‘That guy, I hope he’s dead,’ says Livi, bitterly. ‘But yes, I wouldn’t have cared what Mumma or anyone said, and I would probably have got myself killed.’
‘Well, I guess I should be glad I was the one who got left behind then.’
‘But then you arrived fat and strong, Magda,’ teases Livi, and then she’s serious again – ‘and thank God. For how else would we have survived the marches if you weren’t?’
*
Magda and Livi receive word from Cibi that she is pregnant again, and Yitzchak asks a friend to drive him and the sisters to the farm. Soon there will be three Meller children, Livi thinks. These new babies will be born against the backdrop of the national ambition to make this country into a prosperous and cultured Jewish homeland, in which they will play a part.
‘Hurry up and marry, Livi,’ Cibi tells her. ‘We want to fill our houses with babies.’
‘I’m not marrying someone just to give your children another cousin,’ Livi says, indignant.
‘I’m not suggesting that’s the only reason, kitten,’ says Cibi. ‘But you love Ziggy, don’t you?’
‘I don’t know!’ snaps Livi.
Cibi looks at Magda. ‘Is she OK?’
‘I’m right here, Cibi, you can ask me yourself.’
‘Oh my God, what’s wrong with you?’ Magda says. ‘Is it Ziggy? Is something wrong?’
Suddenly, Livi is crying. ‘I’m sorry,’ she sobs. ‘I’m not unhappy, just .?.?. just confused.’ Livi sits on the sofa, a sister either side of her, each with a hand on her back.
Cibi is back on familiar territory now: she knows how to comfort Livi; hasn’t she done it before, and in worse places than her own house in the promised land?
‘Confused?’ says Magda. ‘Will you tell us what’s happened?’
‘Nothing has happened,’ says Livi. ‘But it is about Ziggy. More than once now, whenever we talk about the camps, he says he shouldn’t even be complaining when we suffered so much.’
‘It’s not a competition,’ says Cibi, frowning.
‘That’s what I said.’
‘Livi, listen to me,’ says Cibi, suddenly serious. ‘From what you’ve told us about Ziggy’s story, it’s obvious he was on his own – he didn’t have his brothers around to help make sense of what was going on.’
‘That’s right,’ says Magda. ‘You two had each other and then I joined you; one way or another, we went through it together.’
‘Maybe he feels guilty,’ says Cibi.
‘Guilty?’ wonders Livi.
‘Well, if he feels his experience wasn’t as bad as ours, then maybe somewhere, deep down, he believes it should have been – God knows there are some terrible stories out there. He probably thinks he got away with something he shouldn’t have.’
*
That night, long after her sisters have left and while Mischka is putting Karol to bed, Cibi gets into bed herself and closes her eyes. The exchange with her sisters about Ziggy’s possible guilt has triggered a powerful memory in Cibi, one that she wishes wouldn’t visit her so often.
However hard she tries to put their faces out of her mind, they come unbidden to her.
Warm in her bed now, Cibi thinks back to that night in Birkenau when – shivering in their bunk, the night she and Livi had decided to kill themselves before the cold took them, the night they were saved by a girl they didn’t know and who they never met again – the girl had pulled the blankets off a couple in another bunk to give to them.
The next morning the girls had been dead, their bodies curled around one another in a bid to eke out the warmth that never came.
Maybe the girls had already been dead when their blankets were snatched away, but Cibi will never know. Cibi didn’t steal those blankets, but she accepted them.
Does this make her complicit?
Cibi turns over, restlessly, in her bed now. A week ago, at the baker’s in town, shopping for challah and buns, she caught sight of two teenage girls in the kitchen at the back of the shop: the baker’s daughters, helping their mother after school. They had just pulled a tray of tins from the oven and were delighted with the golden loaves and pale sponges. They had fallen into a hug, and there was something about their embrace that had sent Cibi straight back to that chill morning. Arms looped around each other’s backs, chins nestled into shoulders, eyes wide open, they had adopted the self-same posture as the dead girls. Cibi had shivered, turning away without buying a loaf and hurrying home. That afternoon, she had retrieved her mother’s candlesticks and filled them with new wax tapers which she lit in memory of the dead girls, all the while knowing the gesture was about assuaging her guilt.