Page 64 of The Pianist's Wife
It was hours later, with darkness creeping around them and a chill against her skin so cold that Amira couldn’t stop shivering, when the door opened with a bang. She’d been waiting, sitting on a mattress on the floor and staring at it, praying that Fred would walk through and that it hadn’t all been a terrible mistake.
It was hard to see the man’s face when he first walked in, his shoulders slumped, but when she said his name, his head lifted.
‘Fred? Is that you?’
‘Amira?’ He said her name quietly, hesitantly, as if he weren’t certain it was truly her.
‘Fred?’ she whispered, taking a step forward, before rushing the rest of the way. ‘Oh my gosh,Fred! It’s you!’
He opened his arms and embraced her, but she quickly let go when she felt how thin he was beneath his ill-fitting clothes.
‘Fred, I barely recognised you with your head shaved,’ she said, pulling back and looking up at him. She raised a hand, waiting for him to nod his acceptance before gently running her palm across his head. ‘Your beautiful thick hair. But it will grow back, it won’t take long for you to look like you again.’
‘How did you get here? What happened?’ Fred’s eyes widened, and he rubbed at them as if he were hallucinating. ‘Were you arrested because of me? What have they done to you?’
She shook her head. ‘I voluntarily entered the camp.’
‘Amira, you didn’t,’ he gasped. ‘Please tell me you didn’t.’
‘We made a promise to each other, Fred, that we would do anything we had to, to keep each other safe.’
‘But Amira, I would never, I—’
She took a deep breath. ‘There is no need to say anything. We’re going to survive this place together, Fred. I promise.’
‘You haven’t seen what they do here though, Amira,’ he whispered. ‘If you’d seen what I have...’
Amira went to take his hand and he quickly pulled it away, the pain seeming like knives stabbing deep into his skin.
‘What’s happened to your hand?’
‘Never mind my hand,’ he muttered. ‘We need to find a way to get you out of here. You should never have come.’
Chapter Twenty-Nine
New York, 2006
‘Amira, please don’t feel you have to answer this, but as a writer, I need to ask.’
She nodded, feeling so very tired as she took the blanket from the back of her chair and wrapped it around herself. ‘You may ask.’
‘Do you think Fred would have done the same for you?’ Madison asked. ‘Do you think that he would have voluntarily put himself in harm’s way to help you?’
‘I do,’ she said, without hesitation, even though her voice cracked with emotion as the memories of that day came rushing back to her. Because she’d asked herself this question so many times over the years, especially in those first nights she’d spent at Buchenwald. And every time, even in her darkest moments, she’d known that the answer wasyes.
‘And neither of you ever spoke of your time in Buchenwald? I’ve read countless interviews of Fred’s over the years, about his musical talents, but not one of them ever mentioned that he was a Holocaust survivor.’
‘You’re asking if he ever spoke about Buchenwald, or how he ended up there?’
Madison nodded.
Amira sighed and shook her head. ‘Once it was over, we never wanted to speak of it ever again.’
‘Then after all this time,’ Madison asked, ‘why share your story, and your secrets, now?’
‘Because I’ve come to realise that if I don’t tell our story now, there will be no one left to tell it to.’ Amira paused, taking a deep, shuddering breath. ‘Besides, Fred had to hide who he was his entire life. To be truthful about who and what he was as a young man would have been a death sentence.’
A tear slid unexpectedly down her cheek, and she brushed it away with the back of her knuckles as she fought to retain her composure.
