Bone and Blood

by Margo Gorman

  Maybe a private practice with the story of Gerry. The times when it felt like Gerry and Aisling. In another place, the age gap wouldn’t be so important. So what if he was Maeve’s dad. Grow up she felt like saying. True at the beginning and the end Gerry was Maeve’s Dad more than his own man. Mounting in the middle. Grown adults taking pleasure. Nobody’s loss. Happier Gerry probably having sex again with Anne. Catholic guilt creeping in again to turn a good fuck into an incident. Maeve’s horror at her reaction, “You’re not even ashamed.” Sorry to be found out. Sorry the pleasure was spoiled by the brown envelope solution. Montage into Maeve’s Dad and Anne’s husband again. No lover boy left. Not quite true as he came back again in fantasy fucking. No wonder Brigitte was all over the place. She probably saw Günter in Katharina. Nobody else to share the image. Lonely too maybe.

  Aisling made a pot of tea and rattled the cups. It worked but neither of them ate much or said much. The aunt insisted on helping clear away. She had her own way of stacking the dishwasher – some method that Aisling hadn’t mastered yet and had no inclination to. Let her do it herself. She waited until they were sitting again. The first really warm evening since she arrived. She opened the big windows wide onto the street and sat with half an eye on passers-by.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about the Lager. It’s a bit hard to imagine. Did they torture you?’

  ‘You may think you want to know but you don’t really young lady,’ her aunt’s tone was regretful – not as bossy as usual.

  ‘But I’d like to know. It would do you good to get it off your chest.’

  ‘Katharina has sent you to torture me.’

  ‘Hey come off it. I only asked!’

  Brigitte closed her eyes and her head fell forward to her chest. Aisling waited to see if it was one of those two-minute dozes or if her head would go back and the snoring would start – then she might be gone for an hour or so. But this time, it seemed like she wasn’t asleep at all. She started speaking even before she lifted her head.

  ‘Maybe it is not so shocking for you young people to-day. You see everything on the TV and in films. You watch images of lots of blood and violence. You think you can rewind the film again and people will come back to life. Even in Ireland, so many people blown to bits in those Troubles – bits of bodies collected in black plastic bags after a bomb in the street with no warning. If they’d known a real war, they wouldn’t be so quick to start one. I was glad I was living here then.’

  ‘It was mostly in the North. We didn’t see much of it in Dublin – just on the news.’ Aisling wasn’t going to be side-tracked like that. She wanted a story with face-to-face reality not some story of anonymous plastic bags. Real images in her mind to inspire her. A mix of reality and fiction. Some graphics without words because she would use her skill in creating images to tell the story combined with what was common knowledge.

  ‘So did many people die in that camp?’

  ‘You are more persistent than Katharina. Or is it I am older now or you are younger? I don’t know how many – thousands of course but how many thousands I have no idea. The deaths of people I knew were enough for me. Katharina was good with the numbers of people killed by the Nazis but the thousands or millions made no sense to me. Day-to-day death is harder to count. Worst of all were the days when you wished it were yourself. ‘

  ‘So did you see people die?’

  ‘Too many to count but Anna’s death was the one that I mourned most. I only wish the story of “Die Arme” had died with her.

  ‘Who was Diana?’

  ‘There was no Diana there.’

  ‘So what is the story that did not die with Anna?’

  Brigitte sighed, ‘Some stories are not for telling. Telling can release the devil himself.’

  ‘Your devil?’

  ‘My devil, your devil. Everyone’s devil.’

  The nightmare devil who came to torture me long after Katharina was born. When Katharina was growing up, I didn’t talk of those things. No-one did. Leave Katharina to her facts about millions. How could I tell her those words from Anna’s lips gave me worse nightmares than the bundles of rags turning into naked corpses on a trolley? How could I tell Katharina I heard the animal cries and the strange silences with my own ears when maybe I imagined it? How could I tell her I saw the weird procession better than if I had seen it with my own eyes? How could I tell her what I saw in Anna’s eyes when she would pray each night for “Die Arme”.’?’

