Page 4 of The Pianist's Wife
Amira ran the rest of the way home, her eyes burning with tears that only fell faster when her mother caught her in her arms as she stumbled through the front door.
‘Amira! Slow down. What’s wrong?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said, quickly wiping at her eyes. ‘I just—’
She looked up at her mother and felt like the little girl who’d had her lunch stolen as a five-year-old, all over again.
‘It doesn’t look like everything is fine,’ her mother said, drawing her in and holding her close. ‘Tell me what happened.’
Amira shut her eyes and let her mother hold her.
‘They hate me,’ she eventually said. ‘Mama, they hate everyone like us.’
Her mother was silent. She rubbed Amira’s back in small, comforting circles, her lips whispering against her daughter’s hair when she bent down to hold her.
‘They are being influenced by a monster of a man, that’s all,’ her mother murmured. ‘But this will pass. No one will allow this to continue, your father won’t allow us to be treated like this. We just have to wait.’
‘You truly believe that it won’t last?’
‘Yes, my love, I truly believe that this will pass, we just have to be patient.’
Amira nodded, but when her mother tucked her fingers beneath her chin and lifted her face, she knew that something else was wrong. Her mother had been crying too, her eyes red and her skin blotchy; she simply hadn’t noticed when she’d come racing through the door.
‘Amira, I know this is going to be hard for you to hear, but I have something to tell you.’
She let her mother take her hand and guide her to the kitchen table, sitting down beside her in the afternoon sunshine as it streamed in through the window. She wondered, while she sat with her small hand in her mother’s slightly larger one, whether anything could be worse than the day she’d just had.
How wrong she was to think that.
‘I went to see the doctor today,’ her mother said, gently;too gently. ‘Unfortunately I received some bad news.’
Amira gulped, and she felt as if her heart were about to hammer through her body. Part of her wished to run away right then and there, so that she didn’t have to hear the bad news that she knew was coming; but instead she stayed deadly still.
‘I’m sick, my love. I don’t know how bad it will become, but the doctor, he—’ Her mother’s voice wavered, and Amira threw her arms around her mother’s shoulders and hugged her tighter than she’d ever hugged anyone in her life before.
‘I love you, Mama,’ she said, closing her eyes and pretending that her mother wasn’t sick, that she hadn’t just been about to tell her something terrible.
To her great relief, her mother chose not to continue speaking.
‘I love you, too, Amira. With all my heart.’
Mama is going to be fine. She has to be.
Chapter Three
Six Months Later
Amira stood beside her father, her palm pressed tightly to his as she stood at the graveside and stared at the coffin being lowered into the ground. There was a small group gathered, people who’d offered friendship and kindness to her family despite what was happening throughout Germany, and a few more who were there to support her father. At first, Amira had been permitted to keep attending school because her father was German, because all they cared about was that she had at least one parent and two grandparents who weren’t Jewish, but eventually she’d stopped of her own accord and stayed home to help care for her mother. She no longer even felt like that girl who’d stood before her teacher all those months ago – she’d had to grow up almost overnight and learn to look after her family.
It was almost impossible to believe that her mother was gone now. In the beginning, they’d pretended as if nothing was happening, as if they could just ignore her illness and press on. There had been so much hate all around them, Jews being turned away from stores or being spat at on the streets, people no longer making eye contact with those they knew weren’t pure Germans, which meant that at home they’d tried to maintain a facade of normality until thevery end, especially when it was just the three of them. It felt like eyes were burning into her back when she went to the store sometimes, and she was only grateful that her mother wasn’t leaving the house anymore, so she didn’t know how bad things had become.
Some of their neighbours had continued to support them, leaving meals on their doorstep or sending small bunches of flowers, and Gisele had continued to defy her mother, dropping by with little bunches of hand-picked flowers and tales of what was happening at school.
‘It’s time to go,’ her father said, his face drawn as he placed a hand on Amira’s shoulder. ‘It’s time to thank everyone for coming and then go home. I don’t want to draw any more attention to us than we already have.’ They’d purposely kept the service as short as possible, with no mention of her mother’s Jewish heritage, but her father had ensured she was buried the day after passing as a small nod to the religion she’d been brought up with.
‘But I don’t want to leave her yet,’ she found herself whispering, hurt that he could even think of going. He gave her an agonised glance. ‘Can’t we stay a little longer?’
‘We can come back at dusk, once it’s just the two of us. But for now, I don’t want to draw any more attention to us.’
