The door opened and my mother came into view. She was walking backwards, but her step had a bounce in it that I didn’t recognise. Her hair was pulled into a springy ponytail and when she glanced at the camera her chin was defined, her eyes bright.
She gestured to someone who remained outside the room. ‘Come on, Cassie. Come on, pumpkin. Follow Mummy.’
I held my breath as the camera panned to show a child. She was confident on her feet, a toddler, but she still held her arms in front of her as if to prevent a fall that almost, but didn’t quite happen. Her grey eyes, when she looked towards us, were huge in her chubby baby face and her hair was curled wispy brown around her ears.
Then those eyes widened and she stopped and bumped on to her bottom. Mum knelt beside her. ‘It’s alright, pumpkin, you remember Doctor Ashworth, don’t you?’
Even through the grainy picture I could see the little girl’s bottom lip tremble. She turned her head into her mother’s shoulder and fisted her hands in her T-shirt.
Dad levered her off Mum with a nervous glance towards the camerawoman. ‘Sorry. She’s obviously going through a shy stage. Come on, pumpkin, it won’t be for long. Just say a few words for the camera. Do it for Daddy.’
Mum scooped up a toy and my fingers twitched in recognition. Bunny still lived upstairs on the end of my bed.
On the television a game of Peekaboo was in progress. Finally the little girl showed her face again and giggled. ‘Wo ist Bunny?’
As if in stereo, Mum and Dad, who were both watching the screen as avidly as a car crash, swallowed audibly.
I shook my head.
She isn’t English. My God . . . I’m adopted. I’m German.
I glanced at Mum and she gestured towards the screen with a shake of her head. It wasn’t finished.
The mum in the video placed Bunny in her daughter’s hand. ‘Here’s Bunny.’
‘Danke, Mama.’ The little girl wrapped both arms round the ragged toy. ‘Ich habe Hunger.’
‘Here you are.’ Mum lifted an apple from the bowl on the dresser.
‘Nein, nein Mama. Das will ich nicht.’ The child pushed the
fruit away and her face screwed up. Her shoulders hitched and Mum looked at the figure holding the camera with a panicked expression.
There was a slight movement as though the camerawoman had shrugged. ‘She wants something else.’
Mum shook her head. ‘No, baby, we’re having tea in a little while.’ She looked at the camera. ‘I’d better take her outside. Is that enough do you think?’
The strange voice spoke. ‘I believe so. It’s pretty clear.’
Mum lifted the toddler up and balanced her on her hip. ‘Can you say bye-bye, Cassie?’
The little girl waved. ‘Auf Wiedersehen.’
‘No, Cassie, say
bye-bye
.’
Confused, the little girl hid her face. Mum looked stricken then headed for the kitchen swaying with the extra weight. As they left a small voice said, ‘Ich liebe dich, Mama.’
There was silence for a moment as the video continued to record the room in their absence. Dad glanced at the faceless woman behind the camera. ‘Are you certain it’s German?’
‘Quite certain.’
‘Alright.’ He visibly gathered himself. ‘That was my daughter,
Cassie. My wife and I don’t speak German, although we’ve picked up a few words now . . . We didn’t teach her this.’ He ran his hands through his hair again. ‘It started when she began to talk five months ago. She . . . she won’t speak any English, other than names like Bunny. We don’t know what this means, but we’re recording this because one day we might need to prove that this happened . . . It might mean something . . . W-we hope it doesn’t.’
The video whirred on for a moment, immortalising his anxiety, then the picture quivered and turned to static.
My hands had fallen to my lap. I clasped them together until they ached and stared at my parents. They still looked at the screen as if the ghosts of their younger selves were imprinted on the glass.
I felt as if I was on a fairground waltzer. Implications of what I had seen whirled around me and my head pounded. There had to be a rational explanation. Desperately I clutched at the one idea that had occurred while I was watching the film. ‘I-I’m adopted?’ Even I could hear the pitiful hopefulness in my voice.
Mum blinked. ‘Oh, Cassie,’ she said. ‘No, that’s not right at all.’ She glared at Dad. ‘I told you we should have explained things to her first.’
Dad slumped further into the low armchair. He made no move to switch off the television and the hiss of static continued in front of us as if something was trying to break into the room. ‘You think you’re adopted? You think that’s what that shows?’
