‘Why don’t I read to you whilst you dye my hair with this disgusting mixture?’ Dorotha suggested. ‘The skies overTreasure Islandare every colour from gold to indigo.’
Gabriele nodded, appeased, and Dorotha could see the relief in Ava’s eyes.
‘Go, but don’t be too long,’ Mrs Mordkowicz said. ‘I’m going to make fried potatoes and I even have a little sausage meat. I warn you, it’s of dubious origin, but meat is meat.’
Ava escaped, and soon the little girl had forgotten the four walls of her prison as Dorotha read her into the high seas and a story of buried treasure and buccaneers, while Mrs Mordkowicz worked on dying her hair. Short of feeding a child, reading to one was probably the most absorbing and satisfying way to spend an hour of one’s life, Dorotha reasoned, as Gabriele curled up in her lap and listened with her thumb in her mouth. Even Dorotha forgot the horrible concoction Ruth was painting on her head as the delicious smells of frying potatoes wafted through the room.
‘Ta-da,’ Ruth said eventually, finding a small cracked mirror next to a bucket and placing it in front of Dorotha. Dorotha stared at herself, unable to find words.
‘You look like a Spanish piratress,’ Gabriele gasped.
‘What’s a piratress?’ Ruth laughed.
‘A lady pirate of course,’ Gabriele replied, reaching up to touch a strand of Dorotha’s hair.
Dorotha said nothing. Her hair was transformed, and was now closer to black than grey, but it was her eyes and face she found haunting. It had been so long since she’d last registered her appearance. Those with the will to do so used a dirty windowpane as a mirror. Dorotha never had the inclination. She stared at her reflection now, taking in the sharp planes of her cheekbones. Her eyes sunken into their sockets. The putty-pale skin. All her softness had gone. Dorotha didn’t recognise herself, and with that dawned an awful thought. Nor would her sister and friends recognise her either. A part of herhaddied. The desperate quest for survival, that belonged to a new, harder woman. She was all steel and fire now.
Gabriele reached up and curled her arm around her neck, her voice a soft, wet whisper.
‘I think you’re ever so pretty.’
Dorotha smiled for Gabriele’s benefit and pushed away the mirror.
‘Dorotha, you’re going to be late to meet Mr Weiss. Go now!’ ordered Mrs Mordkowicz.
‘But Gabriele . . .’
‘Is perfectly safe with us,’ she insisted.
Dorotha demolished her plate of potatoes, and thirty minutes later approached the northern edge of the ghetto. A pale spring sun was turning the soggy filth of the pavements to dust. Municipal sanitation services were non-existent in the ghetto, as were sewers, and a marshy stench was muscling its way out of dark corners.
This is a mistake, she told herself crossly.I don’t even know the man, much less harbour any romantic notions towards him. I’d rather be back in the basement withTreasure Island.
Then she saw him. Oscar Weiss was sitting in a small patch of sun next to a ramshackle allotment, reading what looked to be a dense piece of historical fiction.
‘Any good?’ she asked.
‘Immeasurably,’ he replied, sitting up as she approached. ‘Reading’s not only an escape, but also a discipline of the mind, wouldn’t you say?’
He squinted up at her, the sun lighting up his deep-set green eyes.
‘The more they reduce us to beasts, the more important it becomes to retain the habits of a civilised existence. Reading about past wars and catastrophes universalises our experience and transcends the misery within the ghetto walls.’
Dorotha burst out laughing, surprising even herself.
‘Not one for small talk, are you?’
A smile curled across his face, creasing his cheeks into dimples. ‘Sorry. This is what the ghetto has done to me.’
‘I suspect you weren’t one for small talk before the ghetto either,’ she said, arching one eyebrow.
‘Yes, you’re probably right,’ he said ruefully.
‘Please, won’t you sit?’ He took off his coat and laid it down on the ground.
‘You look different,’ he said, before realising. ‘The hair.’
‘It’s supposed to make me look less conspicuous to them,’ she whispered, nodding to a German truck as it lumbered mechanically along the edge of the field.
