The Rabbit Girls

by Anna Ellory

  ‘Can I say something to you, some advice that my mum once gave me?’ Dawn asks.

  Miriam watches the rain mist around them, seeming not to fall but to rise, as if the tiny drops were suspended in the air.

  ‘She used to say that if you give a man what he wants, he’ll never take what he needs.’

  Miriam says nothing as a black car turns into the entrance space. She opens the door and gets in without looking back.

  The shame washes over her in huge heavy waves, she goes straight into the bathroom, deposits all her clothes into a small pile and turns the shower to a scalding heat. It burns her scalp like tiny needles.

  Looking down at her body, she feels his handprints, like tar, marking her body. Where he touched her, where he hurt her, his paint on her canvas. His hands on her body. The shower cascades like oil over water, she cannot erase his unwanted touch.

  Her hands scream and withdraw from the water as it burns through the broken skin. It takes days for the smell and taste of him to leave her, no matter how much she washes.

  She once tried bleach, but it looked like her skin had been removed with sand paper and then set upon by bees. It singed her nasal passages too, it was all she could smell for five days, long enough for him to evaporate, at least from her body. But the scars and the scratching lasted an entire month.

  Sitting on the side of the bath, a towel loosely draped around her, she watches as beads of pink water cascade down her legs, swallowed up by the dip in her ankle. She allows tears to fall.

  Then, wrapping herself back up, she returns to Dad’s room and stands at the window for half a second, taking a glimpse at the same picture, its scene unmoving, yet everything has changed. She shuts the curtains tight and moves around the empty house, touches things, but doesn’t move anything. Her father’s absence fills each space and makes everything foreign.

  She scrubs and scratches and her skin stings. She tries to remove him, she settles for distraction and sits carefully, looking at the letters, each as individual, as beautiful and as tragic as the last. Except these won’t just melt away like the women described within them. The untold women with untold stories.

  Laid out on the table, her parents’ table. Having been held captive in a dress for decades. She wants to free them, to find out how they survived.

  If they survived.

  24

  MIRIAM

  Dearest Henryk,

  Wanda Bielika and Bunny are from the same village, Lidice. The Nazis did what they did to Lublin a year later: they tore it to the ground.

  Wanda told me, when we had a rare moment alone outside in the shadow of a block, that she had known Bunny before they met here.

  She was a young mum called Neta-Lee. Wanda discovered it was her when they were lying side by side in the special treatment section of the revier.

  A woman called Jacosta, also on the Lidice transports, was lying on the other side of Wanda and knew of Neta-Lee too. She was not dumb or mute. She married young, childhood sweethearts, they had four children.

  When the Nazis came to town, they stood the husband and all the children against the wall of the house, the babies calling for their mummy, small hands reaching out.

  She begged the guards to shoot her, to take her instead. To spare the children. The guard laughed. Five shots. The family lost.

  When the rabbit girls in Wanda’s group had been bathed, but before their legs were shaved, Wanda tried to talk to Neta-Lee, using her name. But she said nothing.

  As Wanda was older she never thought she would make the selection process as all the other girls were young, with thin, long legs. But she was selected and enjoyed the bath full of warm water. They were so amazed, Wanda recalls, they splashed and laughed and for the first time in so very long, felt like women.

  Afterwards, in clean beds, clean shirts, a nurse came by with a razor to shave their legs.

  The next morning, they were given a tablet and the world became blurry. Wanda remembers the walls moving as if they were liquid. She was taken to a sterile room, strapped to the bed. Unable to move at all.

  When she woke, her legs were in a cast up to the groin. She could hear others screaming out, but she felt fine, tired but fine. But when she awoke that evening, her legs felt like they were on fire and she couldn’t move. A woman in the opposite bed had hiccups, continual hiccups, when the hiccups stopped they took her body away.

  They all had different number and letter combinations on their casts – no one knew what this meant. It is the thirst she remembers the most. By night her lips were bleeding. One of the women from another bed who had been there for a few weeks came around with a bucket of water. She was hobbling on a cast too, she brought water to all the parched mouths and left a trail of blood and brown pus from the cast in her wake.

