The Paradise Ghetto Page 5

  During the night, Julia has concluded that she can’t get out of this camp. There is clearly no kind of escape. Between the Nazis and the collaborating Dutch they have set up what is obviously a watertight system. She knows enough about how life works – if you can’t escape the system you have to work it. During the night, that’s what she decided to do.

  Though it is such a dismal system. The food, the camp. A book would be a way of leaving it behind.

  But Julia could never write a book. She has always thought she would like to, has often scribbled random thoughts in a diary, stupid and bad little poems, or descriptions of beautiful things she saw – but the notion that she might write a book? It’s absurd. Outrageous.

  If this is what she is thinking, what she says is, ‘We’d need a lot of paper. And pencils or pens. Where would we get all that?’

  ‘When I went into hiding I took some notebooks with me. They were really just about the only thing I took.’

  Again Julia’s mouth goes first, opening up a conversation she doesn’t at all want.

  ‘How long were you in hiding for?’

  ‘More than two years.’

  ‘My God. In what kind of place?’

  ‘A corner of an attic. The people who hid me built a sort of tiny room there. On one side of it – where the roof was highest – you could stand up.’

  ‘And you stayed in that place for over two years?’

  Suzanne nods.

  Julia is appalled. ‘Did you come out at all?’

  ‘At first no. The people hiding me – they were an old couple – were too afraid that somebody might see me. But it became impossible. I can endure a lot...’

  There is something about these words that resonates with Julia. Suzanne continues.

  ‘But I was becoming weak, my muscles were wasting away from so little exercise. So I persuaded them to let me come out. At night. Just for a little while.’

  Julia can see from Suzanne’s face that she is becoming shaky at the memory.

  ‘Eventually, every night, I would come out for a little while, go down into the house. I would just walk around – from one room to the next – endlessly. That nearly made us all crazy. Can you imagine it, just walking round a house from one room to another? Over and over again. Hundreds of times.’

  Julia tries to imagine it. It occurs to her that there are many different ways that life can be unspeakable.

  Suzanne has told Julia she is twenty. Julia looks at her now and all Julia can see – with the glasses and the pale face – is a fragile little girl who needs to be held. She is just a child, regardless of her university education. She has seen so little of the world despite all her travels.

  ‘Sometimes, when they thought their neighbours were away, I was allowed out into their garden. Only at night of course. I can still remember how it felt to be out in the air. Breathing was like drinking wine, the air felt like silk on my skin. But in the end, I think that’s what gave me away. There was a boy about my age next door. He heard me and started to call over the wall, asking who was there. I froze.’

  It is as though Suzanne is reliving what happened.

  ‘I crept back inside as quietly as I could. But the next day he called round and asked to see me. The old couple swore blind that there was nobody else in the house but he insisted he had heard somebody. Soon after that they came for me.

  ‘In some ways it was a relief. The worst part was that I wasn’t doing anything – I wasn’t running away or fighting or anything. At least you did something. You lived every day. I was hardly living at all. I just waited. Like a cornered animal waiting for the hunter.’

  Julia sees a small frightened rabbit cowering in a hedgerow.

  ‘So anyway, I filled one notebook while I was there.’

  ‘With a book?

  ‘No, not a book. Short stories. My thoughts – a kind of diary. Things I would do after the war. Lists of the things I would eat. Places I would go. Anything really. Anyway, I left it behind, and hopefully I’ll be able to pick it up when the war ends. I was ready to start a new one and managed to bring it with me. There are two hundred and forty pages in it. If we write small we could write a book.’

  Suzanne looks into Julia’s eyes. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I’ve never written anything before,’ says Julia and now, suddenly, she feels small and frightened.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Well, you know, just childish things. Stupid things.’

  ‘If you can read, you can write,’ Suzanne announces, as thought that were the end of the matter.

  Then she adds, ‘Oh please, Julia, say that you will. I’m going to do it by myself anyway but it would be so much more fun to do it with somebody else. And anyway, can’t you see – there’s a reason why we’ve been thrown together.

