a long time discussing what kinds of cakes. Eventually, they are ready to start and they eat their food, mouthful by mouthful, imagining this feast.
‘It’s dining “as if”’, says Suzanne. ‘Welcome to the Restaurant As-If.’
46
Julia is angry. She’s angry at her father, at her mother for not protecting her, at herself for not acting on her feelings and going to somebody – the Rabbi, her schoolteacher, the police, anybody who might have listened. She’s angry that she can’t rewind the clock and do any of that now. She’s angry that her parents are dead and that she can’t confront them.
She has an image in her head of this anger. It is of a barrel of gunpowder with a long fuse on it. The fuse has already been lit and it is burning, running across the ground. It runs across sand, through grass, across mud, along city streets, along by tram tracks, across bridges, up a garden path, through doorways, up stairs, across floors but no matter how much it burns, it never reaches the barrel of gunpowder. If it did, she has a feeling that that would be the end of her anger. And she wants to be done with this anger. But instead, the fuse just sputters along its way. One night she even dreams about the fuse.
‘You know we’ll have to go to Pompeii,’ says Suzanne one evening towards the middle of June.
They have finished chapter thirty-five – they wrote the last paragraphs while sitting on the grass – and there is still some time before lights out. They are on the ramparts while swallows swoop overhead like tiny curved axe blades in the sky.
‘I hadn’t thought,’ says Julia.
‘Of course we will. You have to see it – especially the lupanar. I have to see it – my memory may not have been completely accurate. After all, it was seven years ago. And you have to get a sense of the place. We both do. Actually – what we have to do is take the book and read it there, at least the chapters that are set there. It’ll be like opening the door to the past. Who knows – we might even have dreams or visions while we’re there. Anyway, I think it will cause us to make changes – even if they’re only small ones. But it will all heighten the authenticity. And what we certainly don’t want is that somebody reads our book and we have got something wildly wrong and it bounces them out of our imaginary world. That’d be a disaster.’
The Paradise Ghetto Page 30