The question is like fire, sizzling and blistering; it causes her consciousness to fade and recede slightly, into the background, as if repelling the words.
“I don’t know,” Rosalind hears herself saying, as if her conscious self has broken free to take control. “Partly because I felt I owed him something. He brought Georg back to me. We had both been loyal to the führer. In some way I thought that bound us. And that it was something that kept us separate from you.”
Monique stares at her thoughtfully.
“He did bad things,” Monique says.
“So have I,” Rosalind says. She is remembering the last days in the hospital in Berlin, the death of German soldiers. Merciful, she thought at the time, but she knows it was also murder in another form. It makes them equal in a way, her and Erich.
Rosalind studies Monique’s injuries.
“What happened?”
Monique looks at her, her dark brows almost together, her eyes becoming duller at some inner thought, at memories of her perhaps.
“It doesn’t matter now,” says Monique. “The past is the past. We must start once more at the beginning. We must start from now.”
Thoughts filter through: pleading, crying, blood. She remembers Monique with blood dripping down her arms, begging Rosalind to stop. She closes her eyes. “I hurt you,” she whispers. Images disperse, and others enter: Georg on the bed, his back to her, distant, always somewhere else in his mind.
“When did you know about Georg?”
“Before he knew himself, I think,” Monique says.
“I hated how you hung around those clubs. But you saw things that I couldn’t.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“The irony,” says Rosalind. “Georg . . . Erich—”
“I have to go,” Monique says, her head cocked, ear trained on something Rosalind can’t discern. Her hand touches Rosalind’s and she leaves it there a second, her eyes searching Rosalind’s. When Monique pulls her hand away, Rosalind can still feel her hand there, the warmth. She was always warm. And she, Rosalind, always cold. “But I will be back.”
“Why did you never tell me . . . about Georg?” asks Rosalind.
“He made me promise. He knew that you weren’t ready for the truth . . . wanted one day to get the chance to explain. He loved you once, Rosalind. You have to know that.”
But not now.
Monique opens the door, and she is gone, the door bouncing shut, a dull thud as old wood meets old wood.
“I have to tell you things,” says Rosalind quietly when she is gone, but she can’t remember what they are. She shuts her eyes, sinking slightly, imagines the murky depths of the river, but other images consume her thoughts. She flows from dreams to wakening, to delirium, though the episodes are coming less now, and memories appear and are not so quick to disappear.
And surfacing in her mind, those final days after the birth, patches that she can’t quite piece together, followed by another memory that emerges clearly and boastfully above everything else, an introduction to the trauma that she caused. She tries hard, but there is something not right with her, she heard, listening through the wall to her parents’ room. She thinks too much; she thinks too darkly. I don’t think she should be a nurse. She does not have the empathy, the strength of character. Monique would make a better one.
“But I do try, I do,” she pleads to ghosts.
July 1945
Rosalind was in Georg’s house. There were photos on the wall, pennants and silver trophies from athletic competitions, and there was a vase in the shape of a fish, the tail stained in blues and greens, and eyes with each side painted gold. This last one was a present from Monique, something she had bought from a bric-a-brac stall with the money she earned sweeping a café on the corner of their street in Berlin. Georg kept it on his side of the bed.
Rosalind’s first screams during the contractions had sent Georg shrieking and stomping the floor in their attic bedroom. Monique said it was best for Rosalind to stay in the other house, just until after the birth. Monique said that Georg was confused, erratic, and unreachable; it was better to be away. The baby was born in Georg’s childhood bedroom instead, which was sweet, said Monique to make her cousin feel better, a short time before the truth emerged about the fate of the child.
Monique was efficient, quick, comforting, though Rosalind didn’t want her there. She wanted Georg. She wanted her mother then. She had never thought of her mother before, had never leaned on her emotionally. Yvonne was incapable of being leaned on, but it didn’t matter. She had still needed her there.
And then Monique took the child away, and Rosalind wondered if it was because of her cousin that the baby had died. Monique was not looking Rosalind in the eye. She told Rosalind she was sorry it happened. She had tears in her eyes, but Rosalind didn’t believe the sympathy was genuine. Monique also told her she loved her, but that was also a lie, thought Rosalind. She was not there for her. It was always about herself.
Her baby was dead, and she had not yet come to terms with the strange situation she had found herself in. She should be nursing a healthy baby, but instead it was Monique again who was there, always blocking the sunlight.
Monique told Rosalind that she must allow herself to grieve, that coming to terms with losing the baby would allow her to face the future, a future where she could try again, return to some kind of normal. There was no kind of normal! screamed Rosalind inwardly. Not now with her baby dead and Monique back from the dead, where she had imagined her, who had arrived in the weeks before her contractions with a healthy little girl in her own image.
Rosalind looked at Monique who was tired from helping with the birthing, and quite ordinary without the dresses and the makeup and the hats. She looked like a farmer’s wife, a scarf around her head, apron on with stains of Rosalind’s blood. The roles were reversed. It was Rosalind who was claiming the attention finally, but it was attention that she didn’t want.
And she wondered whether she should tell Monique the truth about the near drowning years earlier. How when Monique was first struggling to reach the surface, Rosalind had paused to watch her from the edge before diving into the river to save her. That she had thought, just for a moment, it was the answer to all her problems. If Monique drowned, Rosalind would no longer have to share Georg. But she had dived in and she had saved her, and she wondered then as blood fell between her legs, the skin of her belly still swollen, whether things would have been different, whether Georg would have loved her more.
The morning following the birth, Monique had brought her tea in bed. Rosalind hadn’t slept. The combination of lack of sleep over several nights and the loss of the child had put more fissures in her fragile state of mind. The sadness that had nearly choked her had passed, and she was left with a feeling of numbness. She pinched herself as Monique sat on the bed and spoke of things she did not want to hear. She thought of her mother and father. They were good people, but she had never felt wanted by either of them. They never told her she was loved. And there was the strange irony of Monique, whose parents doted on her, but she had lost them. And she had moved on, stronger than anyone. How different Rosalind’s parents had been compared to how they were after Monique arrived. They were lighter, laughed more, when Monique was around.