Bone and Blood (14 page)

‘Wowee,' she said when the wave subsided, ‘Thanks for the gift. Finger fucking good.'

They laughed and she felt safe in the cocoon around them.

She reached over and slid the zip down on his hard on, loosening his trousers down to get at his balls. She felt his hand then on her neck, gentle pressure down. Oh God, she'd never given a blow job before. What do you do with your teeth? Surprising soft-hardness in her mouth and it was working for him as she sucked. No way was she going to have spunk in her mouth though. Using both hands for pressure. Good luck rather than judgement she grinned to herself as he came all over her hands.

And so it went on from there. She told herself she really did love him. She fantasised about their affair going on forever in secret. Or maybe he would leave Anne and they would live together. She brought condoms and got him into the back seat of the car. She felt triumph when he suggested a hotel. When did it start to feel sleazy and cheap? Easy answer. When he offered to pay the weekend in London for the abortion. Brown envelope. Film star role in B-movie over. Comic-strip sex affair. Too old for pure sex he said. She didn't want him to talk about love or did she? The whore feeling distracting from any last bit of pleasure. Without the sex there was nothing. If only Maeve hadn't found out. Using the same hotel was a mistake. Ireland is so fucking small.

Matt was great cover for the assignations although she never told him who it was. He didn't ask. Talked instead about how gay men could give some insight into the pain of splitting sexual relationships from emotional commitment. The unbearable mirror-image of the male tendency to separate taken to the extreme. Trapped in a cycle of sexual compulsion. Consume sexy meat chunk and shit it out again. Flush the consequences down the pan.

She thought of asking Matt to go with her for the abortion but he was really busy. A dilemma solving itself when Mum guessed and made it their female secret. Better for her not to know the father she said. Did she guess? Hold my hand, Mummy. Abortion clinical but feeling sordid. How to shake that off? After the split, Matt told her to go for connection. First connect with yourself. Use freedom to make choices not dance the puppet on a string of projections.

She'd miss Matt even more when she was back in Dublin. He'd be in Venezuela for six months working on some project for school children. She was so mad when he told her that he was going – she refused to take any interest in the details. He still emailed her but the messages had got shorter and shorter. Matthias would be really interested in hearing Brigitte's story. She would wait until he came back to tell him her idea of creating a graphic novel.

Brigitte describing Katharina as ‘the unborn' made her curious about Katharina's father. The aunt came back to Berlin in April before the war was over. She vaguely remembered Gran saying something once about Katharina's father being an American soldier. But so far there was no mention of American soldiers. Aisling's parents had never so much as mentioned the fact that the aunt was never married until that day when they were talking about going to the funeral. Her father said then that Aunt Biddy would have had the child adopted if she was in Ireland. Of course everybody would have seen it as a big scandal sixty years ago but even Gran was cool about it now. Maybe the young Biddy was raped. Maybe she had several lovers. Were they Jews or Nazis – soldiers or prisoners or what? Whatever there was, there was something to hide. Aisling was determined to worm the truth out of the aunt. Her graphic novels needed reality not fantasy. Reality had horror enough and the green bomb was a better image than any fictitious monster from another world. .

Kaffee und Kuchen to-day – because Aisling was here. She'd better watch she didn't put on weight. She liked being skinny and usually she could eat whatever she liked. One good thing about not having the baby was keeping her own shape. She wasn't much into sweet stuff but the coffee and cake ritual here was quality. As she went through the routine of bathroom and hand-washing, she tried now to remember a funny rhyme that Matthias had taught her about Kant and cake. She'd learnt it at the time but she should have written it down. Yola stayed to serve the coffee and cake but wouldn't sit to eat it with them. Biddy insisted she take a great wedge of it with her.

‘Lovely cake. I must get the recipe for Mum,' Aisling hoped her insincerity didn't show too much. Advise Mum to find a source of good German cakes would be more likely.

