Page 6 of The Pianist's Wife
‘If it becomes too dangerous, if you don’t want to be seen with me...’
‘Don’t say that.’
Amira gave her a quick hug, standing up with her and watching as she darted away. She waited until Gisele was out of sight before going back to find her father, who seemed relieved to see her. He placed his hand on her arm and she felt it shaking as he led her away; her poor father, who’d always done his best to look after his wife and daughter. She was only grateful he hadn’t heard what those awful women had said.
She hated the way these people treated her father, as if he’d somehow been tricked into marrying her mother, as if she’d been a monster that he was finally rid of. Amira only wished they’d seen the way he’d held her mother as she cried from her pain, the way he’d touched water to her lips when they’d been dry and cracked, as he’d sat with her until she passed. Her father had told her mother before she died that she was an angel, and that was what Amirawanted to remember. He loved her and Amira more than anything, that much was obvious.
But for some reason, the only words circling her mind now were the ugly ones those awful women had muttered as they’d passed her, not knowing that she was hidden in the long grass behind the trees, listening. And she was left wondering if they’d have even cared if they’d seen her, or whether they would have just kept on talking as if she didn’t exist.
Amira woke to the noise of something falling. She sat up and rubbed at her eyes, realising that she must have fallen asleep on the armchair when they got home after the funeral. They’d both been exhausted afterwards, her father pouring himself a drink and staring out of the window in silence as she’d tried her best not to cry. They’d both been so tired, not just from the funeral but from the past few months of seeing her mother slip away before their eyes, and her father’s tenseness had been obvious in how quiet he’d been.
She stood and brushed down the creases in her skirt, before going to look for him. She would need to start dinner soon, a job that had fallen to her when her mother had taken ill, but she took comfort in the fact it was something she could do for him.
Amira walked down the hall and stopped at her parents’ bedroom, seeing a pile of her mother’s clothes and other belongings at the foot of the bed. It was then she realised what he was doing, and her heart plunged.
She went up behind him and placed a hand on his shoulder, feeling him jump beneath her touch.
‘Do we have to do this so soon?’ she asked. ‘Can’t we wait?’
‘No, we can’t,’ he said, and when he turned she saw tears in his eyes. It was the first time she’d seen him cry since her motherhad passed. ‘I could feel it at the funeral, Amira. Things are getting worse by the day.’
She stood by as he hurriedly stuffed things into bags, stunned into silence as she watched her mother’s things disappearing. It was awful, like she was being erased.
‘It doesn’t feel right,’ she said. ‘Not today.’Not on any day.
‘I have to,’ he said, and when he looked up at her again, she saw a frightened man. And it unnerved her more than anything, realising that her father was scared – he was only a slight man but he’d always seemed so strong to her, so capable, until now. ‘It’s the only way, Amira. We have to erase all evidence of her from our lives. It’s the only way I can keep you safe. It’s the only way I can keep you alive.’
‘Not everything, please,’ she whispered, collapsing to her knees beside him as he dropped a framed photo into a bag. ‘Please let me keep something. Surely we don’t have to get rid of everything?’
He paused for a moment, glancing around the room. It was strange being with him like this – in the past, she’d have never sat quietly on her own with him, just the two of them. Amira and her mother had been joined at the hip, and she’d often sat on the bed and talked to her mother as she did her hair or make-up, watching her in the mirror. But she’d never sat in the bedroom with just her father before.
She watched as he reluctantly reached for the bottle of perfume her mother had kept on her nightstand, holding it out to her instead of adding it to the rest of her belongings.
‘Take this and use it sparingly,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to do this, Amira, but I don’t see any other way. This is what she would have wanted. I promised her that I would do everything I could to save you, that I would stop at nothing to keep you alive. The only other things we’ll keep is her jewellery, because we never know when we might need to have valuables to trade.’
Amira nodded, trying her very best not to cry, but when he turned away she ran quickly into her bedroom, taking a photograph of the three of them from beside her bed and quickly prising it from the frame so he couldn’t take it. She reluctantly folded it in half and tucked it inside her skirt so that her father wouldn’t see it.
What if I forget what she looks like? What if one day I can’t remember her face without looking at a picture?There was no way she was going to let him erase everything. She couldn’t.
‘Amira?’
She went back into her parents’ bedroom, glancing at the bed that her mother had still been sleeping in until the very end. Her father sat down and she went to him, sitting beside him and immediately dropping her head to his shoulder. She knew that he wasn’t a beast, that he was only behaving in this way to try to protect her, but it was still hard not to cry, seeing him throwing away all of her mother’s things.
‘Amira, we’re going to leave here and move to the city,’ he said. ‘We mustn’t tell anyone about your mother or about your grandparents, do you understand? This is to be our secret. This life, we have to pretend as if it didn’t exist once we leave, that she was never Jewish.’
She nodded, biting down hard on her lip to stop herself from crying. Amira understood why – it was impossible to live in Germany and not understand that everyone hated Jews now – but it still made her heart ache. Amira’s mother might not have practised her religion after she married, but Amira still felt that she would have been upset to think of her heritage being lost entirely.
‘Your mother was stronger than I ever was, Amira,’ he said. ‘She defied her father’s wishes by marrying me, but we were in love and she refused to let anyone tell her what to do. She always knew just what to say or how to go about something.’ He sighed and rubbed at his eyes. ‘I’m trying to be more like her, to do what she wouldin the same situation, and I know that she would do whatever was necessary to keep you safe.’
Amira nodded her acceptance, not used to seeing her father look so broken. But he was right, her mother wouldn’t care about belongings if it meant them both being safe.
‘But we have to be careful, and we have to be clever,’ he said. ‘I’m going to make myself indispensable to the party, to keep you safe. Now that your mother has gone, you’re everything in the world to me, and that’s why I’ve already made false documentation for you. Once we’ve left here, no one will know you’re Jewish, and we have to promise not to talk about our past life, not to let anyone find out about your mother. Do you understand? We will be anonymous there, in a way we can never be in a smaller town.’
Amira nodded, her lower lip trembling as she tried to comprehend what he was saying.
‘These papers will save your life, Amira, but we still have to be careful,’ he said. ‘We will tell everyone that your mother died when you were just a girl, that I have raised you on my own. There is no reason for anyone to be suspicious of our story, not if we’re careful, not if there’s no one around us who knew us before.’ He paused and looked her in the eye. ‘I’ve forged your papers myself so they are the best they can be, but there will always be risks. I want to make you understand that.’
She nodded, not sure if she did understand or not. All she truly knew was that everything was changing, and not in ways she wanted. How was she going to live without her mother? She loved her father, but it wasn’t the same as having her mother to guide her, or coming home to her mother’s hugs and the smell of her cooking clinging to the air, and she no longer understood what the future held. Was she to be a prisoner in their own home so that no one ever discovered her, or would her new identity mean that she couldpretend she was someone else and go back to school? That she still might grow up to be a teacher?
