Lost - Michael Robotham [26]
“You grew up in Lancashire, didn’t you?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I’m just asking a question. Your stepfather was an RAF pilot in the war.”
“How do you know that?”
“I remember you telling me.”
“Bullshit!”
A ball of anger forms in my throat. “You’re just itching to get inside my head, aren’t you? The Human Condition—isn’t that what you call it? You got to watch out for that bastard.”
“Why do you keep dreaming about missing children?”
“Fuck you!”
“Maybe you feel guilty.”
I don’t answer.
“Maybe you blocked it out.”
“I don’t block things out.”
“Did you ever meet your real father?”
“You’re going to have trouble asking questions with your jaw wired shut.”
“A lot of people don’t know their fathers. You must wonder what he’s like; whether you look like him or sound like him.”
“You’re wrong. I don’t care.”
“If you don’t care, why won’t you talk about it? You were probably a war baby—born just afterward. A lot of fathers didn’t come home. Others were stationed overseas. Children get lost …”
I hate that word “lost.” My father didn’t go missing. He isn’t lying in some small part of France that will forever be England. I don’t even know his name.
Joe is still waiting. He’s sitting there, twirling his pen, waiting for Godot. I don’t want to be psychoanalyzed or have my past explored. I don’t want to talk about my childhood.
I was fourteen years old the first time my mother sat down and told me about where I came from. She was drunk, of course, curled up on the end of my bed, wanting me to massage her feet. She told me the story of Germile Purrum, a Gypsy girl, with a “Z” tattooed on her left arm and a black triangle sewn into her rags.
“We looked like bowling balls with sticky-out ears and frightened eyes,” she said, nursing a drink between her breasts.
The prettiest and the strongest Gypsy girls were sent to the homes of the officers in the SS. The next group were used in camp brothels, gang-raped to break them in and often sterilized because the Roma were considered unclean.
My mother was fifteen when she arrived at Ravensbrück, the largest concentration camp for women in the Reich. She was put to work in the camp brothel, working twelve hours a day.
She didn’t go into details but I know she remembered every one of them.
“I think I’m pregnant,” she slurred.
“That’s not possible, Daj.”
“I haven’t had my monthly days.”
“Have you been to see the doctor?”
She looked at me crossly. “Esther tried to make me bleed.”
“Who is Esther?”
“A Jewish angel … but you clung to my insides. You didn’t want to leave. You wanted so much to live.”
Daj was talking about me. I knew this part of the story.
She was three months pregnant when the war ended. She spent another two months looking for her family, but they were all gone—her twin brothers, her mother, her father, aunts, uncles, cousins …
At a displaced persons camp near Frankfurt, a young British immigration officer called Vincent Smith told her she should emigrate. The United States and England were taking refugees if they had identity papers and skills. Germile had neither.
Because nobody would take a Gypsy she lied on the application form and said she was Jewish. So many had perished it was easy to get identity papers in someone else’s name. Germile Purrum became Sofia Eisner, aged nineteen instead of sixteen, a seamstress from Frankfurt—a new person for a new life.
I was born in a rain-swept English town in a county hospital that still had blackout curtains on the windows. She didn’t let me die. She didn’t say, “Who needs another white-haired German bastard with cold blue eyes?” And even when I rejected her milk, puking it down her open blouse (another sign, perhaps, that I was more of him than her), she forgave me.
I don’t know what she saw when she looked in my eyes: the enemy, perhaps, or the soldiers who raped her. I looked as though I owned the world, she said. As though everything in creation would be recast or rearranged to suit me.
I don’t know who I am now. I am either a miracle of survival or an abomination.