Relatively Strange (20 page)

“Why should I trust you, believe what you’re saying?”

“Don’t be obtuse girl, how d’you think? If we were lying you’d know.”

“I can’t read you.”

“Doesn’t matter, you know full well you wouldn’t have come with Glory if you hadn’t believed she was telling the truth.” She was right of course. I’d seen the boy, I knew in the deepest core of me what I’d been shown was genuine but I wanted more.

“I don’t understand this whole set-up. Who are you anyway? What’s it all got to do with you? And – oh yes, last time I saw Glory, she was actually working with Dreck and that ghastly assistant.”

Miss Peacock tutted briskly,

“We haven’t time to go into everything.” This time it was Glory who intervened.

“Rachael, she’s right, I’d want to know more.”

“We’ll be talking till the cows come home.”

“She needs some background.” Glory argued, “Or she won’t co-operate, you see how obstinate she is.” I shifted crossly, polite, obviously wasn’t something this lot did.

“I don’t know.” Miss Peacock was dubious. Glory was firm.

“No choice. Ruth?”

“Agreed.” Ruth said quietly

Swivelling my head from one to the other, I felt like an enthusiastic spectator at Wimbledon. Miss Peacock raised an eyebrow at Ruth who nodded,

“I’ll do it now.” she said. Miss Peacock turned back to me.

“Right. If you know more, it might make up your mind but because time is short it will be intense, do you understand?” I nodded. I didn’t at all, but presumed I would shortly. Ruth moved a little closer to me,

“Give me your hands dear, that’s right. If you’ve had enough at any time, just pull away from me. Don’t look so apprehensive, I’m only going to share some memories with you. I’ll try and keep things brief and in order but remember, these are my recollections – from my heart as well as my head – not edited like a film or a book. Close your eyes.” Her plump little hands encircling mine were warm and dry and held me very firmly.

Chapter Twenty-Three

They were two sisters, Ruth younger, Rachael eighteen months older. Father was as tall as the ceiling. Waist-coated; fob-watched; balding; distinguished; a doctor; heart specialist; highly respected. People from all over, in fear and need came to him to be cured or comforted. With colleagues and patients he was cool, calm, reassuring, with his wife and beloved daughters he played the clown and they sometimes laughed until they cried. He’d bend, sweet-cologne smelling and gather both girls in his arms, rising with them to his full height and it felt to them as if they were going to touch the sky and catch the clouds, but they knew, in his arms they were safer than safe.

Mother was soft, rose-petal cheeks, warm, soap-smelling neck with long brown braided hair which she wore coiled and pinned up, held in place with tortoiseshell pins which she took out at night and laid on the dressing table ready for the morning. Sometimes she let the girls brush her hair with the silver-backed brush, gift from her own mother. She was a cushiony bosom and baking and bedtime stories, a warm lap when they were cold after the long brisk walk home through snowy streets from school, a cool hand on a fevered head when they were sick and sweating.

There were two Grandpapas one strict, stern, generous with pocket money but needing a perfectly recited times-table first. Another, Z
aider,
soft like butter who let them do whatever they wanted, from plaiting his beard to riding on his back. No grandmas sadly but variegated uncles and aunts and cousins some in the city, lots in the country for weekend visits – late nights, full stomachs, falling asleep lulled by the rhythm of the adults talking downstairs. Happy days, swinging on a tyre suspended from a tree, a bloodied knee bringing pain but also a pleasant shower of attention. Ruth and Rachael watched their mother light candles on a Friday night and yearly they sat with the family around a
Seder
table. Life was good. They spoke another language, but I understood everything because these were Ruth’s memories.

What the two girls knew they could do was shared simply between themselves, taken for granted, nothing out of the ordinary. They were very close, in age and affection and it seemed entirely logical that they shared each other’s thoughts, along with everything else. They assumed this was the way it was with sisters. Because they didn’t know they were different, there was never any reason to talk about it. By the time oddly unsettling incidents started to emerge, objects accidentally smashed in transit, fires inexplicably ignited, their parents were preoccupied with altogether different concerns.

Ruth and Rachael were, naturally, aware far earlier than their contemporaries of what was taking place, reading if not quite understanding what their parents sought to keep from them. At first their father was not unduly perturbed. Of course he didn’t like what was happening in Germany, despaired of the direction in which things were headed although, as he reassured his increasingly anxious wife, nobody at his level, in his profession, was likely to be affected in any way. But he was wrong, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

Unbelievably swiftly the whole structure and fabric of their lives began to unravel in unimaginable ways. I saw yellow stars sewn onto sleeves of coats by women too fear-filled to cry. Listened in on visits from anguished relatives who thought they’d lost everything, but were not yet aware of how much more they were to lose. Familiar streets became foreign territory, changed and corrupted by shattering glass, crackling fire, shouts of hoarse hatred. Father – and surely it was only their own growth, Ruth and Rachael’s that made him look shorter, diminished in size – no longer went to the hospital, no longer clowned. He was allowed to see a few patients at home but gradually even the neediest of patients deemed it better for their health to seek treatment elsewhere. Once, more frightening than anything, they thought they heard him crying, rusty, gut-wrenching noises more like retches than sobs. Over the months, Mother’s plump cheeks sagged and paled, her hands shook now.