  There’s no reason. It’s just an accident. Chance.

  ‘This is obviously the reason. What do you say?’

  Julia is astonished at what Suzanne is proposing. The audacity of it. In this terrible place, in these circumstances, that she would even think up such an idea, much less voice it. And that she would ask Julia to be a part of it. In some ways that’s the most extraordinary thing of all.

  There seems no way out. And anyway, Julia is actually very taken with the idea, even though simultaneously, she is daunted – no, overwhelmed – no, terrified – at the prospect.

  Suzanne looks at her. Suzanne has pushed her glasses up onto her head, so there are just her blue eyes framed in the blonde hair. She is smiling.

  ‘But you know how to do it – you were learning it, in university. I know nothing about –’

  ‘I’ve only ever written short stories before – or assignments for my professors. This would be the first time I’d tried to write a book. We’d both have to learn. We’d learn as we went along. We’d help each other. Come on, Julia.’

  Julia feels tremendously inadequate at the thought of doing this with somebody who’s been to university. But Suzanne’s eyes are warm and her smile is inviting. And there is something else in her face – a frailness, even a vulnerability. Maybe Julia will be able to contribute something to this, instead of being just an incompetent passenger. After all, she has experience of the world.

  ‘All right,’ says Julia, ‘I’ll give it a try. But you have to swear that you’ll tell me if what I’m writing is no good. I don’t want to hold you back or ruin your book.’

  ‘It’s our book, Julia. And anyway, if you’re a reader, you know good writing when you see it. You’ll know if what you’re doing isn’t good enough. You won’t need me to tell you. And you also have to tell me when mine’s not up to scratch.’

  The thought hadn’t occurred to Julia.

  ‘All right,’ she says. ‘I will.’

  Suzanne extends her hand. Julia takes it and they shake.

  ‘So when do we start?’ asks Julia.

  ‘We start right now,’ says Suzanne.

  ‘Oh,’ Julia says, hesitantly. ‘But how?’

  ‘Well, we’ve got to have’ – Suzanne counts the items off on her fingers – ‘characters, action, setting, and atmosphere. How about we start with the setting?’

  ‘All right,’ says Julia and an idea immediately occurs to her. ‘How about a big hotel. A luxury hotel. Since lots of people would be coming and going, we would have scope for lots of different characters.’

  Suzanne considers this for a moment and then says, ‘That’s a really good idea.’

  Julia is pleased – and not only that, but she was often in such hotels with her parents when she was younger. She’ll have lots of information about them. Maybe there’ll be stories and people she’ll be able to remember if she thinks hard enough.

  ‘And we’d be able to talk about food,’ she adds. ‘Beautiful food. Lots of it.’

  ‘That’d be nice,’ Suzanne says. ‘So – a hotel. What century?’

  ‘Just before the war?’ Julia ventures. ‘The thirties?’

  ‘Makes sense,’ sa
ys Suzanne. ‘We both lived through that time so we wouldn’t have to do much research. A hotel in Holland?’

  ‘What if we just say somewhere in Western Europe?’ suggests Julia. ‘That should be all right, shouldn’t it?’

  Suzanne agrees.

  ‘So that’s the setting,’ says Julia. She holds up four fingers, then lowers her little one. ‘That leaves characters, action, atmosphere,’ though she’s not sure exactly what ‘atmosphere’ is. She asks Suzanne. That’s another thing about Julia. She doesn’t mind admitting that she doesn’t know something. She tries to learn and learn quickly. Most other people seem to see not knowing things as a weakness but Julia sees it as a skill. The way she thinks about it is that it means she’s expert in becoming expert. How stupid other people are not to see this.

  ‘What kind of book we’re going to write,’ Suzanne explains, pushing a stray strand of her hair back behind her ear. ‘You know. Whether it’s a love story or a detective story. Serious or funny. Happy ending or sad. Those sorts of things.’

  Julia likes the way Suzanne is explaining everything. She doesn’t come across as some kind of know-it-all.

