As I listen, I’m reminded of the story of ‘The Dream’ from the Thousand and One Nights. ‘So you didn’t need to seek your future elsewhere after all? It was right here, all along, just as the dreamseller had seen.’
Josie chuckles. ‘You know how the story goes, don’t you, Zoe? That’s right – and secretly I was relieved. I didn’t want to have to face leaving Casablanca again. Having already gone through that twice was more than enough. In any case, once the Americans were here everyone was even more preoccupied with fighting the war. I felt safe and happy with Kenza and Nina, who were all the family I had left, so here I stayed.
‘Nina spent hours reading to me while my body and my mind mended. She’d go on the bike to the library and take out books.’
I nod. ‘I saw your name recorded in the ledger at the library. I thought it might be Nina.’
She chuckles. ‘I think we reread every single one of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels during that time and it was a comforting distraction for me. Something familiar when my mind wasn’t able to make much sense of anything else. My memory seemed to be full of holes.’
‘Is that why you didn’t tell Kenza where you’d hidden the journal and box so she could fetch them from your old house?’ I ask her.
She nods. ‘I was in the hospital for so long and my mind shut out a lot of what happened – there were places I just couldn’t reach, even though I kept trying because I had a sense of certain important things being missing. Besides, the house was very soon let to new tenants and Kenza no longer worked there because she was so busy caring for me, so even if I had remembered it would have been difficult to gain access and retrieve my things.’ Once more she pats the cover of the journal, which lies in her lap. ‘It’s been wonderful reading this all over again. You’ve given me back so many happy memories and reminded me what my papa and I did. We weren’t just helpless little white mice, after all.’
‘And Felix? What happened to him?’
She smiles broadly. ‘He and his parents got out in the end. They went to America. And guess what? He became an orthodontist! He spent the rest of his days fixing people’s smiles, having had his own fixed first, of course. I have a photo here, look.’
She rifles through a folder of letters and postcards and draws out a photo printed on to a card along with the words Happy Hanukkah from the Adlers! In it, a grey-haired man stands with his arm around a smiling woman and they’re flanked by three children, all with perfect white American teeth. ‘Sadly, he passed away a couple of years back. His wife still writes occasionally, though. They visited – when was it, Nina? About ten years ago? That’s right, it was a special trip they made for the millennium. He wanted to show his wife and kids where he’d been in the war years. They retraced the whole journey, from Vienna to Casablanca.’
We talk for hours, and the years seem to fall away as Josie and Nina relive the time that marked the end of their childhood. Alia sits beside me on one of the settees, entranced, watching them laughing together and becoming more animated as they dig up more of their memories.
‘It’s wonderful, seeing the two of them like this,’ she says. ‘Josie’s mind seems to have grown stronger just in the past few days, ever since she got her journal back. You can see the girls they once were, can’t you?’
The two friends sit close, heads together as they pore over another page, recalling how Felix tried to teach them to juggle. ‘Can you still do that?’ Alia asks them. ‘Here, have a go.’ She takes three oranges from a bowl on a low table.
Josie’s hands are stiff, her fingers bent into talons, and she fumbles the fruit, laughing as they roll across the mosaic tiles of the floor. But Nina hasn’t lost the knack and we applaud her, cheering loudly.
Later, when Josie has grown tired, I help her upstairs to her room. She sinks into her chair with a sigh. ‘How annoying the side effects of ageing can be! I’ll have to practise my juggling and see if I can improve. Still, I shouldn’t complain. Growing old is certainly better than the alternative, as they say.’
She’s making light of it, but I’m reminded again of her lost family. ‘I hope you won’t mind my asking you this, but did you ever give the names of Annette and your mother to the ocean?’
Her expression grows serious again. ‘No, I never did. I was too unwell for a very long time and somehow I’ve never got around to it.’ She fixes me with her clear green gaze, reading the things I keep hidden beneath the surface. Then she reaches out and takes my hand in hers, the tips of her fingers very lightly stroking the sorest patches. Her touch is cooling and it feels as if she’s drawing the heat out of my burning skin. She continues, ‘When I was so badly injured, and Kenza brought me home here to recover, I spent many hours with the dreamseller. She had the time to sit with me, to talk to me and to listen. She helped heal many of my wounds – the ones on the inside as well as the external ones. She taught me a lot, telling me her stories, enabling me to see life in a way that would help me be able to bear my pain. I asked her whether she thought it would be possible for me to become a dreamseller myself one day and she smiled. She had a smile that lit up her face, you see, transforming the ravages that life had wrought on her features into something truly beautiful. She made me feel that my ruined face, too, had its own beauty. And then she told me that I already had the power to become a dreamseller, not just because I had stories of my own to tell but also because I could hear people. Being a dreamseller is a two-way process, you see. But she didn’t just mean that I was a good listener, she meant that I could really hear what it was people were trying to say, even when their words were saying something else.’