  This, it turned out, was Eugenia. The next few days were laden with pain and screams; three women died within the week.

  The doctors came around by day, checked their numbers on their clipboards, didn’t speak at all. Eugenia came around at night, bringing water.

  Bunny also lay in the bed, silent, but had her eyes open, listening. She refused the water offered.

  Wanda looked at me. ‘That’s why we protect Bunny. We must. She has been through so much. It’s our duty to help her.’

  ‘That’s why she needs Stella?’ I asked.

  ‘Stella keeps Bunny alive, I think. All the love for her own children spills over into Stella.’

  When Wanda came back from the bandage change, Bunny lay stagnant, Wanda thought she was dead. Wanda reached out and held her hand, to help her find the ground again and Bunny didn’t let go.

  A week later Eugenia was discharged. She continued to bring food from the bunks to Wanda and the other rabbits and delivered items through the window. They all watched as Jacosta died. Her jaw locked shut. The nurse plunged a syringe into her heart so she did not ‘suffer’.

  Eugenia said she had heard the guards were planning to destroy evidence of the experiments, she cautioned Wanda to be vigilant. That night the nurse came around again, she had a needle. When Wanda awoke, the nurse was over her. Wanda screamed:

  ‘I am not a guinea pig. I am not a guinea pig.’ It woke Bunny and by morning they were the only two who had survived.

  Eugenia planned their escape. Bunny could not walk.

  Wanda was more fortunate and could stand. To be in a place like this and not be able to move. It was a death warrant for sure.

  Eugenia came in carrying a chair she had found and they tied Bunny to the chair with a sheet. Eugenia and Wanda, as the guards watched, carried Bunny back to the bunk. The guards saw them and laughed. Two women in casts, barely able to walk, carrying a mute on a chair.

  Mutiny was the only power they had left and they were determined to save Bunny. Wanda would not leave her behind.

  Soon more and more women came and arms helped to hold Bunny, to get the rabbits to safety.

  They made some shelves in the old toilet area and Eugenia sewed the skin back up on Bunny’s leg with her perfect running stitch. Wanda’s legs, it appeared, had been shot: black circles front and back and bruising up to her knee.

  Wanda showed me her scars, her legs deformed, the skin still bright red, raw and new.

  ‘We have to stay alive, for we are the only witnesses.’

  Miriam recalls the hatches, the drawings the doctor made in red pen. She too has scars, but these are even less visible, and even less believable.

  Does anyone know or remember Wanda? Miriam doubts it and the thought makes her sad.

  She gets some pens and paper from her father’s office, replaces many ledgers back into the desk, and piles the books and paper to one side. She has time now, waiting for her father to die, or for Axel to get her again. She tries not to think about which will come first.

  She uses her father’s good pen and stares back at the letter. Her hands shake so much the ink drops and splashes, and as she presses the pen on to the paper, the nib bends slightl
y at her hand. Her fingers stop quaking. They are quiet. She becomes entranced by them as they work. Moving the pen across the page, tracing Wanda’s words.

  A deep sense of peace cloaks Miriam, stilling her busy mind.

  On second reading and really looking at the finished letter on plain paper, the letters are beautiful. Written as she supposed they were meant to be. As Eva has restored the ones written in French, Miriam will do the same for the rest.

  How Frieda must have imagined them. Rather than squat writing pressed into space that could never contain the volume of thoughts. The pages overflow with love and grief.

  ‘If you give a man what he wants, he’ll never take what he needs.’ The words of the nurse seem to echo in her head. She feels foolish and petulant to have been talking to the doctors, the police, about Axel. Look what happened to the ‘rabbits’, and they didn’t complain.

  Axel had sex with her, she thinks, that is all, yet she went crying to the police. Maybe Dawn was right, that her actions caused his needs to take over. That she deserved it, again. Of all the things the police must hear, her whines and worries must seem so petty.

