The question was out before she had time to stop herself. She knew the answer despite the fact it wasn’t spoken. He was thinking about Monique, worrying about her. She had become his obsession after the war.
Monique can take care of herself, she had wanted to say but couldn’t, because she’d tried that once before, and his reaction was frightening. The mention of her name these days can cause him anxiety and set about events that Rosalind is sometimes unable to control. To keep him somewhat stable, since the war took part of his mind, she has found a solution to his depression and his outbursts. But lately his mood has worsened. Lately he has raged and broken things, frustrated by thoughts and images in his head.
Rosalind rests her head on the side of his pillow to ponder. His mouth is open, suspended with the effects of sleep. There are blue veins around the edge of his jaw and down the side of his neck. With her fingers she traces them. This is his good side, how he looked before his final campaign. On the side that is hidden, there is a puckered red scar that runs from the top left-hand side of his temple to halfway across the side of his head, making a track through his hair.
He stirs; his eyes flutter slightly. His body is warm, and she shifts several inches closer. She wears a lavender-colored silk chemise that finishes just below her knee. He bought it for her as a gift on their wedding day, three years earlier. Apart from her gold wedding ring, it is the only precious item she has. Other things, other jewelry, her collection of books, her parents’ wedding china and silverware, have all been abandoned, and her parents’ life, her life, is now just rubble in a street in Berlin.
Georg opens his eyes and stares at the ceiling, adjusting to the new day. She wants him to look at her, but he doesn’t turn his head.
With her hand she forces his chin toward her, but still his eyes do not find hers. They stare over her shoulder to something his mind doesn’t really see. She lifts herself up on one elbow so that he can look into her eyes. Visual stimulus works the best with Georg, and soon his eyes are focusing as green stares into blue.
She remembers the first morning after they were married. She remembers the first time he looked at her. He must have loved her then. Did he? It was just later when other things got into his head.
She reaches under the cover and slips her hand into his shorts. She rubs gently at first, and his body shifts slightly, his eyes closing involuntarily. He is partially aroused, but she knows that little else will happen. Even though his body reacts, his mind and heart aren’t hers anymore, even in this state. Perhaps they never were.
“I love you,” she says, eyes welling with tears.
And he looks at her vacantly. He doesn’t recognize her, not this morning, and not the ones before.
1933
“Here she is,” said Rosalind’s mother, Yvonne, lips flattened together. It wasn’t said like a genial introduction, but the tone of it, the way the words sank at the end, suggested Monique was something now they all must bear.
Monique, twelve years old, a small face lost in a large mass of dark curls, fists in and out of her eyes, emitting sounds like those of a lonely puppy. Yvonne stood beside Monique, holding her hand and staring at Rosalind under rows of lines and invisible brows, agitated, angry, or disappointed. Rosalind couldn’t be sure exactly which. Her mother was difficult to understand and never good at conflict, or anything that took her away from herself. And that day, it was up to Rosalind to rescue her mother. “Children” were a territory Yvonne preferred not to understand, once confiding to her daughter that she had never planned on any at all.
Rosalind’s father, Max, she believed was somewhat happier at his daughter’s arrival. Rosalind was a good girl, he said often, when she showed him her schoolwork, and these words would come to be highly prized by Rosalind when he came home from a shift on the trams. There was nothing of great substance in the relationship with her father, just more an understanding that she was part of the same enduring grind, attached, the three of them, by the ties of birth.
Why her mother had seemed so bitter at times, Rosalind never really considered, until Monique brought it up when they were some years older. She concluded that there were those who were born with a frown and those born with a smile. And a little after that, Rosalind would realize that she was born with a frown also, that one’s nature was difficult to alter.
“Do you want to see my room?” Rosalind asked her younger cousin, whom she’d not met before that day. She was surprised that Monique could still hear her through the whimpering that had risen to more of a howl. In Rosalind’s bedroom at the back of the house, Monique sat on the spare bed.
“I’m sorry about your parents,” said Rosalind. “They will come back, and you can go home again soon, I am certain.” Monique’s crying lessened, the volume lowering. “Sometimes people only go to prison for a short time.”
But it would prove to be untrue. The incarceration of her parents in Austria, where Monique was from, was permanent. The new government had been imprisoning those who openly opposed the regime, and Gustav and Ada, Monique’s father and mother, were two of them. To add to their crime of dissidence, they were caught helping funnel other objectors out of the country.
Monique at first was seen as an infiltrator, another mouth to feed, and someone who brought with her an undesirable amount of noise. But the silent grudge that Rosalind’s parents held toward their niece slowly disintegrated over time, and they would come to appreciate Monique’s bright personality and lust for life, and her ability to remain herself, untouchable, despite the chaos that Berlin was entering. She would prove a welcome distraction from the gray.
Two years separated the cousins, and Rosalind, who at first liked the idea of looking after Monique, of taking control of her, of shaping someone of her own, quickly realized that her younger cousin needed little nurture.
Her parents’ acceptance of the new situation and Monique’s strength and independence seemed, to Rosalind, to highlight the differences between the two girls, an observation that led her to feel, sometimes, less than. But it was not until the first riverside summer together, with Georg, that Rosalind’s resentment of Monique really began to take hold.
Present-day 1945
Two geese rush toward the grain that Rosalind scatters to the ground. It is a treat that she gives them every so often, in place of the grass she collects from the empty paddocks across the road. Her intention was to breed geese, like her grandmother did, to expand the goose farm. Her grandmother had many geese once and wasted no part of the birds, the flesh and the fat for consuming, and feathers for stuffing linen.
Only these two were here when she arrived after Berlin was taken. The others were likely stolen, the gate to their pen broken, palings taken also. The pair, with their wings clipped, had somehow managed to stay hidden in the woods, and she had repaired the fence and restored their home. More recently she welcomed the connection she had with these two interesting white females. As if their survival had not been a coincidence. As if they had been spared to await her return.
At the back of the enclosure is a small shelter for the geese, and inside here she discovers a miracle. The geese did not lay any eggs over the spring, but inside are two, side by side, as if they conspired, as if they thought of her. She picks up the eggs, kisses each of them, amazed at the size.