Rose pulled back. Margaret was right; it wasn’t her business.
Rose was being churlish, she knew. Margaret was only trying to help. “It’s only temporary. And there are loads of smart girls on the floor with me,” she said. Rose was taking care of herself. When Mutti and Papi arrived, they would need as much money as she could offer. But she knew it wasn’t so simple; she wasn’t proud to don those overalls every day and stitch together pieces of silk for hours at a time. She feared Mutti’s disapprobation when she learned that her daughter worked in a factory. But you have to understand, Rose wanted to tell Mutti and Margaret both. She was doing what she could. Of course she was capable of more.
“I know,” Margaret said. “I know it’s temporary. But I was thinking: What about asking the Cohens again?” She took a thick pencil from atop the shared bureau and sat next to Rose. “Just think: if they relented, you could work part-time, make money, and go to school.”
It frustrated Rose to hear Margaret articulate this scenario, as if anything were that simple to attain. She couldn’t ask the Cohens. They did not owe her. Rose glanced at the mushroom-colored window curtain that looked like it could fall down at any moment. The room was too small, Margaret, with all her good intentions, too close. “But they’re not relenting,” she said. “And I won’t ask them again.”
“They care so much about you, Rose. I know you don’t always feel it, but they do.” Margaret leaned in. “I know they told you they would only help with nursing. But if you went up for a visit, and truly explained to Mr. Cohen, I don’t believe he wouldn’t help. It’s worth a try.”
Rose shook her head. “I can’t,” she said. Mrs. Cohen had been emphatic. Nursing was a practical profession, a noble one. And if she didn’t want to do that? Well, when she was eighteen she was expected to join the ATS. “You should be grateful,” Mrs. Cohen had said. “This is the best way to pay back your country.”
“All right,” Margaret said. “It was only a suggestion.” Rose could tell she wanted to say more, but Margaret took the pencil and began drawing a thin dark line from the back of her left ankle up her calf, imitating the seams of the stockings that neither of them could afford.
Perhaps Margaret was right. Perhaps Mr. Cohen would acquiesce. Every month, she got an envelope from him with two crinkled pound notes inside—not that much more than he used to give her as pocket money when she was twelve. And yet, every month the envelope arrived. “For Rose,” he wrote in his spidery handwriting, nothing else. That card never failed to deliver a pang. She kept Mr. Cohen’s money in a separate envelope and used it to buy small purchases, one more unnecessary than the next—black currants that she spotted in October in a shop in Notting Hill, a slim leather volume of Hopkins’s poetry, a tin of marzipan from Selfridges that she ate furtively, not sharing with Margaret, the almond taste taking her back to her family’s flat on Liechtensteinstrasse.
“Thank you for suggesting it,” Rose said as politely and with as much dignity as she could muster. “But you have to understand, it’s different for me.” Besides, she couldn’t change course, not now. How could she make any decisions until she heard from them?
One Thursday in late November, nearing clock-out time, a white-coated inspector stopped in front of Sylvia, a small, serious girl from Prague who sat next to Rose and was deft with the massive spools of thread. It was then that Rose realized Sylvia had stopped working. “That’s the second needle you’ve broken this week, Miss Strauss,” the inspector said. “It’s coming out of your wages.”
Sylvia nodded. “It won’t happen again, sir.”
He strode off, and Rose leaned over. “You all right?”
Sylvia nodded, turning back to her buzzing machine with renewed intent.
“She cut her finger the other day,” said Mrs. Lloyd, Rose’s other neighbor. “It’s swollen up to something awful. It’s got septic.” Mrs. Lloyd’s husband, as she often reminded them, had been a pharmacist before the war.
Rose glanced back at Sylvia and saw that she kept her small left hand in her lap. “She has to go to hospital. She shouldn’t be here,” Rose said. “Come, Sylvia; let me see.” But Sylvia didn’t move.
“Infection or no, she’s relying on this week’s wages,” Mrs. Lloyd said. “She’s not going anywhere.”
“I got back my letter,” Sylvia said. She did not look at Rose as she spoke. “It says they were deported.”
“Which letter?” Rose asked, but she knew.
“My parents. It came back. On the back it says ‘deported to Auschwitz.’ And there is a date, the tenth of November 1944.”
Rose nodded dumbly. She had never spoken to Sylvia about her parents. They hadn’t talked about their families at all. Rose realized she held a hand over her mouth. It felt essential to do so, to keep all that was loose inside of her contained.
“But there are so many people in those DP camps,” Sylvia said, “They couldn’t have registered them all yet.”
“That is right, that is absolutely right,” Rose said with a conviction that she did not feel.
It was cold by the time Rose made it to the flat on Catton Street that night. The two sweaters she wore under her overcoat did little to keep out the bitterness. Daylight was long gone, though it was a clear night, the half-moon just clearing the tops of the worn brick apartment buildings across the road. Soon it would be December, the first holiday season after the war.
She was rummaging for her key when she registered an officer in uniform, standing past the laundry on the corner, smoking against the peeling trunk of the plane tree. She paid him little mind. Then she heard: “Why, mausi. You’re not going to say hello?”
She screamed.
After six months stationed in Minden, Germany, Gerhard had been granted a leave. He had five days in London, and he had just dropped off his bags with Charles, the brother from the family he had lived with up north. “I came straight here,” he told her as she led him up the three dank flights to the flat, put the kettle on in the kitchen nook, and pulled down the tin of biscuits that she thankfully had not finished.
“You should have written—or called. But am I happy to see you,” she said. “Would you like biscuits? Or, I have a tin of corned beef somewhere. I could fix you a sandwich. Or an egg? Margaret has an egg and I’m sure she won’t mind us using it on this fine occasion. Or what am I thinking? Perhaps you want to shower?”
“Mausi, stop. Would you, please? I’m fine.” He said it with such recognizable, familiar brotherly annoyance that it made her want to nail him to the spot, never let him go.
She squeezed his arm, moved to pour the kettle. Had his eyes always been that vivid shade of blue? They were the same color as the birds on Mutti’s scarf.
“I’m a lieutenant now,” he said with a wry little grin.
“A lieutenant? That’s wonderful. You must be important.” Rose handed him a cup.