But that morning there was no organization to her thoughts. There was no logic; there were no feelings of goodwill—there was no time to think on Monique’s qualities. Beside her, distractingly, was the glass vase that she wanted to smash. There was just one random image after the other. The memory of telling Georg that he was soon to be a father and the smile on his face that did not mean anything. That did not register. A child, a living, breathing person created from his own flesh and blood, would have healed him, she thought.
And Georg had arrived to see the dead child and his eyes had come alive and he had reached for the boy at first and then recoiled and that had hurt Rosalind; it had burned into her memory. Even a live one perhaps would not have been enough.
Monique carried the baby carefully as if it were alive. Monique, with her healthy child sitting nearby: the sweet little girl, with downy hair, watching, unaffected by what was in front of her, eating her toasted bread and watching her mother with wonder, soaking up everything about her so that she could be just like her. Rosalind shuddered. The erratic thoughts continued. She still couldn’t sleep. She paced the floor again that day, looked again and again at the dead baby, which was changing color, becoming not so soft or flexible. Perhaps it wasn’t hers. Perhaps hers had been taken.
Then she did sleep briefly that night, and in the morning the baby was gone and so were the bloody towels now bleached and hanging on a line between the two houses. There was no trace left of him, her child.
When Monique returned to Georg’s house, Rosalind was waiting furiously in the kitchen and had screamed at her as she entered, demanding to know where she had buried the child. Then Georg walked in and looked at Rosalind as if he had never seen her before. It only fueled her anger, and she pulled pictures off the wall, one by one, smashing them.
“Be quiet,” he had said, and she had run upstairs, back to the bedroom she had shared briefly with her baby.
Monique had followed, and so did Georg.
“You stole him from me,” she had screamed at Monique. “Your child is probably his, isn’t it? Georg was mine, and you stole him. You chased him until he gave himself to you.”
Rosalind had seen for the first time the redness in Monique’s eyes, the dark circles. She had not slept either, because of her guilt, thought Rosalind.
“Rosalind,” she said quietly, “you are not thinking straight. You are in shock. You need to sleep. You need to rest. I will give you something to sleep.”
“Leave me,” Rosalind screamed. “You are not to touch me!” And she was standing on the bed, and Georg covered his ears and ran from the room. And now it was worse, thought Rosalind. He hated her.
“You had an affair with Georg and you ruined my life and I will never forgive you,” said Rosalind.
“You still don’t understand . . . I’m sorry . . . I should have told you,” said Monique, quietly, eyes closed to a memory. “But the truth was hard, and Georg made me promise—”
“Leave Georg out of it,” she yelled. “You use his name because he can no longer defend himself.”
“You have to stop giving him the drugs,” Monique said, then continued more harshly. “You are making it worse for him. He will never repair.”
“Leave me! You will never find your own man. You are a whore! Not satisfied with Erich, you had to take Georg.”
Monique was silent and still, and she straightened her back and brushed down her skirt, which never needed brushing.
“You think you know everyone,” shouted Rosalind. “You think you know me. You don’t even know your own husband.”
“Rosa, stop now! Please! Enough! We are on the same side. I—”
“You didn’t know that it was Erich who had Alain arrested. That he was the one to round up your friends, and then he pretended he knew nothing. Not even Georg knew about it. But I did. He trusted me. He could see that I didn’t approve of your friends. That I thought like him.”
“You have to stop this!” said Monique firmly, and Vivi climbed up the stairs behind her. Monique left to take her daughter next door, and Rosalind could hear Monique telling Vivi that Mama would come to get her soon.
When Monique returned, she broke down and cried, and Rosalind felt nothing, perhaps more hatred because her cousin was becoming the victim, as if she had been wronged somehow.
“This war,” Monique began, “has changed everyone for the worse, but the truth was always there. It has been there in front of you all this time with or without a war.”
“Get out!” Rosalind shouted.
Georg came back then. “You know nothing!” he shouted before going down the stairs again. As if the light had turned on briefly, after all the darkness. He was there somewhere, and Rosalind realized that she must focus on him now, help him get better, but she could not do that with Monique, not after what she did. And Georg needed his drugs, the drugs that Monique was against.
Georg left then. She heard the door bang. She knew what that meant. That he would be gone for hours. He would sit in the river hut until night. He needed his medicine, and she would take it to him.
But Monique was on the stairs, stopping her from going past; they tussled on the top stair, but Monique pushed her back into the room.
And then came the lies, the poisonous lies.
Rosalind didn’t want to hear them. She had already heard from Erich about what Monique had done. How Monique had betrayed Germany and supported traitors with the money he gave her. And she was suddenly proud that she knew something that Monique didn’t know: that Erich was close by, in the very town where they collected their rations. He had asked her to let him know if Monique returned. She called in on him weekly to collect the drugs for Georg, but she hadn’t told him of Monique’s arrival. Rosalind had felt some duty to keep her cousin safe, but that was no longer an option. Monique had killed her baby, and now she was saying vile things about her husband. She was admitting to the adultery.
“Yes, I loved Georg,” she continued while Rosalind was perched at the edge of the bed, looking beyond the trees to the river. Monique was thinking that Rosalind had calmed, but she was unaware of the thunder that reverberated within her.
And Monique continued talking, cruel and calculated. She was crying the words that were coming out of her mouth.
“That night you saw me and Georg on the path, it was not what you thought . . . Erich had left our bedroom, and I followed him. I already knew about Georg . . .”
Rosalind was covering her ears. She could feel the truth deep, deep down inside of her. She was remembering something, just vaguely, Georg touching the hand of another man at a restaurant they were meeting at, and Georg’s face falling at the sight of Rosalind’s early arrival. At the other man, uniformed, scurrying away like a mouse, disappearing from her sight and then from her mind, willfully. Georg had asked Monique about the secret clubs that didn’t discriminate; he had asked her to take him with her next time he was in town, but he never got the chance. The clubs were closed, Monique then married.
“I never suspected them. I never loved Erich, and it wasn’t the marriage you think . . . It was a ruse, to protect me, and one of the conditions from Erich was that I tell no one of our arrangement, our pretend marriage, which might affect his position in the party . . . and Georg begged me not to say anything about him . . . all these secrets a burden . . . and I was worried about you, and I was angry at Georg when I saw them . . . It was unfair, you unknowing.”