Rachael and Ruth, with their parents were taken in 1939, they were amongst the first. They became separated from Mother and Father when they were herded into different carriages of a train with no windows. I was Ruth, clinging to her sister, the two of them inundated into near unconsciousness by, not only the smells and sounds of fear and despair, but the sensory overload of what was going on in the minds of the three thousand desperate men, women and children who travelled with them.

I jerked my hands away convulsively, tears streaming still, mine or hers I couldn’t tell.

“My dear, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I just needed you to understand who we are so you would know us, I forget, stupid woman me, how intense it can be.” Ruth’s arms were around me as I shook. Her own face was pale and strained, chin quivering, her stress doubled by mine. The others weren’t in the room any more, how much time had elapsed I couldn’t tell. I tried to tell her she shouldn’t apologise, I wasn’t crying for me. But of course she knew that. She pressed a tissue into my hand, watched while I blew and wiped. “It’s important Stella, my dear, for where we go from here, that you know as much of us as I can convey in the short time we have. Look, let me just talk you through the next bit.” She reached for my hands again, I couldn’t help but flinch. She shook her head, “No, not sharing, just telling, all right?”

“We were ten and twelve when we entered the camp, sixteen and eighteen when we were liberated. We survived because of what we were, though we knew enough by then to make sure nobody else guessed. If there’d ever been even the slightest suspicion, we’d have been taken for experimentation immediately. There were things, my dear, we had to do that I will not talk about, but we did them to survive and survive we did. We developed our abilities beyond anything we had thought possible and we learnt more about human nature than we would wish anybody else to ever know. We learnt, as you have done, how very easy it is to kill and how powerful is this thing we have, although it wasn’t powerful enough to get us out of that place.” She paused for a moment, eyes closed lost in thought and I waited hands quiescent in hers.

“We tried,” she said softly, “Never to forget that for every man or woman who sinks to untold levels of wickedness, depravity and sheer inhumanity there are others who rise equally in the opposite direction.” She opened her eyes to look at me, “That’s something very important to know, to remember, to hold in your heart whatever happens, do you understand?”

“Your parents?” I asked the question although I knew the answer.

“We never saw them again.”

“The rest of your family?” she shook her head.

“All of them?”

“All of them. When we were liberated we didn’t want to stay in Germany, couldn’t bear to. It was arranged we would come to England, we were very lucky.” I snorted, couldn’t help it,

“Lucky?”

“Yes,” for a moment her sister’s impatience was echoed. “You’ll find, my dear, I don’t use words lightly. We considered ourselves lucky to be alive and lucky that a family who’d come over years earlier took us in, looked after us, that we became fond of them and they of us. We studied, we learned the language quickly, we took exams,” she smiled sideways at me, softening the previous rebuke, “We did well, naturally, and in due course we both trained as teachers.”

“And that’s what you do now?” I could visualise no insurrection in the classes of Miss P the elder. Ruth smiled catching the thought,

“Both of us deal with tutoring special needs children, children who have physical, mental or learning difficulties. Some are damaged at birth, some come from broken or abusive homes and have suffered physically and hence emotionally all their lives, others have differing degrees of autism. Sometimes we’re a last resort, when all other avenues have been exhausted. There are those whose difficulties we can solve very easily, others who require much more from us, but there are few we cannot help, even if only a little. We’re actually rather successful at what we do, sometimes people say it’s as if we can see into the minds of these sad children.” She laughed, deliberately breaking the sombre mood and I smiled with her. Hamlet who I’d almost forgotten was there, raised his head briefly to look at us, whumpfed gently and lowered it again.

“And sometimes, my dear, the children who need our help, need it desperately because they are like us in one way or another. You’ll do it, won’t you, help us get Sam out?” It wasn’t really a change of direction but where she’d been heading all along and far more statement than question. I was to learn about Ruth that she was master of emotional blackmail, with a knack for playing people in a way that, had her motives ever been less than pure, would have been downright immoral. Glory called them, she told me once, the Stick and the Carrot, both sisters achieving their ends equally effectively, albeit by differing methods.

*

There was much more, so much more I wanted to ask but after our brief, shockingly intimate and painful walk down her personal memory lane, I felt I knew Ruth more than a little. There was no doubt in my mind she was totally genuine and if she was, so were the others. As for Sam – well, I didn’t really think I had a choice. In the strange situation I found myself, all the time-consuming rituals of social intercourse and interaction were stripped away and openness was all that was left, no room for prevarication, compromise or empty courtesies. My earlier irritation had subsided to let in, if I’m honest, a gradually mounting sense of anticipatory excitement, albeit mixed with apprehension. This was an unsought and unthought of opportunity to find answers to questions that had been with me all my life.

If I imagined though that things on that strangest of Saturdays couldn’t get much stranger, I was wrong. First, though there were practical arrangements. I phoned my parents who answered so swiftly they must have been sitting on it at their end. Launching cautiously into a carefully reasoned argument as to why I should be allowed to spend a few days with my new acquaintances, I was amazed when my mother said yes. I was even more astonished to find they’d already spent some time talking on the phone with Miss Peacock. I don’t know exactly what she’d said to them or they to her but once they’d received my assurance that I was fine and did want to stay, they acquiesced without further discussion, the only proviso being that I phone every day.

“Now,” my mother said, “I’ve packed for a week and …”