Clung Together

Rebekkah nodded, hoping to catch a glimpse of Katrina, perhaps amongst those bashing down the wall or amongst those gathered in the evening shadows. She knew Katrina was there. Her excited phone call from the capital where she worked had left her mother in no doubt as to her intent.

"At long last, after all these years of Honeker and the DDR, the business is finished!" Ilse exclaimed.

Not quite all, reflected Rebekkah. Despite the closeness of their love and their many nights of passion. Despite the long pillow chats and the tearful confessions of guilt about the women she had seduced or let herself be seduced by. Despite a love the two had tried to rescue from Ilse's infidelity by a failed night of making love together with a third woman, a lover from whom Ilse was reluctant to be parted. Despite all their many ups and downs, trials and tribulations, and their shared parenthood. Despite all this there was still one issue wholly unresolved.

"You know, Ilse, there is a matter we haven't discussed."

"There is?"

"Yes."

"And what's that, Becky?" asked Ilse, perhaps quietly aware what Rebekkah was alluding to.

"The time we first met."

"In that house? After I'd been... after that awful... when..."

"No. Not that. The first time."

"What time? What do you mean?"

There was real fear in Ilse's eyes. She looked towards Rebekkah, not really at her, perhaps even through her. Colour appeared to be draining from her already pale face.

"You know exactly what I mean. It wasn't there we first met. It was earlier."

"I don't understand. What are you saying?" asked Ilse, with a distinct tremble in her voice.

"On the forced march. The death march. You know what I'm talking about. You and your baton. I know it was you who beat me then. And I know that you know it was me you beat."

"You can't! You mustn't! It's not true!" said Ilse, with genuine panic.

"Itistrue. It is the most true thing there is."

There was a silence between them, but not a silence in the room, as the cheers and cries of excitement continued to stream from the television set and the commentators described the exultation around them, unable to disguise the very real one they also felt.

"Yes. I know. It is true," said Ilse at last, in a soft and tremulous voice.

And then, like a dam that had suddenly been broken, her eyes flooded with tears, her face cracked into fragments of misery, and her mouth contorted into ugly rubbery trembling. And from deep inside her came huge sobs, welling up and exploding, her chest and her bare breasts shaking with convulsions with each guttural explosion of misery.

"It was me! I know it was! I did it! How can youeverforgive me?"

Then, desperately, she clung to Rebekkah's waist, arms clasped about her hips and her face, damp now from the unstoppable torrent of tears, on Rebekkah's sagging bosom, her body shuddering with each sob.

"Please forgive me. Please.Please! Please say you forgive me! Please!"

Rebekkah was silent. She placed a hand steadily on Ilse's head, not stroking her hair but just keeping it in place. Could she forgive Ilse?

The memories of those months of humiliation flooded back. The times she was forced to strip naked. The times she had been spat on and beaten. The times she had witnessed the most appalling brutalities. The woman beaten to death, although she was so weak from hunger she would have soon died anyway. The woman shot in the back as she ran desperately across the fields, followed by a bullet shot to the skull. The bloody mess that was where her face had once been. The constant cruel taunts. The systematic denial of food that was permitted for the Slavs and Poles in the same company.

But somehow, although not especially the worst in kind, there being many beatings and many humiliations worse than that, the worst memory that haunted Rebekkah after all these decades was the beating she'd received from Ilse.

Rebekkah looked down at her trembling lover.

What was Ilse saying?

"I know I did wrong. I know what I did was wrong. So very wrong! It was then. We were taught that the Jews... that people like you... that you were less than human... that you deserved to die... I was so very very wrong!"

"That's an excuse, Ilse," Rebekkah said firmly. "No one forced you to beat me that day. And I'm sure, in fact I know because I saw, that I wasn't the only one you beat and tormented. I wasn't the only one you called a bitch or a cunt."

"Cunt? I called you that?Bitch?"

"You did!"

"Oh, Becky! I'm so sorry!"

For a moment, Rebekkah viewed this as her time of triumph. She could now abandon Ilse as she could so easily have done so many years before. Leave her Teutonic lover to rue her viciousness. But Rebekkah knew that the reason she remembered that moment so very vividly, and why, of all the torments she'd suffered, the one she received from Ilse was the one that hurt the most intensely, was precisely because of the intensity of the love she felt for Ilse and the passion they had shared so often and so equally intensely over the many years. Perhaps they had clung together so tightly because of the strength of this unspoken guilt that Ilse had carried with her, but there was also the true love Rebekkah knew Ilse felt for her. A love that had always had her returning to her first love whatever the desire and lust she expressed towards and experienced from other women.

She stroked Ilse's hair, slowly but firmly. Ilse was quiet now, her sobs fewer, but fresh tears were still seeping free and leaving a trail on Rebekkah's bare breasts.

"Do you forgive me?" asked Ilse again, looking up, her face as miserable as that day they met in the abandoned house when the object of her misery had been violent and prolonged.

Could Rebekkah ever say anything else?

"Yes, Ilse. I forgive you."