I bit my lip. ‘If that little girl is me . . . then she’s not English.’
Mum moved her hand to hover over mine, but didn’t let it fall. ‘That was you, Cassie, and you’re ours.’ She flexed her fingers. ‘I mean you aren’t adopted. I can fetch your birth certificate if you want.’
‘Then how do you explain this?’ I gestured at the television in sudden anger.
Dad leaned forward and his face was inscrutable. ‘You spoke German before you spoke English. You had whole sentences in German before you could even say “bye-bye”.’
‘That doesn’t make sense.’ I swallowed. I needed to think about this. ‘Who was the woman recording the video? Why did you say your name was Dave Smith? What house was that? It had our things in it.’
Dad glanced at Mum and groaned. ‘Alright . . . when you were about twenty months your language was quite a long way behind your friends. We were worried so we took you to see the
health visitor.’ His Adam’s apple bobbed. ‘Her father was Swiss so she realised straight away that you were talking German. Eventually she helped us find a doctor. Doctor Ashworth: a specialist in past lives.’
‘P-past lives,’ I spluttered. ‘You’re kidding me.’
Dad flushed: ‘We were desperate; we didn’t know what was going on and the Doctor seemed so rational when we called her.’
Mum knotted her hand into her skirt. ‘You won’t remember her, honey. You spent a lot of time with her when you were little, but she started acting like she owned you . . .’
‘We told her we didn’t want you to see her any more, but she wouldn’t leave us alone.’ Dad clenched his fists. ‘She kept badgering us to send you to some special school where she could monitor you twenty-four hours a day. She interfered all the time and never took no for an answer.’ The lines on his face deepened and his mouth turned down. ‘Then you started having the nightmares.’
Mum flinched and her face twisted. ‘We just wanted you to live a normal life, not be some sort of . . . science experiment. One day the Doctor turned up with all this equipment and tried to get into the house. I told her you were napping and made
an appointment to go to her office instead.’
Dad reached out as if he wanted to pat Mum’s hand, but the distance between his chair and the sofa was too great. ‘We realised we’d made a mistake letting her into your life. So we went to stay with your nan and put the house on the market. Your mum gave up her job. We even changed our name.’
‘Changed our name?’ I looked around the room as if I was seeing it for the first time.
‘That’s right.’ Dad cleared this throat. ‘You were born Cassiopeia Mae Smith.’
I inhaled, too stunned to react further. ‘I-I thought I was born in this house.’
Mum pulled my hand to her lap. ‘The Doctor was convinced you were having past-life memories, Cassie. Your dad and I, we’ve been racking our brains for years and we can’t think of anything else this could be. There’s no other explanation that isn’t even more far-fetched. When we moved down here and you started nursery you stopped speaking German, like you forgot it. But you never grew out of the nightmares and at school German was so easy for you, as if you were remembering instead of learning.
Your dad didn’t think you should carry on with the lessons. He thought it might make the nightmares worse.’ She hesitated and I stared at him.
‘Why didn’t you tell me? I thought . . .’
‘I know.’ Dad refused to catch my eye. ‘But we didn’t think we were ever going to tell you this. It was better that you thought I was being unreasonable.’
Over my stunned silence Mum continued to talk. ‘I got you that book,
Learn Lucid Dreaming
, because it was by Doctor Ashworth. I thought it might help.’
I shook my head and Dad exhaled. ‘Now there’s this thing with Hopfingen.
Was
it you who left the anonymous tip they were talking about?’
I winced, unable to answer.
‘We’ll not mention that again.’ He dropped his head into his hands. ‘I-I don’t know what to do, Marie.’ He spoke into his palms, but his eyes went to the card on top of the video box. ‘Do we use the number?’
Mum’s grip tightened on my arm. ‘It should be up to Cassie.’ She looked at me. ‘The Doctor might be able to tell us more about
this. She might even be able to help, but then again . . .’
I tightened my hands on hers. ‘I could end up as some sort of science experiment.’
Mum said nothing, but Dad’s fists closed round handfuls of his hair.
‘I need some time to think about this.’
Mum nodded. ‘Take all the time you need.’
‘I should go to school.’
