SYLVIA
Sylvia had tried her hardest to get Evelyne to explain everything to Anna: why she wanted to see her, what she would be writing about, what newspaper she worked for. Evelyne swore she had, but when they turned up at Anna and Daniel’s pokey sixth-floor flat in a suburb of Lausanne, Sylvia wasn’t convinced Anna had given a single thought to having her story in a newspaper – she simply seemed excited to see Sylvia again, and it occurred to her that perhaps she was the only pregnant woman Anna knew, the only person she could get some much needed reassurance from.
With Evelyne as translator, Sylvia answered the many questions Anna flung at her when she was hardly through the door: had Sylvia had breathlessness (yes), heartburn (no), and insomnia (yes, most nights, out of worry, mainly), like Anna had? Was she excited to meet her baby (of course, she said, I wish, she thought), was she scared about the birth (not really, but only because she’d hardly dared give it a thought)?
Anna ushered them into the battered wooden chairs she said the previous tenant had left behind, and served them glasses of tap water. They didn’t yet have a table; the only other furniture in the studio flat was a bed, neatly made up by the window. Evelyne had given them a few pots and pans for the kitchenette, and that was it. The place was tiny and dark without the main light, which was just a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Sylvia thought of her and Jim’s airy sitting room with its bay window and polished wooden floorboards, their spacious kitchen, and the spare room that would be the baby’s, Jim having diligently painted the walls pale yellow.
After two stressful months crammed into Evelyne’s flat, Anna and Daniel had finally managed to move out, Evelyne had told her with relief (brother and sister, it transpired, were not designed to live together as adults), after Daniel took on two jobs. So in addition to working on a building site in the daytime, he was also making croissants in a bakery in the early hours of each morning. How he found time to sleep, Sylvia didn’t know. And how lonely Anna must be, holed up in this tiny flat on her own, in a new city where she didn’t know anyone. Sylvia had wondered if Anna could get a job herself, but Evelyne had said no. She was sixteen, pregnant and unmarried – even if someone would take her on, it would be risky to make herself ‘seen’; she and Daniel couldn’t get married until they both came of age, and until then she was at risk of being sent back to the farm, or some awful women’s detention centre, if the authorities found her – and then her child might be taken from her and given up for adoption.
So it was best to stay off the radar.
They hadn’t even told the landlord Anna was living here – as far as he knew, Daniel occupied the flat alone. The cheap metal ring Anna was currently twisting around her wedding finger was just a small attempt to stop any prying neighbours from asking too many questions.
Still, the apartment was progress, Daniel’s two jobs were progress, and maybe, just maybe, they could get through these next few years until easier times arrived. Sylvia hoped so with all her heart.
‘What was it like, growing up where you did?’ she said, to start the interview. She and Evelyne were sitting on the two chairs, while Anna sat on a cushion on the floor, her back to the wall, an arrangement Anna had insisted on.
‘It was home,’ Anna said.
Sylvia looked at Evelyne as she translated, and then frowned. She looked back at Anna. ‘Were you happy?’
‘Until Father left. But after that we didn’t really have any money, and then Mother lost her job.’ She paused. ‘I think she was very unhappy. She cried a lot.’ Anna looked down, picked at the edge of her skirt. ‘She loved us though, our mother. She loved us and she didn’t want us to go away. I don’t know why she let them take us.’
‘Tell me about what happened when the authorities came for you,’ Sylvia said gently.
Through Evelyne’s translation, Sylvia heard about the day Anna last saw her mother and older sister. The despair on her mother’s face, tinged with something else – resignation, Anna had decided after years of thinking about it. Her own confusion as the men came to the house and grabbed her and Cornelia by the arms. Cornelia spitting at them, screaming. Get your hands off me! The car ride for what felt like hours and hours until her mouth was dry and she desperately needed to pee. The road sign – Ferden – where Cornelia was pulled from her seat. The door slamming shut and the car pulling away again, going she didn’t know where without her sister.
Anna spoke about arriving at the farm where Franziska, Evelyne’s mother, showed her to a cot bed in the corner of the kitchen where she would sleep, how she’d been asked to serve the dinner to the four of them that very same night, and how Franziska had chided her when she spilt a drop of sauce on the tablecloth, and ordered her to go and wash it as soon as she’d eaten. She spoke about having to get up at 5am to milk the cows before school, and then coming home and going straight to work again, mucking out the cow shit or washing the family’s sheets.
‘Did you mind it?’ Sylvia asked, aware, as she did so, that Anna was having to relate this tale in front of Evelyne, the daughter of the people she was speaking about. But at least Anna knew that Evelyne had left too, that she understood something of what Anna had gone through.
Anna shrugged. ‘I’d done chores before, at home, although not as many. I was always tired, but that meant I slept well. And at least the work filled my day. It stopped me having too much time to think – about Mum and Cornelia mainly. I missed them so much.’
Sylvia looked at her, willing Anna to meet her eyes. ‘Did they ever hurt you at the farm?’
