‘It’s a castle!’
‘It’s the biggest house I have ever seen!’
Livi hammers at the heavy wooden doors. But no one answers.
‘I don’t think there’s anyone home. Some of you go round the back and see what you find.’
Magda, Livi, Marta and Amelia run towards the back of the house. They return a minute later.
‘The house is open round the back,’ Magda tells them. ‘But, there’s another dead man in the yard.’
The group now gathers around this new dead body.
‘He must have lived here. Look at his clothes, they’re so fancy,’ Livi says.
‘Can we look for some food first?’ Eva cries, plaintively. ‘I’m starving.’
‘No,’ says Cibi, firmly. ‘We’re not animals, to fill our stomachs beside dead bodies. We have to bury him now.’
The girls hunt the outbuildings for shovels, spades, anything that will help them dig the hole as fast as possible. Cibi points to the immaculately manicured lawn beyond, in which a small fig tree blooms with new fruit. ‘That’s the perfect place for him,’ she says.
The girls take turns to dig. Magda finds a wheelbarrow and, together with Livi and two others, they load the body into it. But Livi won’t pull the barrow, the memory of moving Mala to the crematorium still painfully fresh in her mind.
Magda, once again, opens her mouth to recite the Kaddish.
‘But what if he’s not Jewish?’ Marta says.
‘I don’t think it matters anymore what your religion is, not when you’re dead,’ she replies. ‘These are words of comfort, whether you believe in a God or not.’
With heads bowed, the Kaddish is spoken over the grave of an unknown man, by everyone but Cibi.
*
The group gathers at the back door of the house, Cibi holding them there for a moment, while she gathers her resolve.
‘There could be a hundred people hiding in there.’ Marta cannot shake off her fear, and she and Amelia huddle together, visibly shaking.
‘Two hundred,’ says Amelia. She found her cousin on the march and she isn’t about to lose her now.
‘We need food,’ says Livi.
‘We’ll go inside and look around,’ Cibi decides. ‘But I’m pretty sure if there were two hundred people in there they would have heard us by now.’ She can feel its isolation, its neglect.
She leads the way into a kitchen the size of her house in Vranov. She was right – people have left in a hurry: there are still dishes in the sink, bread only recently gone stale on the long table in the centre of the room. The girls perform their routine of opening cupboards, rifling through drawers. Magda finds a small cache of preserved fruit and vegetables, a few cans of fish and processed meat. And then Marta and Amelia find the prize: a large walk-in pantry, with jars upon jars of food on the shelves. They cry in relief.
The girls gather at the kitchen door which will lead them into the rest of the house.
‘We stay together,’ says Cibi.
They walk, open-mouthed, through the luxurious rooms. Living rooms and libraries, studies and boot rooms. Livi opens one door to find a lift, but no one is prepared to try it, instead they ascend the staircase by foot. There are just too many bedrooms, thinks Cibi. How many people live in this house? The beds are draped with opulent silks, while thick wool rugs cover the polished parquet boards. Gold taps adorn the elegant bathrooms and the girls leave muddy boot prints all over the pale marble floors. They enter walk-in wardrobes, the walls lined with shelves housing soft jumpers, shirts. Shimmering dresses dangle from tasselled hangers. In the chests of drawers they find underwear, which the girls model against their own bodies, giggling, before carefully replacing them.
And then they find the mirror. Standing in front of the ornate frame above the fireplace in the master bedroom, the ten girls pause to absorb what has become of them. Livi and Cibi barely recognise themselves. The Polish cousins begin to weep, and Eva buries her face in Magda’s arms.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ whispers Cibi, and in silence the girls go back downstairs.
They make for the dining room, pausing to run their hands along the surface of the long table, around which are arranged twenty elaborately upholstered chairs. The sideboards reveal an impossible array of glassware, whose drawers contain fine silver cutlery. At the far end of the room the French windows open out onto a small courtyard with a beautiful lawn extending into the formal gardens.
‘I haven’t sat in a room at a table for so long,’ Eliana says, quietly. Nine heads nod up and down. No one makes a move to pull out a chair.