  This one takes them quite a time to sort out. They do it by elimination. Finally, Suzanne says, ‘What if we wrote a murder mystery? Set in the hotel.’

  ‘That sounds really difficult,’ says Julia. ‘You know – we’d have to figure out all the twists and turns in the plot and keep the reader guessing.’

  ‘But that would be part of the fun, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it would be,’ she says. Then she asks, ‘And is it going to be a serious book or funny?’

  ‘Well, murder’s pretty serious,’ says Suzanne.

  ‘But that doesn’t mean it all has to be serious.’

  ‘That’s true. But it’s very hard to write stuff that’s actually funny.’

  ‘But that would be part of the fun, wouldn’t it?’ echoes Julia.

  Suzanne looks into her eyes and laughs. ‘We can but try. So – we have the setting and the atmosphere. Now we just need characters and action – the plot.’

  ‘That’s most of the story really. Isn’t it?’ says Julia.

  ‘It is,’ says Suzanne.

  The two girls have been doing all of this while walking around the open space between the huts. Dusk is coming on now and with it an intense, lung-searing cold.

  ‘Maybe we should sleep on all that,’ says Suzanne and that is what they decide to do.

  The first Julia knows there is something very different about this day is when she gets up to go to the washroom sometime before dawn. The queue is far longer than usual, extending out the door, and there is the sound of somebody puking inside. By the time it’s her turn, the bowl is overflowing and the floor is awash with urine and vomit.

  After peeing, she goes back to bed and falls into a deep sleep. When she wakes, the sounds are very different from the ones she has become used to. There is a deathly silence about the place. The normal morning bustle is missing. People speak in whispers. Even the children aren’t capering about as they normally do. And there is a smell that Julia knows very well. It is the smell of fear.

  Today, they discover, is the day that the list of those to be transported is to be posted up. It usually happens in the evening.

  ‘Pretty girls like you should be able to get off the list,’ a woman tells them. ‘The rate is one week’s postponement. If I were you, college girl, I’d take off the glasses.’

  ‘What did she mean?’ Suzanne asks Julia as soon as they are alone. ‘And how did she know – calling me “college girl”, I mean?’

  ‘Maybe you just look like a student with the glasses.’

  ‘And what was the thing about the postponement?’

  Julia tells her.

  ‘My God, that’s terrible,’ Suzanne says.

  If you only knew.

  While they wait for the list, people don’t know whether they will be staying or going. Some try to go about their business as normal. Others gather their meagre belongings together on their beds, laying them out as though packing for a holiday. But nobody actually packs as that would be to invite calamity. Some people are unable to eat and give away their potato soup. Anxiously, Julia and Suzanne ask several people where the transports go but while nobody can tell them, they all reply with the same thing – that it’s definitely nowhere good. And they tell blood-chilling stories of couples separated by the transports, children and parents torn apart, babies taken from their mothers, the separation of aging husbands and wives.

  Julia and Suzanne had hoped to get on with their book today but the mood of raw terror that hangs over the camp takes hold of them too and means they are unable to focus on it. If people can be affected in this way, they reason, then whatever happens with these transports must be very, very bad. Julia finds she can hardly speak. Instead her thoughts go inwards. She is very frightened.

  ‘Let’s go out in the air,’ says Suzanne.

  Once outside they begin to walk – it is the only way to keep the cold at bay.

  ‘Have you heard of Boudica?’ asks Suzanne.

  Julia feels like she is choking. She manages to say ‘no’.

  ‘One summer my parents took me to a dig – an archaeological dig – in England. They told me about Boudica.’

  ‘What is it?’ asks Julia.

  ‘It’s not a “what is it?” – it’s a “who was she?”,’ replies Suzanne. ‘In 60 AD the Romans had occupied Britain. They were just like the Germans – invading places, taking the land and all the wealth, enslaving people, torturing, killing. Boudica was the queen of one of the British tribes, the Iceni. She led a revolt against the Romans.’