  The possibility of a true grisly story gave Aisling goose pimples of anticipation. Something she could use which would make fantasy horror images lame by comparison.

  ‘Katharina hated me when I said, the Nazis were bad but we were worse. She wanted stories of heroines or if not heroines, she wanted innocent victims. She should have been Irma’s daughter not mine.’

  ‘Matt says we’ve all got a bit of Nazi in us if we look hard enough. He says it’s about abuse of power and creation of scapegoats.’

  ‘Matt?’

  ‘A friend of mine, he’s from Hamburg. ‘

  ‘Sounds like an intelligent young man. They say the phosphorus bombs in Hamburg were much worse than here.’

  ‘Yeah, he says victims can feel guilty either for not resisting or for surviving when others didn’t. He can’t get over how much guilt there is in Ireland. It creates space for power seekers who use guilt to exploit and manipulate people.

  ‘Is he your boyfriend?

  ‘No. He’s too good a friend for that!’

  ‘You met him in Hamburg?’

  ‘No, I’ve never been to Hamburg. He moved to Dublin with his parents but he stayed when they went back to Germany. Now he’s in Venezuela. I wish he was here. You would tell him Anna’s story. He can make anybody tell him things they wouldn’t tell another soul.’

  The blue in Brigitte’s eyes flickered, ‘You are quite persuasive yourself. I will tell you Anna’s story if you are sure you want to hear it. If only I could have seen Anna buried, maybe I could have buried her story with her. Instead I saw her spirit rise up in the smoke from the crematorium that day and heard her laugh. It was Anna’s laugh all right and I often wondered what caused such a laugh.’

  ‘So is Anna’s story about how she died then?’

  Brigitte was silent. Such a story seeks to escape thoughts. Such a story sneaks away from memory. Such a story is in nightmare only. Such a story is not made for thinking or for telling. There are no words to tell it. Some words were spoken then but not many. No words of accusation. Her sins were many. Stealing food. Nobody asked who among us is not capable of stealing food when we are hungry. Dead meat on a platter of bare arms carried past. Later vomiting bile at the thought of it. Push the thought away and it sneaks back inside into the dark where there are no words to release it. She shouldn’t have tried to escape. And who didn’t dream of escape and envy her for trying? She shouldn’t have got caught. They should have caught her sooner.

  The others waited, waited and waited. They’ve caught her – waves of sharp air carried the news. Hunters brought her to those hungrier than hunters. The silence of hungry anger. Anger to energise exhaustion. Beyond the limits of endurance anger. Anger inside and out – pulling and pushing. Anger at them. Anger at me. Anger at you. Anger at her. There was no first movement. No single hand or mouth. Each anger joined the other in bone and blood. We threw you to the wolves in ourselves. We tore you limb from limb. The anger of teeth with no tongue. No flesh to eat. Skin from bone. The eyes of those who carried the remains past the windows of the block that she remembered more than the bits of flesh and bone. Surprising to see blood left to drip. Dripping blood we didn’t know in that place. Congealed raw sores and open wounds, blue-black bruises, raw fingers and toes we knew but no blood dripped for long without being licked off. There was no monthly rhythm of blood in the Lager to remind us we were women. Bones we knew with not a scratch of fat remaining rolling on the ground. A joint of meat dripping blood was geist feast food not red reality. We made her a
n animal, making animals of ourselves.

  ‘Das arme Kaninchen’. But she wasn’t really a poor rabbit – not one of those who hopped on crutches from shelter to shelter rekindling some maternal feeling. Not even lucky enough to live through the scientific experiments of doctors. Thrown there, still alive, at those feet at the bottom of legs left too long standing. Those eyes that looked in those eyes that looked on Anna and looked on me – defiant or dead eyes and hands that carried the remnants turned into a skinned rabbit. More skin and bone but flesh too with teeth marks.