  She continues writing, feeling shame at her own actions. It is a new sensation, it pricks her skin like a rash. Not shame from what someone else has done to her, but shame at what she has done to herself. She writes until Wanda’s words exist again, then calls the hospital.

  Her father is stable and off the oxygen. Miriam is relieved and then cautious. Like being pulled toward and instantly repelled against something. The hospital. What if Axel were there again? What if he didn’t just hurt her, what if he were able to do worse? Her head spirals into the ‘worse’ she’s experienced before. She continues to write out the letters with diligence and intensity.

  When her hands ache and she has rewritten many of the letters, wrapped them in cloth and placed them in her handbag, Miriam gets up with no real purpose, and walks into her father’s study. Taking off her jacket and rubbing life into her arms, she starts to collect his papers and put them away. She sorts them and places them back into the desk and the folders just behind it. She works without stopping until she can see the floor space and there are only a few small piles left on the desk to go through. She pulls out her father’s chair and sees a book has fallen; she retrieves it.

  Yeats in English.

  She flicks through the pages, the spine is broken and deeply lined. She opens it to a poem and a scrap of paper falls out.

  When darkness drops, I am your light.

  Frieda.

  The poem, ‘The Second Coming’, is full of pencil markings and lined with notes in her father’s writing, all around its margins.

  She sits in the chair with the poem on her lap, and reads and rereads it and the note.

  From Frieda.

  Her father had been searching for her; after all these years. Miriam swallows hard. He must never have found her.

  25

  MIRIAM

  ‘Merry Christmas,’ Eva says, slipping off her boots and placing a bag of food on the ground. ‘I have a present for you.’

  ‘Christmas?’

  ‘It’s Christmas Eve.’ Eva is wearing a red dress and a deep green jumper with her usual heavy boots.

  ‘It is?’

  She follows her through to the kitchen.

  Eva takes out all the vegetables from her bag, some coffee and a newspaper.

  Miriam picks it up and leafs through it. A picture of the church catches her attention. The Church of the Redeemer is opening its doors tonight, the headline reads. After almost thirty years shut away, there will be a service this evening at 8 p.m. All welcome.

  ‘The church,’ she says, holding the newspaper for Eva to see. ‘They have a service on tonight.’

  ‘Are you religious?’ Eva asks.

  ‘No, but my parents were married here. Now that Dad’s not here, I’d like to go, I think.’ Axel would never find her there.

  ‘Perhaps I could accompany you?’

  Miriam looks at her. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Here, I got you something,’ Eva says, and places an envelope on the side, before rustling back into her bag. ‘I still have a few more to go, but I’m almost there. And I also have this.’ She hands Miriam a small parcel wrapped up in pink tissue paper.

  ‘Merry Christmas,’ she says as Miriam takes off the sellotape at each end first before unwrapping.

  She finds a scarf the colour of autumn folded over on itself. It is the softest fabric Miriam has ever felt between her deeply battered hands.

  ‘Do you like it?’ Eva asks.

  ‘It’s . . .’

  ‘I know it’s bright, but I can’t stand pastel colours and, well . . . I always said that pale colours are poor relations, if you know what I mean.’ She laughs as Miriam smooths her fingers across the fabric. ‘I thought maybe you could do with a bit of colour?’

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Go get yourself dressed and I’ll make dinner . . . if that’s okay?’

  Miriam looks down and realises she is still in her pyjamas. She smiles and stretches.

  After changing she returns to the kitchen, where there is a substantial mess of tomatoes, saucepans, knives and an eruption of what must be broccoli all over the work surface. She shakes her head and takes a piece of carrot from the chopping board and chews on it.

  ‘Mum would have a fit to see her kitchen like this.’

  ‘I promise I’ll clear up.’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean it as an insult, just . . . it’s not a problem.’

  ‘I love to cook, so this is a treat for me. It’s hard to make an effort when you are on your own, so cooking for someone else is nice,’ Eva says, searching the drawers for a spoon. Miriam points out the cutlery drawer. ‘And it’s Christmas!’

