Before Dorotha had left work, she had ordered Ruth to go straight home and rest, rather than come with her. It was strange, she mused, how easily she had slipped into the role of big sister again. She wouldn’t admit as much to Ruth, but their relationship was assuaging the ache of missing Adela. Nothing could diminish her hunger, though. It was a living thing.
Memories of past meals rose like yeast in her mind constantly.Soft, fluffy white bread. Her mama’s roast chicken with crispy skin. Chewy beigels with dill pickles.She shook away the memories, but it was impossible. Everything always came back to food. It had got so bad that even the early morning frost on the barbed wire reminded her of icing sugar, while the billowing white clouds looked like piles of fluffy creamed potato.
But there was so little food to be had. People were dying every day in the ghetto of starvation and disease. She saw the bodies every morning, laid out on the kerbside and covered in rags or paper for thedoroz?ki, the death cart, to collect. Every timeshe saw a corpse, left out in the open like a discarded paper bag, it was a knife in an open wound. No one could respect the sacredness of the deceased or observe Shiva, the seven days of mourning for the dead. Bodies were buried in the Jewish cemetery with whatever their relatives could find to mark the grave.
Dorotha breathed deeply and thrust out her chin, forcing her mind back to the present. It was such a beautiful Friday evening, and she tried to feast on the colour of the leaves as the early evening September sun filtered through them, turning them from green to gold. It was Shabbat. Before the war, Mama would be lighting the white Sabbath candles at sunset, then Tatus´ would say the special Kiddush prayer, drink from the silver cup of kosher wine and then pass the cup around the table for the family to share. There’d be lively discussion, laughter too, as Dorotha shared stories from the library, and she and her father would debate about what meant more, words or numbers.
Then, the following day, after morning service, she and Adela would be dispatched to fetch the cooked cholent from the baker’s. The memory of those warm cast-iron pots bubbling with meat, barley and beans sent a deep swell of hunger and longing through her. Family and food. Family and food. The words took up a drum beat in her brain.
As she walked further north to Marysin, towards the orphanage, the landscape changed from dense urban to agricultural. Rumour had it that the chairman and his favourites even haddachas, or holiday homes, up here. ‘Holiday homes’ in the ghetto! She must remember to put that in her diary.
Here and there, small vegetable gardens had been dug. Tantalising bunches of spinach, radish and lettuce grew protected by a garden ‘fence’ fashioned from old iron bedsteads, fastened together with stretched-out mattress springs. A Jewish policeman patrolled the borders. How she hoped the producefound its way into the mouths of the children in the orphanage and not the chairman’s plate.
An old man walked past her pushing a baby carriage, filled not with infants but onion bulbs, radishes and carrots. Old man Zelenski and his mobiledzialka –allotment – were a familiar sight around the ghetto. Who could blame him for taking his vegetables to work with him? Food was such a precious commodity in the ghetto, it made sense to guard it like a child.
‘Good evening,’ she greeted him warmly.
Zelenski gave her a toothless smile and plucked her a radish.
She thanked him and tucked the radish in her pocket.
Dorotha knocked on an unassuming door. A young lady called Miss Weiss answered. Dorotha knew little about her, apart from that she had been a teacher in Austria before the war. No one in the ghetto knew much about their fellow inmates’ pasts. No one discussed their old lives. Most were just too busy surviving the new reality, flung together from all corners of Europe in this desolate cage.
‘Dorotha, our librarian, come, come,’ she said, smiling. Dorotha liked Miss Weiss. She was one of those women who seemed to light up a room. She had honey-blonde hair she wore pulled back from her head with a headscarf, and warm green-grey eyes that lit up whenever she saw her.
‘You remind me of my old friend, Joyce,’ Dorotha said on instinct.
‘Was she a scatterbrain also?’ Miss Weiss asked, searching for her glasses before realising they were propped on her head.
‘Yes, actually,’ Dorotha laughed. ‘She could be.’
Miss Weiss led Dorotha along a long, chilly stone corridor to a classroom at the back of the old building.
‘Just to warn you, the children are very excited about your visit today,’ she said, pausing outside the door. ‘I have been trying toteach them algebra this afternoon, but they kept asking when the book lady is coming.’
She swung open the door, and one hundred or so sets of eyes settled on her.
‘Hello, Miss Berkowicz,’ chorused the voices.
‘Hello, children,’ she replied, settling herself on a wooden chair. The room was sparse. Just a blackboard, a little chalk and some mismatched desks and chairs.
‘Did you bring the book?’ asked Anne, a small girl with curious hazel eyes and a determined set to her jaw.
‘Yes, don’t worry,’ Dorotha replied. ‘Now where was I up to?’
‘Page one-twenty-one,’ Anne said, quick as a flash. These children – could she really still call them that when they didn’t occupy childhood any longer? – were fiercely bright.
Dorotha opened the book and began to read.
The children were spellbound from the first page. Misselthwaite Manor and its whispering secrets and thick, ivy-covered stone walls were utterly beguiling to them.
A hundred faces watched her, transfixed, as she stood at the moment in the story when a magical gust of wind blew away the ivy from the door. She even pulled out her key, pretending to be the character in the book.
‘Open it, miss, quickly,’ yelled little Benny Perlman, unable to contain himself. ‘The robin’s telling her to.’
She wanted to draw out the magic and lead these children out of the abyss and into the secret garden. She wanted them to breathe in and smell the fresh scent of the Yorkshire moors, heather and mists, not sour ghetto winds. She read on, hoping to cloak them in the words and fill every part of them with the wonder of the story.
Eventually, she became aware of Miss Weiss hovering at the back of the classroom.