  ‘Good for her,’ says Julia.

  ‘She and her army attacked cities, burned them, killed many, many Romans and their collaborators.’

  ‘And she freed the British?’

  Suzanne shook her head. ‘Sadly, she didn’t. Eventually the Romans defeated her. Maybe she was killed in the last battle, maybe she killed herself afterwards. Nobody knows exactly what happened to her. But the reason I’m telling you this is that, when I first went into hiding, when I’d only been there a few days, I was in shock. I was thinking that I would never be able to survive this. I mean, I didn’t even know how long it was going to go on for. Maybe I would grow old in that attic. If I hadn’t been discovered, I’d still be there and who knows for how much longer.

  ‘But then I remembered Boudica. The reason that she revolted was that Romans flogged her in public and raped her daughters.’

  At this Julia shudders – actually, physically shudders. If Suzanne notices, she doesn’t say anything. Instead she continues.

  ‘I decided that she would be my heroine – that if I ever felt afraid or like giving up, I would remember Boudica. I started to talk to her. It became like she was there with me in the tiny attic. And I asked her to stay with me.’

  Suzanne’s face and eyes have become distant. She is back in the hiding hole in the attic. But suddenly she appears to return from wherever she was.

  ‘This must sound very silly.’

  ‘No, not at all,’ says Julia, who is glad Suzanne is talking to her like this. She finds it’s helping with her own fear.

  ‘Is she with you now?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes, she’s with me now. But you know, in some ways Julia – you remind me of Boudica.’

  ‘Me?’ says Julia in astonishment. ‘How? Why?’

  ‘Because you did something. You fought back. You were brave.’

  Julia has never thought of it like this.

  ‘I just carried on working,’ she says. ‘Trying to make enough to eat and pay the rent.’

  But Suzanne ignores this. She says, ‘You asked me if Boudica was here with me now. I think she is. I think you’re Boudica.’

  Julia laughs. The thought is too outrageous.

  ‘You mean brought back to life or something?’

  Suzanne shrugs. ‘I don’t know. Reincarnated �
�’ Julia doesn’t know what this means ‘– her soul, her spirit, something. I feel her very close to me now. Closer than ever before. And that is why there’s no reason for us to be afraid. Imagine it. Feel it. You are Boudica and I am one of your army. Maybe one of your inner circle. Maybe your closest adviser. For now, the Germans have us in bondage.’

  It’s another word that resonates with Julia.

  ‘But we will be free. We will defeat them. And most of all – we will have our revenge.’

  While it all sounds a bit outlandish to Julia, she is startled to find that this talk of Boudica has helped. It has made her feel better, stronger, less fearful.

  And Julia thinks how extraordinary this all is. A couple of days ago, she didn’t even know of Suzanne’s existence and she is very, very different from Julia. Suzanne is educated and dreamy and has travelled outside Holland. Julia could be wrong but she has a hunch that Suzanne has always lived with her parents – that she has led a pretty sheltered life. She’s definitely a virgin. Julia doesn’t know if Suzanne has brothers and sisters but she imagines that Suzanne’s childhood was very happy, very protected.

  But with all her university education and travel, Suzanne doesn’t seem very smart about the world. Even if Julia’s last few years had been relatively normal and she had worked in a shop or something like that, her knowledge of life would be so much more than Suzanne’s.

  Yet suddenly, bizarrely, Suzanne has – literally – become the dearest person in the world to Julia. Of course, this wouldn’t be hard, Julia thinks bitterly. Who else is there? Suzanne is number one in a field of one. So now Julia asks the question that has leapt onto her back like a black, evil goblin.

  ‘What if one of us is transported and the other isn’t?’ she asks.

  They have been walking around to keep warm but now they stop and Suzanne turns to face Julia. Suzanne takes Julia’s hands in her own.

  ‘That’s not going to happen,’ she says, her eyes fixing Julia’s and then Suzanne says it again with a terrible determination in her voice.

  ‘That’s not going to happen.’