  Aisling sighed. It was hard to follow the staccato burst from the mumble of blood and gore. No chance for questions. Brigitte had gone back into one of her dozes. Maybe she’d head off to do an Internet search on Ravensbrück. She’d more or less exhausted what she could read from Katharina’s collection.

  ‘And how did Anna die?’ she asked to see if it would wake the aunt

  ‘Anna was one of the lucky ones. She died peacefully in her bed between Irma and me. She went out on a breath. I was young enough to think that she was a very old woman and eighty years was a long life in those times. Anna’s death was a comfort to me not a great pain. Every day that I suffered I would think of her not suffering any more. It was the other death.’

  ‘What death would you mean?’ Aisling heard her mock imitation of Gran’s accent. Not a good idea. The two of them were radically different characters. Hopefully Brigitte didn’t notice.

  ‘Anna said that it was the eyes that were worst of all – wild eyes set in faces of stone with something not of this world. Anna said she saw the devil that day in those faces. The faces kept coming after the parade was over. Some of the bibelki of course saw that whole block as no better than animals anyway and passed their own judgement on them. They accepted the punishment of all for one as their lot. It was true of course. The bibelki often faced the long hours of punishment and they did it together without blame. ‘

  ‘Anna said, ‘in Stücke’ – torn into pieces. I could see then skinned and shiny bones sticking out. Hannelore in the next bunk heard her tell me this story and intervened. She said the woman brought it on herself – live like an animal, die like an animal. She knew what would happen when she was caught and worse – she knew what would happen to those she left in her block when she tried to escape. Bringing punishment on everyone was bringing death nearer to everyone. But for Anna nothing made it right to open the door to the devil.’

  ‘I don’t understand. What actually happened to this woman?’

  ‘She was in another block – the block for prostitutes, thieves, petty criminals. Many of the Zigeuner were put there.’

  ‘Zigeuner?’ Aisling repeated.

  ‘Zigeuner looked foreign. When I heard Anna use that term first, I thought it was another form of Zeugen or witness. She laughed so hard at that, I had to join her although I didn’t understand the joke, I asked Anna were they German? She said first yes and then no. “Zigeuner”, she said. Maybe another word for Jew I thought.

  ‘Later I overheard one of the British women there say Gypsy and then I realised Zigeuner were similar to the people we call itinerants or Tinkers. When I was growing up there were Tinkers who came round: sometimes people would call them Gypsies. People were afraid of them but they could mend things that no-one else could and they would do small jobs in return for food.’

  Brigitte paused again and Aisling prompted.

  ‘Like knackers you mean?’

  Aisling was glad Matt wasn’t in earshot to hear her using the slang term for Travelling people. Matt had told her off once for calling Travellers, ‘knackers’ and said the women with long skirts and shawls that begged on the streets in Dublin were linked to Irish Travellers even if they came from Romania .

  ‘Knackers – isn’t that where they take horses to die?’ Brigitte was puzzled, ‘I don’t know that word. Katharina said they prefer to be called Rom or Sinti – according to the clan they are part of. An educated young woman like you should know that. I suppose you don’t see itinerants on the streets now in Ireland, but you used to have them all sitting on O’Connell Bridge wrapped in shawls and with their long skirts – a baby bundled inside and another one with the hand out. They said at home that they were people pushed from the land during the famine. Other people said that real Gypsies came from Egypt so they were foreigners not Irish at all. The rest of them were just tramps. One woman came to our door every year at the same time with a new baby in her shawl. My mother would always give her a cup of tea and whatever bread was in the house and a few eggs. She used to give her my grandmother’s china cup and she would scald it after with the kettle from the range. My mother was a Christian; most of our neighbours would shoot them if they got a chance. I understood a bit better why they were treated as if they were no better than animals even by the other women prisoners.’

  Aisling felt insulted when the aunt called her ignorant though it was true she didn’t know about the history of Travellers. On the news it said that some of the people who lived in tents on a roundabout with no toilets had a better living that back in Romania where they were persecuted. But not all Romanians were Romanies. She’d have to ask Matt when he came back what the connections were. Anyway there were plenty of people who would call Travellers or Romanies asocials nowadays too. She ignored the insult.

