Page 30 of The Girl with a Secret
“Rosa?” Peter asked gently, and she realized she was simply standing there on the sidewalk, staring into space. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.” Rosa shook her head as if she could dispel all those memories, the silly, stupid girl she’d been. If only she could! If only it were that wonderfully easy. Well, she was going to try her best, especially on a day like today, bright and warm and full of hope. She turned to Peter with a firm smile. “Yes,” she said, her voice as sure as her smile. “I’m fine. I’m very fine, indeed.”
CHAPTER 13
London Zoo was right in Regent’s Park, with wrought gates and a handsome pergola at its entrance, below a sign announcing the “Zoological Gardens.” Rosa had enjoyed chatting with Peter during their walk to the zoo; he’d told her a bit about himself—he was a student at King’s College and lived with his sponsor, a friend of his father’s, in Belsize Park, only a few streets from her. He also offered suggestions for days out, and how to get cheap theater tickets, and which restaurants served the best German and Jewish food.
It had been lovely to speak with another person in a way she hadn’t in weeks, if not months… Not since she’d been with her friends on theSt Louishad she been able to converse so freely or easily.
“Do you like London?” she asked as they queued for tickets at the zoo’s north entrance.
“I like it better than Germany,” he replied frankly. “As I imagine any Jew does.”
“Yes.” She fell silent, and he raised his eyebrows in query.
“You don’t sound entirely sure?”
Rosa considered the question. “It’s not that I’m unsure,” she replied slowly. “It is better, very much so. It’s just…” She thoughtof her hours washing dishes, the smell of drains and sauerkraut in the flat. She hadn’t come to England for a life of scrubbing and cleaning, desperately trying to make ends meet. “I want tobesomeone here,” she burst out. More than she currently was, anyway.
“Be someone?” Peter repeated, sounding nonplussed, and maybe even slightly disapproving. “Who, then, besides yourself? Or do you mean someone important?”
Belatedly, and with some horror, Rosa realized she’d sounded like her father, pontificating about his significance, wanting to be feted and admired. The thought that she was at all like him in that way was deeply unsettling. “No, not someone important,” she amended hastily. “At least, not someoneveryimportant. I just want to learn English and get a decent job and feel as if… as if Ibelonghere, I suppose.”
Peter was silent for a moment, his head cocked thoughtfully to one side, his hand still tucked behind his back. “I don’t know if any Jew will feel as if they truly belong in this country. Not properly,” he said at last. “Please don’t mistake me, the British have been very welcoming for the most part, but we’re still strangers, and I suspect we always will be. It is the nature of being Jewish.”
That was a rather dispiriting thought, and yet one Rosa had to acknowledge was very likely true.
“Perhaps,” she allowed. “But surely we can make something of ourselves in this new country.”
They’d reached the front of the queue, and Rose took out her change purse, only to have Peter wave her aside. “Please, let me.”
“You don’t have?—”
“I want to.” He gave her a quick smile before he reached for his billfold and counted out some coins; it was only then that Rosa finally saw his right hand, and she understood why he kept it tucked behind his back. His third, fourth, and fifth fingerswere all twisted and bent, the knuckles swollen so the digits were barely usable, the fingernails missing, seemingly having never grown back after they’d been damaged. It was a terrible sight, although he presented the money to the man at the till with both confidence and alacrity. As he tucked his billfold away, he turned to Rosa with a wry grimace. “My hand.”
“I’m sorry…” she began helplessly, not knowing what to say.
He nodded briskly and kept walking, pausing for a second so Rosa could fall in step beside him. “It’s all right. I know it looks dreadful, which is why I tend to keep it hidden. I don’t want to scare little children away.” He gave her a humorous look before continuing, “But it doesn’t pain me, at least not too much. Not anymore.”
Rosa swallowed. “What… what happened?”
Peter gave a little shrug. “I was a politics student at the University of Münster. When the race laws were passed, a bunch of brownshirts stormed into our lecture hall, roughed up some of the Jewish students. One of them stomped on my hand with his jackboot—he made sure I felt it.” There was only a slightly bitter twist to Peter’s lips, but Rosa’s heart ached for him.
She’d heard of such things; it was why so many Jews had been leaving Germany—not just because of the restrictions on opportunity, but also due to the persecution and outright abuse. It was just, Rosa acknowledged painfully, she hadn’t actuallyfeltit herself. Not like that, anyway. She may have been forbidden to attend university, and turned out of her home, and made to feel inferior in a thousand both subtle and not-so-subtle ways, but she’d never been abused. At least, not physically.
“I’m sorry,” Rosa said again.
“The reason it didn’t heal properly,” Peter continued, his tone turning diffident, “was that a bunch of us were rounded up and sent to a camp for a few weeks after. Dachau. Not a pleasant place.” He paused for a moment, his throat working, before heresumed, “Anyway, I didn’t receive any medical attention for my hand. If the fingers had been straightened and set, well then, maybe they would have healed properly, but who knows?” He shrugged, his philosophical smile returning. “I make do, just as anyone would.”
Rosa admired his positive attitude, even as she felt a strange, uncomfortable sense of guilt. His experience was so far from hers—what, really, had she suffered that wasn’t from her own awful folly? But she wasn’t about to explain any of that, and in any case, it didn’t seem as if he wanted to dwell on the past.
This was proved true when he straightened, tucking his hand behind his back, his smile firmly in place and his eyebrows raised. “What shall we see first? The giraffes? The elephants? The pandas?”
For a second, Rosa was blinded by a flash of memory—visiting Berlin Zoo as a small child and begging her father to let her see the giraffes. He’d hoisted her on his broad shoulders, and she’d felt his deep laugh reverberating through his chest as she’d clutched the top of his head to keep her balance. It was a moment that had been one entirely of joy, and yet was now shot through with a sense of loss and regret. She’d adored him, back then, in the uncomplicated way of a child.
Rosa blinked Peter back into focus and saw he was looking at her quizzically. “All of them,” she replied firmly as she smiled back. “Absolutely all of them.”
They began to stroll through the zoo, stopping at various enclosures to view the animals—the penguins in their newly built, state-of-the-art pool, the elephants towering above them, with Peter offering knowledgeable facts about each one that he read from a brochure he’d picked up at the entrance.