‘Käsekuchen. Yola made it from a recipe of Anna's. Anna spent hours repeating those recipes with me so that I could remember them. They were like bedtime stories, told again and again. She made me picture the ingredients in my head and reach for them one by one. Käsekuchen. First of all make the pastry case for the base. It's richer than the pastry we make and you can put egg in it if you have it but it is flat. She put dried peas on it to keep it flat when you bake it. I forgot once and got a bowler hat instead of a base. It made Katharina laugh and we ate it anyway. Anna made me memorise the exact quantities of the filling – the mixture of quark, sugar and egg yolks whipped together with egg whites. I see her yet insisting on the lightness of those egg whites. Standing there demonstrating it with her skinny arms. Grating a bit of orange peel and lemon peel when you can get them. She folded her arms to wait patiently until it turned a golden brown colour on top. I waited a long time to cook my first Käsekuchen but I never forgot how to do it. I invited Anna's ghost to share it with Adelheid, Katharina and me. It tasted better than any cake I had ever eaten in Ireland. Those women were great cooks. They even managed to put together something from nothing. There is no cake that tastes as good as the cake Anna and I ate one day together to celebrate her eightieth birthday. The other women made her a ‘cake' of crumbs they collected. It was bound together with some butter and sugar that Dorothea had begged from the house where she cleaned and looked after the children and it had even some children's sweets on top. It was tiny –the whole ‘cake' not much bigger than a cigarette packet and they all refused to share it with her but she insisted that I have some. She said it tasted better shared. A true Christian.

‘Kaffee und Kuchen. That was the dream that kept me going in the Lager and Anna was the perfect companion for it. She must have been a great baker – no it's not baker is it? What do you call someone who bakes cakes – is it the same?'

‘Maybe pastry chef or is there a word for someone who does patisserie?'

‘Yes or gateau. They still don't bake great cakes in Ireland even with all the wealth now. Our word ‘cake' doesn't really cover everything like that here. They make a difference between a ‘torte' – lots of eggs and cream and very elaborate usually. The word, ‘Kuchen' is often used for something that's got fruit in it but eggs, flour and sugar too. None of this airy faery spongy stuff that we call cake or the fruit cake solid as a rock for special occasions.'

Aisling smothered her yawn. She wasn't interested in cake recipes. She needed more about the horrors of the camp. Real evil to lay her devils to rest. Horrors of war to inspire a graphic montage. Composing a holistic image from fragments of memory. Not too many words.

‘So was Anna a Jew?'

‘No, I told you, a true Christian.She was what we call a
Jehovah's Witness.'

‘So why was she there?' Aisling still had not winkled out the reason for Brigitte being in the camp. Choose the moment. Maybe this was a lead in.

‘The Jehovah's Witnesses were one of the first groups to stand up to Hitler. Anna was taken to the camp in 1940. They wouldn't work at anything to support war and they wouldn't give the Hitler salute. Everyone says they are fanatics but maybe you needed to be a bit of a fanatic to survive the Lager. Even in the camp they wouldn't work in any factories that made weapons for the war. They worked in Siemens.

‘From what Anna said, the camp that she arrived in was a different place from the one I arrived in. First of all it was only sixteen wooden blocks, and a building that housed the kitchen, baths, and offices. The ‘bunker', the camp prison, was there from the start and it didn't change much by all accounts. Many of the houses – the villas and apartments on the outside of the camp for the women guards and SS – were already finished. The prisoners worked on building more blocks and more houses. By the time I arrived, the Ferienlager was a memory. All I saw was mud and cold – even the blissful snow when it came seemed to get dirty quickly. All of the blocks overflowed with people.'

‘I read in one of Katharina's books that Polish and Germans made up more than half the inmates if you included the German Jews who were the third largest group.'

‘Katharina searched always for facts. Anna was German but not German enough for the Third Reich. We were women. Jews. Germans. French. Polish. Italians, Russian, Czechs. There were a few men too but I never saw the men or women in the political block where it was more like a prison than a camp.'

‘So where was the camp?

