A Traitor to Memory

“You didn't tell me you'd be meeting Harriet Lewis,” Yasmin said.

Katja lifted her cigarette to her mouth and took her time about inhaling. She finally said, “There are matters to be dealt with. There are twenty years of matters to be dealt with. This will take time for us to work through.”

“What d'you mean? What kind of matters? Katja, you in trouble or something?”

“There is trouble, yes. But it is not mine. Just something that needs to be resolved.”

“What? What needs—”

“Yas. It is late.” Katja rose and ground out her cigarette in an ashtray on the coffee table. “We must work. I cannot explain everything right now. The situation is far too complex.”

Yasmin wanted to say, “And that's why it took so long to discuss it? Last night, Katja? Because the situation—whatever it is—is too complex?” but she didn't say it. She placed the question in the mental file that held all the other questions she'd not yet asked. Like the questions about Katja's absences from work, the questions about her absences from home, the questions about where she took the car when she borrowed it and why she needed to borrow it in the first place. If she and Katja were to establish something lasting—a connection to each other outside prison walls that was not defined by the need to maintain a bulwark against loneliness, despair, and depression—then they were going to have to start dispelling doubt. All her questions grew from doubt, and doubt was the virulent disease that could destroy them.

To drive it from her mind, she thought of her first days in Holloway on remand, of the medical unit where she was watched for signs that her despondency would lead to derangement, of the humiliation of the initial strip search—“Let's have a look up the grumble and grunt, Missy”—and of every strip search that followed it, of stuffing envelopes endlessly mindlessly in what went for rehabilitation in prison, of anger so deep and so profound that she thought it might eat its way into her bones. And she thought of Katja as Katja had been in those first few days and all through her trial, watching her from a distance but never speaking till Yasmin demanded what she wanted one day over tea in the dining room where Katja sat alone, as she always sat, a baby killer, the worst sort of monster: one who did not repent.

“Don't mess with Geraldine,” she had been told. “That Kraut bitch's just waiting for a good sorting-out.”

But she'd asked anyway. She'd sat at the German's table, slamming down her tea tray and saying, “What you want with me, bitch? You been watching me like I'm next week's dinner ever since I walked in here, and I'm dead sick of it. You got that straight?” She'd tried to sound tough. She knew without ever having been told that the key to survival behind walls and locked doors was never to show a sign of weakness.

“There are ways to cope,” Katja had told her in answer. “But you will not manage if you do not submit.”

“Submit to these fuckers?” Yasmin had shoved her own cup away so hard that tea sloshed out and soaked the paper napkin with milky-brown blood. “I don't belong in here. I 'as defending my life.”

“And that is what you do when you submit. You defend your life. Not the life inside here but the life to come.”

“What sort 'f life that's going to be? I get out of here, my baby won't know me. You know how that feels?”

And Katja had known, though she never spoke of the child she herself had given up on the day he was born. The miracle of Katja as Yasmin came to know her was that she knew how everything felt: from the loss of freedom to the loss of a child, from being tricked into trusting the wrong people to learning that only the self would stand steadfast. It was on the foundation of Katja's understanding that they'd put the first tentative stones of their association with each other. And during the time they spent together, Katja Wolff—who had been in prison ten years when Yasmin encountered her—and Yasmin developed a plan for their lives when they were finally released.

Revenge hadn't been part of the plan for either of them. Indeed, the word vengeance hadn't crossed their lips. But now Yasmin wondered what Katja had meant all those years ago when she'd said, “I am owed,” while imprisoned, without ever giving an explanation of what the debt was or who was to pay it.

She couldn't bring herself to ask where her lover had gone last night when she left that house on Galveston Road in the company of her solicitor, Harriet Lewis. The thought of the Katja who had counseled her, who had listened to and loved her throughout her sentence, was what kept Yasmin's every doubt in check.

But still, she couldn't shake off the memory of that moment when Katja had frozen in the act of getting into bed. She couldn't dismiss what that abrupt stillness in her lover meant. So she said, “I di'n't know Harriet Lewis had a partner.”