“Bite down.”
The effect was as instant as Friedrich had told her it would be. Wen shuddered for a moment, harder than before, and Audrey embraced her tightly until she felt her breathing stop. Her body grew heavy.
Audrey choked on a sob, lowering Wen to the ground again. The night sky was luminous in her eyes, staring, unseeing. Audrey gently slid the lids shut.
“So brave,” she whispered.
A sudden gunshot split the quiet air from far off in the distance, and out of the corner of her eye Audrey saw Hannah, the lone young girl in the centre of the field, drop to the frozen ground.
Chapter 38
Kate
ALNWICK, ENGLAND | DECEMBER 2010
Kate wipes away a tear, still in a state of shock over all that Audrey has just recounted. She sets her pen down on her notebook but keeps the voice recorder rolling. Audrey is staring out the large front windows of the Oakwood at the trees lining the drive. They’re all bare now, a white morning frost coating their branches, and Kate wonders if she sees the forest outside Vechta.
Kate sits for a minute, absorbing it all like ice water into a sponge. How it all makes sense now. Why Audrey is the way she is. The nightmares and guilt. She shifts uncomfortably as a shiver grips her.
The fire is fading. She rises to tend it. Her necklace swings out of her cowl-neck sweater as she kneels to add another log and bits of newspaper. It’s become an odd point of pride that she can keep the flames going on these cold winter days. She knows Audrey needs the warmth. Since returning from the hospital, she’s lost more weight, more strength, more independence. Kate had to help her down the stairs and to her chair this morning and Audrey never gave a word of complaint. She’s aware of her decline; it’s ratcheted up her sense of urgency, but it’s clear she also doesn’t want to omit or trim any detail. The experiences became a part of her, lined the cells in her body, and she doesn’t want them to die with her. She needs to drain them, set them carefully aside for preservation, before her body fails. She’s just covered six years in the last few days.
Once the fire is roaring, Kate returns to her chair. Both dogs are at Audrey’s feet now. They always know. Audrey faces her now, blinking away the images of the prison escape and Wen’s tragic death that still project behind her eyes.
“So,” Kate begins tentatively. “What happened after that? Where did you go?”
Audrey clears her throat, winces, and takes a large sip of water, her hand shaking, but her voice is a little stronger than when she spoke of Wen’s fate a few minutes ago. “The Allies had clearly made it to Germany. We only knew that their planes were there, but not much else. Wen had said to run for the Dutch border, so I did. It seemed the only thing to do, really. Even though the Nazis were everywhere, staying in the country that had imprisoned me felt foolish. And I wasn’t really thinking. I was in shock, I’m sure. So shocked that I failed to notice I hadn’t put my shoe back on until I was miles away, on the other side of that wooded area.” She pauses. “I don’t remember much from that first night, to be honest with you.”
She stares into the middle distance.
“Have you ever read Dante’s Divine Comedy, Kate?”
Kate shakes her head.
“In the Inferno volume, the ninth circle of hell is a frozen lake, reserved for traitors. That’s what my journey felt like. Most of what I remember was that it was freezing. Bloody goddamn freezing. And there was a part of me that felt as though I must have deserved it somehow. That it was my penance for all of it, that the land itself was punishing me for my betrayal of Germany.” Sophie paws at her leg, and she lifts her into her lap with a groan. “I was following the small towns on the way, because they did provide some refuge. I broke into a barn one night, at a farm outside of Lindern, I think. I slept in the hay under a horse blanket. A young woman found me in the early hours, pail in hand to milk the cows. She didn’t say much, didn’t even ask who I was, which made me think it wasn’t the first time they’d sheltered someone. She gave me milk, and I drank as much as I could. She let me take the horse blanket too. At any rate, I eventually made it to the border. Somehow. I’m sure I veered off course because I ended up farther north. I didn’t even realize I was in the Netherlands until I saw a group of soldiers that weren’t German. Turned out to be Canadians. I wept with relief when I heard them speaking English. I learned soon enough that they’d just liberated the Netherlands, that the dominoes were beginning to fall. I could hardly believe it. The war was nearly over. And I had survived.”
