Between Two Oceans - Book 2

Chapter 5

- Catherine -

Unlike grandpa, mom never stopped peppering me with questions. It's because we don't fool her. Never.

"Your father was more than happy to have you a little longer and now he puts you on the first plane to Ireland. Did you argue ? It's because of Ellen !"

She asserted more than she asked me if it was because of Ellen. Partly, yes, but I couldn't tell her that. Otherwise, I was going to have to explain the whole story to her and I wanted that even less than the chicken soup she had just placed in front of me.

"It was me who wanted to go home. I wasn't going to stay there forever."

"I thought it was good for you. That's what you told me on Skype. That you was feeling more yourself."

"I got tired of the Scottish rain. I wanted to find back the one in Ireland."

My joke didn't even make her smile a little. It was going to be a long evening.

"If it's neither your father nor his wife..." she recovered just in time remembering that she had concluded a truce with Ellen and she promised to not insult her anymore, "nor his partner, is it Maisie ? Or Blaine ? Did you argue with one of them ?"

"No mom, it's not that." I sighed.

If only she knew...

"You annoy me when you do that. You took that from your father's side. I would never have passed on such a character trait to you."

She spoke of my ability to internalize what could bring me joy as well as sadness and to not give up. Just like my father, I was able to remain stoic so as to not let any emotion show, which had the gift of driving her crazy, her who could be read like an open book.

"Mom, I just wanted to find back my home, my grandfather and my Netflix. And I was hoping for a better reception than that." I said, pointing at the soup.

"Shall we order pizza ?" she suggested, wrinkling her nose at her failed soup.

"That's it ! You order an edible dish and I choose a movie."

September 1941

Quarantine. So that's why we've all been crammed here for four days now. I don't know how long it will last. I was able to speak a little with an inmate who had been there since 1939. She is Polish. At first there were mainly only Germans and Austrians then they deported Polish prisoners including her. She explained to me that when she arrived, the quarantine only lasted one day because they needed labor to build more barracks, that the work was hard, that the blows rained heavily and that hangings were legion.

She's been here almost three years and she's only twenty-five. Most of the women are under forty according to her, which I find hard to believe. They all look like old women, their faces emaciated, their eyes sunken, their skin on their bones. Bones so protruding that I have the impression that they will pass through their flesh.

Is this what awaits us?

What kind of treatment can lead a human to become nothing more than a shadow of himself in a few years ?

"Years !" she laughed when I expressed my thoughts to her. "Weeks you mean."

It was to her that I gave three small loaves in exchange for something to write with. "Why do you want to write ?" she asked me. She's not the only one who asked me that. Elisheba, Ava the Jewish-German music teacher and Mahalia the slender young woman with a streaked cheek for daring to speak to one of our guards when we arrived asked me too, looking at me as if I was a fool.