Remember Me by Irene N. Watts Read Free Book Online Page B

next one.”
    There was no reply, though they heard the wireless playing though the kitchen window. Marianne pushed the note under the door. The next two houses were closed up, the milk crates sitting empty on the back step.
    Then they got three answers one after the other. In one house a very grand butler wearing a striped green waistcoat said, “I will make sure this gets delivered, young ladies.”
    “Let’s do one more,” said Bridget, and then walk over to Gloucester Place. “We don’t want to put all our eggs in one basket.”
    “Sometimes,” Marianne said, “English drives me mad. Where is the basket with the eggs?”
    Bridget’s face went red and she laughed so hard the tears streamed down her face. “It means we’ll have a better chance of success if we don’t concentrate on only one street,” Bridget said, when she could speak again! “It’s a figure of speech – understand?”
    Marianne groaned. “Thank you,” she said, exaggerating the
th
sound.
    She took the last note for Avenue Road, rang the bell, waited a moment, then pushed her paper under the door. It opened suddenly and she almost fell over the threshold.
    “Little girls, vot you doink here?”
    Marianne straightened up to face a plump young woman with dark hair tucked under a maid’s cap. She wore a pinafore over her striped uniform. Their advertisement was in her hand.
    “Come inside, it is cold. My name is Miriam Levy. I vork here.”
    Bridget hesitated, but Marianne pulled her arm. “It’s alright. Trust me.” To the woman in uniform, she said, “I’m Marianne Kohn from Charlottenburg, Berlin. I’m trying to bring my parents to England. Do you speak German?” Then she put out her hand and the woman shook it, nodding her head. Marianne saw that she was only a few years older than they were.
    Miriam replied in German, “I’m so glad to meet you. I came to England at the end of last October. I’m trying to bring my mother over too. My father was arrested after I left. My brother is in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. He is only seventeen.” She pressed her hand against her lips to stop their trembling.
    “My father was there for a while. I don’t know where he is now,” Marianne said.
    Bridget coughed several times to remind them of her presence.
    “Oh, Bridget, I’m so sorry. It was rude of us not to speak English, but Miriam’s a refugee too. Miriam, this is my best friend, Bridget O’Malley. She’s helping me.”
    “I am wery pleased to meet you. Come sit. I just now was making the coffee. Madam is shopping. I pour you a cup, or you like better tea?”
    “Tea, thank you, Miriam,” Bridget replied.
    “Coffee, please,” Marianne said gratefully. The smell instantly brought back memories of home: poppy seed rolls on the blue and white plate; Mutti and she drinking coffee (hers mostly milk); Mutti’s look of mixed horror and amusement as Marianne confessed to walking down
Kurfürstendamm
, watching the elegantladies perched outside on little gold painted chairs at the pavement
Konditorei
tables; imitating the waiter’s voice as he offered them whipped cream on huge portions of apple cake – “
Mit Schlag Gnädige, Frau?
”; the chestnut trees in blossom in spring, rows and rows of them; the lights that never went out in the city; the words of the language she was born with that she didn’t have to struggle with every minute. Marianne looked at Miriam.
Does she feel this kind of homesickness, too? For what we’ve lost, for what we’ve never had because we aren’t Aryans?
    Miriam offered them biscuits from a tin.
    “You go ahead, speak German. I don’t mind,” said Bridget.
    Miriam said, “No, I never vant, but perhaps some words – if I don’t know how to say.”
    Marianne asked her, “How did you manage to come over?”
    Unconsciously, Miriam replied in her native tongue, “I met Mrs. Smedley in Berlin in 1936. She was on holiday with her husband, for the Olympic Games. I was eighteen. She asked