‘School?’
‘I need to think about something else for a few hours, get some perspective.’
‘Alright, love. I’ll let them know you’ll be coming in after all. Your dad’ll drive you.’
I slouched into history part way through the third period. The class was gathered around a table, notebooks in hand.
‘Cassie, good of you to join us. Feeling better?’
I nodded and Mr Greene pointed to the table. ‘Find a spot.’
I edged my way between my classmates then angled myself so I could see the table. It was covered in newspapers. Some of the papers were national: broadsheets and tabloids, but
others looked like local German papers.
‘Cassie, I’ll recap for your benefit. We have a fantastic chance to explore history in action. You might have heard the news this morning.’ The blood pounded in my ears and I gripped the table edge.
Why didn’t I expect this?
Mr Greene was giddy with enthusiasm. His skinny wrists poked out of his jacket as he waved his arms over the print on the table. ‘I want us to look at the differences in how this event is being reported at an international, a national and a local level. I want essays on how the local press is reacting, and on any differences between the ways the Germans and English are seeing this. You should all be able to produce some
fantastic
coursework. The exam board is going to be very impressed. We were almost on the spot, as it were.’
He flicked a copy of the
Daily Telegraph
. ‘I want your essays backed up by historical fact. You can use information from our visits to Flossenbürg and Bayreuth and go to the library – I don’t want information from dodgy websites. Please provide proper bibliographies.’ He raised his hands. ‘Here is a selection of papers. This all actually happened a few days ago, so the local
ones are older than the nationals. Get started.’
My classmates descended like wasps round a Coke can, excited about the turn of events. When the table had cleared and I was no longer being jostled, all that was left was a single copy of a three-day-old community paper, written in German.
Mr Greene looked at me with something like sympathy and his moustache twitched. ‘Start with that one, Cassie. If you have trouble with the translation, speak to Miss Barnes.’
I swallowed and, left with no choice, reached for the smudged paper. I used one finger to turn it round.
On the front page there was a picture I recognised: a young, tensely smiling Karla Ehrlichmann standing in front of her sweet shop. The headline did not focus on the grisly find in the field. Instead it read S
ELBSMORD IN
H
OPFINGEN
.
It took me a moment to translate the line then I had to hold the table with both hands to keep my knees from buckling. Astrid’s great-aunt Karla, who in my memories lived young and candy-scented and who harboured a fondness for a long-dead boy, had killed herself.
I read on, translating unconsciously. The old lady had left a suicide note in which she wrote about the Jewish exodus from
Hopfingen. She said the families had been made to gather outside her own sweetshop and that she couldn’t live with the fact that they had been taken to their deaths and she had done nothing.
In my mind I saw her hand a bag of sweets to Zillah. ‘
You’ll be with your own kind. It’ll be good for everyone, you’ll see
.’
I
had
been wrong to call the police.
My hands shook as I made the decision to call Doctor Ashworth, ignoring the most important lesson of Karla’s death: the past should remain buried.
M
um and I perched on a red sofa in the Doctor’s reception area. Our knees nudged a table laid with magazines like
Eve
,
Livingetc
and an incongruous, dog-eared
Beano
. Neither of us picked anything up.
A slim blonde was sitting behind the desk and murmuring into a telephone. Her beige dress was almost the same colour as the walls; a red brooch was the only spot of colour in her outfit.
Mum leaned close. Her breath smelled of the single gin Dad had pressed on her earlier. ‘Do you think she’s colour coordinated on purpose?’
I snorted and the receptionist twisted away from us to continue her call.
Mum checked her watch with a frown. Then she patted my knee, rose and went to the desk, her shoes clattering a staccato on the light wood floor. ‘Excuse me?’
The blonde raised one finger and carried on with her conversation.
Mum leaned forward. ‘My daughter, Cassie Farrier, has a three o’clock appointment and I don’t want the Doctor to think we’re late.’
The receptionist tossed her hair as though desperately inconvenienced. One finger tapped a rhythm on her mouse as she looked at the computer screen, then she narrowed her eyes at Mum as if measuring the woman in front of her against the details on her display. Finally, she laid the receiver down and pressed a button beneath her desk. ‘Doctor Ashworth, your three o’clock is here.’