‘So near Berlin and yet so far. When we first heard talk about the camps, people called them ‘arbeitslager' or ‘workcamp'. Maybe that was how it was meant to be at first. Who knows? I heard tell of other camps worse than ours. I cannot imagine what those places were like and I don't want to. You can't come back from hell easily once you have been there. Our place was a work camp but for slave gangs. Like machines, some of them. I was young and strong enough myself but found it hard to keep pace when they put me on the building work. Bricks passing from hand to hand and we daren't stop. The woman beside me fell one day. I had a choice to reach further for my brick or let it fall on her. I hated the big beast of a woman on the other side of the fallen bundle of bones between us. She kept the bricks coming at the same speed, hand to hand. It was my first lesson in learning to hate everyone there – starting with hating myself for not doing anything to stop her.'

‘And the fallen woman?'

'Many ways to fall in that place. The guards picked her up. Punishment block I suppose. I never saw her again. Probably one of the many who died that winter. If it wasn't for Anna. I would never have survived. Anna, Anna, Anna. The first glimmer of dawn has never been so beautiful for me before or since. Anna – so good but thank God not completely perfect. Her faults made her human. No-one could hate Anna. That little bad-tempered bag of bones was closer to an angel than any fat cherub. She taught me to see the light of day as a gift of God. It was up to us whether we opened our eyes and hearts to it. She tried to make me believe our suffering was our ticket to heaven. After one whole night and day standing in temperatures below zero after some trivial ‘sin' I can't even remember now, I was ready to drop but they kept us there another two nights. The Bifos looked after each other. When a woman fainted, somehow the others on both sides got their shoulders under her arms, her feet hardly touching the ground and made it look like she was standing until she came round again. How long could we stand it? Longer than we thought we could. I couldn't feel my legs they were so numb and my arms but somehow I could stamp some life back into them. So many rules and regulations, even when the place was falling to bits. They were used to the blokowa making them suffer for nothing.'

Aisling repeated ‘Blokowa and Bifos?

‘Bifos was one of the nicknames for the Jehovah's Witnesses. They were more Christian than anyone else when it came to the push but the French were Anna's weak point. She was so Christian to most people – even the asocials – but the French! She hated them. All the Bifos were impatient with the French women. They said the French women had Communism and workers on their fancy tongues but they were too refined for hard work. Many of the Bifos were plain country women used to farm work – not that unlike what I had come so far to escape. They didn't fear hard work just as long as it wasn't work for war. Polish women despised the
bibelforszerki
as they called them or Bibelki for short.
Bibelforszerki
was the Polish for
Bibelforscherin,
which
was the name the guards used for them – because they knew the Bible so well.
Anna said that the Polish women were jealous of the privileges and the principles. Many Bifos worked in the homes of the guards as nannies or housemaids. They had special privileges and a small source of extra food. Never stolen of course because, unlike all the rest of the camp, the Jehovah Zeugen did not steal.

‘Many of the Polish women prisoners were
Blockälteste
or ‘blokowa' as they all came to be called – so many of the heads of the block who kept the other prisoners in line were Polish and of course a blokowa had privileges. Many Polish blokowa were especially hard on Bifos. Anna laughed at them, “Maybe they are jealous of our principles”. It was easy to stir up one lot of women against another. Even the Bifos had very little time for the asocials. I was lucky to wear the red badge. Most foreigners were given political status. Even luckier to be with the lavender Bifos.'

Asocials, prostitutes, petty criminals, French intellectuals. Polish. German country women. Lesbians. What a mix! All at each other's throats. Hard to take in. Itchy fingers on the pencil stub. Banned. Not allowed. Itchy fingers to tell it like it was. Martyrs, heroines, murderers. A graphic novel for Brigitte? Matt would like it.

‘So Anna had a lavender badge?' Aisling prompted.

‘I've always loved lavender since. Anna told me that she had more wonderful visions of heaven there beyond any dreams before. The lesson for her was that just as evil has no limits, so good has no limits and we would one day find eternity in God's love. She helped me believe there still might be a God but he was not the God I learnt about in Ireland. My own belief in the God that I had been brought up with was not strong enough to survive that place.'