  ‘Can I ask, how long have you been alone?’

  ‘My husband died five years ago,’ Eva says.

  ‘Do you have children?’

  ‘My husband had two daughters before we were married: Renka – who has Jeffrey, whom you met, and Clotilde . . .’ Eva swallows hard. ‘I am a grandmother three times over.’

  ‘Are you close with your daughters?’

  ‘Well, Renka fled with Jeffrey so long ago it’s been hard to keep in touch, and . . . Clotilde . . .’ Eva changes the subject. ‘How did the transfer go?’

  ‘Dad’s in the hospital, he didn’t make it to the hospice. He’s sick.’

  ‘Oh no, Miriam, I am sorry. What is wrong?’

  ‘Pneumonia. I saw him last night, he was stable. But I’d like to give him that closure, to find out what happened to Frieda.’

  They eat in the dining room, the letters at one end of the table and them at the other. The rain taps gently at the window as they eat in silence. Miriam’s thoughts twist and jump around, but she finds the more she eats, the calmer her mind, and she focuses on the meal.

  ‘Wine?’ Eva offers, and pours herself half a glass.

  ‘No thanks, I . . . I’m not sure that’s a good idea.’

  ‘Because of them?’ And she nods to the door.

  ‘Yes, I had a drink, well, more than one, and Dad got sick, so now it proves I’m unstable. And Axel, well, he enjoys that. It’s bait for him really.’

  ‘Fuck ’em.’

  Miriam laughs, unsure if it’s her laugh itself or Eva’s expletive that surprises her, she laughs more.

  ‘What?’

  Miriam laughs all the harder.

  After the plates are empty, Miriam stands.

  ‘The food was lovely, Eva, thank you. It’s nice to eat with someone. I always eat alone.’ She collects the dinner plates and they both walk into the kitchen.

  ‘Always?’

  ‘Yes. When I was with Axel I was always too nervous to eat. It’s hard to eat nervous, so I would eat before he came home or after he went out in the evenings.’

  ‘Your husband sounds like a tyrant,’ Eva says. ‘The things you said the other day.’

  ‘Please ignore me, I was be
ing dramatic.’

  ‘No. Actually I’ve been thinking,’ Eva says.

  ‘Please, Eva. Not today. I can’t talk about it.’ She feels her dinner contract in her stomach.

  ‘Okay,’ Eva says. ‘I don’t know very much about you other than Axel. Tell me, what was your father like?’

  She smiles and speaks uncensored. ‘He was wise. Smart. In the best of ways, not just intelligent, but he knew his own heart and he was so honest. I loved him.’

  Eva gulps.

  ‘I just said loved. Past tense.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Miriam takes a deep breath. ‘I love my father, but all I have are memories of when I was a different person and now I know he was there, all the memories seem to change.’ She sighs. ‘I haven’t spoken to him in so long.’

  ‘From what I can see, you have been busy fighting your own demons. Your father will know that.’

  ‘I’ve missed so much.’

  ‘Will you divorce Axel?’ Eva asks, running water into the sink.

  ‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He would go mad. He’s silent scary, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘He’s dangerous?’

  ‘Yes. He makes me think I am completely mad and the trouble is everyone else believes him. I even missed Mum’s funeral because of his lies, I only got there for the wake.’

  ‘How do you know he was lying?’

  ‘I just knew. That was three years ago. When I got the call that Dad was in hospital . . . I couldn’t allow that to happen again. Mum had Dad, but Dad has no one.’

  ‘You love your father very much,’ Eva says solemnly. ‘And by being here, that takes courage.’

  ‘No, I was with Axel for over twenty years, I am very, very stupid. I believed him. It’s only now that I can see he is lying, but it’s easy to get drawn back into that. And the more resistance I put up the worse he’ll be.’

  ‘That’s why no divorce?’

  ‘Yes, if I fight it’ll be hell.’

  ‘What about now?’ Eva turns from the washing up, soap suds up to her elbows.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Miriam picks up a towel and starts to dry the crockery that drips bubbles.