But Paul had pulled away. “I’m not going to make you,” he said, disgusted.
Rose felt even shakier, more muddled. “I’m sorry,” she said. It would be years before she wondered why she was the one who apologized.
She didn’t look for Margaret. She kept her head down, hurrying through the throngs, through the relative darkness of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. There were celebrators there too, whooping it up and setting off firecrackers, but fewer of them, and no one seemed to register her. She was grateful for that, for the darkness that engulfed her.
When she got home, she drew a bath (lukewarm and no more than the requisite five inches—it comforted her tonight to follow the rules). The water didn’t cover her stomach or her breasts, but she lay there a long time. Finally she climbed out, her limbs heavy. What had she been doing out? She needed to write to her parents.
After the two-day national holiday that Churchill declared in honor of victory, Rose put on her overalls and pulled her hair back and returned to the factory, which remained open. (“’Course,” said Mrs. Lloyd as she took a drag on her cigarette. “Who do you think is sewing the parachutes for the Pacific?”) Just as she’d been doing for months, Rose took her seat on her stool, stared at the bright white silk under the lights, and guided the material through the machine. Big-band music on the BBC poured from the loudspeakers, but it was no match for the voracious clatter of the jittering machines. It was hard to focus, and Rose needed to focus (there had been awful accidents; girls’ hair got caught in the wheels). But all Rose could think about was where she would go at half past four when she clocked out and her day would truly begin.
She usually went to the Bloomsbury House first, that massive stone building in the West End that she felt a kinship to long before she set foot in it. Bloomsbury House was not a house at all but a multifloored administrative building that held a number of Jewish refugee organizations. Bloomsbury House was the place that brought her to England.
The actual offices were of little interest to her now. There were lists on the walls. There were names. Typed up on thin onionskin paper, tacked up in the crowded halls, the lists were not dated or alphabetized. There were so many names sounding achingly familiar to Rose—Solomon, Karl, Eva, Trude, Lore, Kurt; Singer, Weinstein, Porges, Schwartz. These were Jewish names, people she grew up with. The experience of reading the names made her feel vertiginous. She hadn’t seen her parents’ names. She didn’t recognize anyone on the wall. But there were new lists going up all the time, and this meant that every viewing, every new day, held a flush of promise.
After Bloomsbury House, Rose visited the Red Cross and the UN Relief Agency. In the crowded hallways of the summer of 1945, people talked: Did you try the World Jewish Congress? Did you hear that the American army has its own lists up at Rainbow Corner? The Jewish newspapers—the Jewish Chronicle, the Tribune—ran columns of names in their back pages. People were being found. New names were going up every day.
It was a laborious, imperfect process, and the people who crammed into these offices alongside Rose were not quiet about their complaints. But Rose for one was grateful for the queues, for the maddening slowness of information trickling out. Shadows meant that there were still facts that had yet to be unearthed. Uncertainty, by its definition, included a thin, silvery shot of hope.
She had heard, of course. Horrible, unspeakable things. Buchenwald was the first camp she had learned about, back in April, when Allied troops were closing in on Berlin and Stalin was taking no mercy. Even before VE Day, there had been reports. She knew: at some point the lists of survivors that she studied so vigilantly would be replaced by lists of the dead. But that hadn’t happened yet. For now, there were still survivors. She continued looking.
London in the summer of 1945 was heavy with grime and rubble and shrouded in bad smells—burning newspaper and old frying oil and urine. The lights that so struck Rose on VE Day now flickered—in shops, the underground, the factory. Outages were common. Rations were still in effect. But for some illogical, unnamable reason, Rose felt hopeful. She had purpose. She would ride the Tube after leaving Tottenham Court Road on her way to look at the lists, holding a pole with one hand, the other clutching a fat novel of Margaret’s that she felt too impatient to read, the light dim (or sometimes out altogether, when someone pilfered the bulbs from behind the seats). But she felt as if something still might change. It was a time when fear and frustration and doubt still commingled with the slightest leavening, the most tenuous and fragile hope, of possibility, that all this might one day recede safely into the past.
How strange it would be if her parents did indeed walk through the door. What would Mutti think of her little girl who was now grown up? Would they recognize each other? What would they talk about? Would Mutti tell her that she needed to wear a coat or who to date, or yes, she was right, It’s That Man Again was a truly awful show?
She kept searching.
“I don’t know why you’re not coming out.” This from Margaret as she sat on the edge of her bed, clad in her robe, legs stretched before her. She was applying a sponge to her calves, dabbing gravy browning to her legs, changing their color from pale to tanned. “I have twenty quid from my father! Tomorrow it will be gone.”
Rose shook her head. “You know I can’t. I have to be up early.”
“You work too hard.” Margaret pressed a thumb against her calf and inspected it. “I wish you didn’t have to work so hard.”
Rose shrugged. “It’s fine.” She gestured with her chin at Margaret’s legs. “I don’t know why you bother with that.”
“I don’t either,” Margaret muttered, head down as she blew on her legs. “Takes too bloody long to dry.” Then she looked up, her eyes fixed on her friend. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” she said, and Rose knew they were no longer talking about the gravy on her legs.
“I need to work. You know that.” Rose flushed, and focused her attention on smoothing out the thin coverlet on her bed. Their beds sat side by side, with a thin gully of space in between. There wasn’t much else; a chest of drawers pushed up against the wall near Rose’s bed, a crate beneath the only window where Margaret kept her schoolbooks.
“I know. It’s just that you’re so smart,” Margaret said, and touched Rose’s shoulder. “It’s not my business, but I wish you had a job where you could use your smarts.”