A pause stretches between them, and Kate suspects Audrey is thinking of Wen, how close she’d come to surviving too.
“Others died, lost entire limbs. Me?” She holds up her gnarled hands. “This was my damage. This—and frostbite on my baby toe. They had to remove it at the field hospital.”
“I’m sorry,” Kate says, unsure how many times she’s said that since Audrey began telling her story. “How long were you at the hospital?”
“About a month, I think. Through the end of April and into May. They took good care of me. They had mostly men’s clothes there, but my nurse, Eloise, was about my size. She gave me some clothes, and they hung off my frame. I felt a little more like a real person, but at the same time had this sense that I was donning a costume for a play. Like I was sort of this… pleasant imposter in my own life. It took some time to learn how to walk properly again. It’s strange how one toe can impact your balance so much. I did better in my younger years, but that’s why I need the bloody cane now.” She begins to cough, pauses for a sip of water.
“And when did you learn that Hitler was dead?” Kate asks.
“Well, news trickled into the hospital over a few weeks, and we eventually started to get newspapers there. They said he’d shot himself in his bunker in Berlin, and that his woman killed herself, too, with cyanide, and all that did was remind me of Wen’s face, of her gasping her last breaths in my arms.” She shrugs. “I think by that point I was just glad he was dead. It meant the war would be over soon. People at the hospital celebrated, toasted. Cried. Others sat on their beds, just in a state of disbelief, I think. I couldn’t help but think how the war might have ended years earlier if we’d been successful that day in Hanover. How different life would have been. How different I might have been.” Audrey clears her throat again. “I remember taking a bath at the hospital and scrubbing my skin with this scrap of soap until it was pink and raw, trying to wash away the grime of the war. But the residue was indelible, I think. I wasn’t the person I was before. I was a survivor, and forever marked with the stain.”
She looks up at Kate, who nods, thumbing her necklace and thinking of her parents. “That burden must have felt even heavier when you learned about the extent of the camps. The Holocaust,” she says.
“Yes, but that came later,” Audrey says. “There’d been rumours and stories at the prison about the deportation of Jews to work camps, that people were dying there. But the full truth about the extermination camps didn’t reach us until the Allied soldiers started to liberate them. Once they began to sort through the evidence, the debris of all that had happened over those six years. Back then news took days or even weeks to reach people. But when I was in the hospital, all I could think about was Ilse. About getting back to her. Berlin had been bombed all to hell, and I was worried sick. I could hardly wait to see her again, hold her.”
Kate smiles through stinging eyes. Reuniting with Ilse was the dream Audrey had allowed to consume her during the hundreds of dark nights at Vechta. It had fed her as her body weakened, sustained the flame of her soul when the cold gusts threatened to snuff it out.
“Returning to her was all that mattered at that point,” Audrey says.
Kate tries to imagine the uncertainty, especially after everything Audrey had been through. Curiosity burns inside her. “And did you?” she asks. “Did you make it back to her? Was she still alive?”
Audrey takes a deep breath, but her throat catches, and she wheezes.
“Let me get you more water,” Kate says, swiping her glass.
Audrey nods, covering her mouth as the coughs rack her body.
Kate returns a moment later with a full glass of water, and as she leans down to hand it to Audrey, the older woman pales.
“Audrey, are you all right?” Kate asks, concerned.
“Kate…” she rasps. Her eyes are locked on Kate’s neck.
“What’s the matter? What is it?”
“Who are you?” Audrey looks up at her, an expression of utter disbelief on her face. Something well beyond confusion.
“Er,” Kate breathes. Is this some sign of cognitive degeneration? Kate’s own grandparents died before their memories did. She doesn’t know exactly how to handle this. She offers a small smile, wishing Ian were here. “I’m Kate, Audrey. I’m—”
“No,” Audrey says, her voice deathly low. “I mean who are you, and what are you doing with Ilse’s locket?”