  ‘So Zigeuner are German Gypsies?’

  ‘At least they spoke German and were born in Germany but they didn’t look German. Most of them had brown-black eyes and brown skin. Katharina told me many of them were killed in concentration camps.

  ‘Were there Zigeuner in your hut?’

  ‘I thought I told you already that it was mostly Jehovah’s Witnesses when I arrived. I had a hard time with Anna at the beginning. She was even more particular than the sztubowa. At night my head would be full of exhaustion. All I wanted was to lie down and die rather than face the nightly rituals of cleaning and tidying that Anna insisted on. I couldn’t make any sense of it at first. I couldn’t understand who these women were? What fault could be found with them? They were so German and proud of it. Sometimes I was angry at how proud she was her people were allowed to work in the houses of the guards outside the main camp. Later it made some sense. They could be trusted never to try and escape because they were in prison for their principles. They refused to give honour to Hitler that could only be given to God. There was no escape for them. You could see why the guards respected them. They spoke good German. Their own habits of cleanliness and childcare were close to the camp authorities.’

  Was Brigitte dodging out of Anna’s story again? It made her impatient, ‘But the woman who escaped wasn’t a Jehovah’s Witness. What happened to the Gypsy woman?’

  ‘She tried to escape but they caught her as they caught anyone who was foolish enough to try. I heard only about one woman who made it. She was on the team who worked in the forest. Somehow she hid clothes there and one day she didn’t come back. The pine forest was the place to hide but the dogs always found anyone foolish enough to try. She walked all the way to Berlin on her own. Everyone knew because her friend gave the address of her brother in Berlin and she reached him. There weren’t many who even got as far as the forest but anyone who did was usually thrown in the punishment block. Everyone knew that the other women in the block would be left standing until the woman trying to escape was caught. Everyone in the block was punished.’

  ‘So they caught the Gypsy woman?’

  ‘Yes after a few days. Anna saw the guards drag the poor woman, “die Arme” past their block back to the asocial block. She had been beaten so badly by then that she couldn’t walk. She looked like a rag doll her arms already out of her sockets. The dogs had been at her too. She must have been half dead already. The guards didn’t think it worth their while taking her to the punishment block. They knew what they were doing when they threw her back into her own block. They knew the anger of the women there standing, waiting in hunger, suffering for her for days.’

  A
isling looked at her hands. She tried to picture it and couldn’t – a group of half-starved women wouldn’t have the strength surely? Was it really possible to tear someone limb from limb even someone who was half dead already?

  ‘So the guards stood by and let the other prisoners tear someone to bits? But you told me most of those women were ill and weak. They certainly wouldn’t be strong enough.’

  Aisling examined Brigitte’s face. It was hard to work out what was behind that mask. Why would she invent something like this? Why invent it for her? Maybe Aisling hadn’t reacted strong enough to the descriptions of ‘that place’ so she had to invent something. It’s not possible for people to pull apart another human being with their bare hands. Not possible to think of a group of half alive scarecrows using all the strength left to rip the flesh from the bone of another woman.

  ‘Hard to believe, isn’t it? And maybe you don’t believe me either. And if it’s true, who would you say is guilty of that woman’s death? The people who created that place, the people who kept that place going? The woman who was the first to demand punishment? The guards who stood by and let them do the work and condemn them all as animals. Then they could treat them as animals and go to Mass on Sunday. We all have her blood on our hands.’

  Maybe none of it was true. It was confusing. Brigitte never used the word ‘Ravensbrück’. Aisling had guessed it from Katharina’s collection. You never heard much about it. People were always going on about Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Bergen – Belsen. Weird. Stuck here with an old woman who was out of her mind. And what if she was sane?

  Brigitte looked at her, ‘Once you take such a story into your heart, then you also have blood on your hands. Once you really know that other human beings, that other women are capable of such an act, you know that you are capable of it too. It is easier not to know but once you know something, you cannot not know it. You are old enough to know that.’