Evelyne glanced at her momentarily, and Sylvia wondered for a second if she was going to refuse to translate. So she was relieved when Evelyne conveyed the question, adding something else that Sylvia didn’t understand, but from the softening in Anna’s face she knew it was encouragement, not a warning.
‘Herr Buchs shouted a lot,’ Anna said. ‘He hit me sometimes. Franziska told me off all the time; I could never do anything right. But I suppose I got used to it.’
Sylvia looked at her. There was something else, she knew it. ‘And?’ she prompted.
Anna raised her head and looked Evelyne right in the eyes as she spoke. ‘It wasn’t what they did, but what they didn’t,’ she said. ‘They didn’t love me. I was never part of their family, even though I lived there for years and years. I was just a farmhand. No, worse – a dog. They were never kind to me, they never cared if I was hungry, or tired, or cold, or ill. They only took me to the doctor when I was sick because they needed me well enough to work – and then they resented me for how much it cost them and made me work even harder. They took me out of school, even though that was the only thing I liked in my life, and when I pleaded to go back, Herr Buchs hit me.’ She paused. ‘Actually, I wasn’t even a dog, I was lower than that. They liked their dogs far more than they liked me.’
As Evelyne translated, Sylvia heard her voice waver, and she knew Anna heard it too.
‘For the first year I hoped it was all a mistake, that Mum would come and get me back. But she never did.’
‘You weren’t allowed to see her?’
She shook her head. ‘I haven’t seen her since I was eight years old. And the people who took me never came to see me, to tell me how she was. I couldn’t even send a letter. I once asked Franziska for a stamp, but she told me it was best if I didn’t write. I don’t know why. But I never gave up hope that I would see her again, some day. I just needed to get out of there – and now I have. As soon as I’m married, I’ll go back and find her.’
‘Did you think about running away before?’
‘Every day,’ Anna replied. ‘But I couldn’t go back home, the authorities would just take me again. I had no money, I was underage. I thought if they caught me then I might be sent somewhere worse. I’d heard stuff at school about places where they sent disobedient kids – horrible places. I couldn’t risk it.’
‘And then you got pregnant.’
Anna nodded, smiling. ‘The baby saved me. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.’
Sylvia exchanged a glance with Evelyne. She knew her friend didn’t share that view, that she felt Daniel’s life had been curbed by this pregnant girlfriend, that Anna’s would also be curbed, when she had a baby to care for. This is why there should be easier access to contraception, Evelyne had railed before they arrived at the flat.
‘Daniel hardly even spoke to me until I was fifteen,’ Anna said. ‘Then one day he defended me when Herr Buchs was telling me off about something – I forget what, he told me off so often I stopped listening. But this time Daniel stood up for me, and he took a beating for it. That’s when we became friends, and everything was so much better after that. I wanted us to run away together, but he wouldn’t, even though he hated his father. He couldn’t bear to leave his mother there alone, he said. But when I discovered I was pregnant we both knew he had no choice. We’d have to leave.’ Anna put her hand on her stomach. ‘So the baby saved me, you see. It saved both of us.’
Sylvia took a deep breath. It pained her, what the girl had been through. How little love she’d had in her life, how little help. And she knew, after hearing her story, how much Anna wanted the new being growing inside of her. She thought of her own baby and hoped she would somehow manage to feel the same.
‘Danke,’ Sylvia said, when the questions came to an end, and they both smiled at her attempt at German. She would send Anna a copy of the article when it was published.
‘Brigitte,’ Anna said suddenly, as though the thought had only just occurred to her.
‘What?’ Evelyne said.
‘You can’t use my real name. Please call me Brigitte. It’s my mother’s middle name. Just in case the authorities read it. They can’t know it’s me.’
Sylvia nodded and wrote the name down to show her the spelling. ‘Okay?’
Anna nodded. ‘When are you due?’ she asked.
‘October tenth.’ Sylvia didn’t match Anna’s smile. ‘You?’
‘October sixteenth.’ She beamed, and Sylvia saw how excited Anna was at the prospect of having a baby. She didn’t have much to provide, but she would give it the most important thing of all, the thing she hadn’t had nearly enough of herself – love.
They left Anna and Daniel’s flat and caught the bus back into Lausanne city centre.
‘I want to do something for her,’ Sylvia said, when they were installed in a cafe. Perhaps it was just her stupid hormones, but her time with Anna made her want to weep.
‘You are. You’re writing that article.’
‘Something more. Something concrete. They have nothing. How are they going to cope with a baby in that tiny flat?’
Sylvia sat back in her chair on the cafe terrace and rested a hand on her belly. Listening to Anna had been emotionally hard, but for some reason she felt physically drained, too, with a headache pounding at her temples. Guilt-induced, probably. Guilt that she had so much in comparison, and yet had been so ungrateful for it.
‘They’ll just have to, there’s no other choice,’ Evelyne said. The waitress came and they ordered drinks – coffee for Evelyne and lemonade for Sylvia. The air had the metallic smell of fresh rain on hot tarmac. Back home, summer had finally broken over the bank holiday weekend with a downpour almost as intense as the drought that preceded it, and here it felt like autumn was finally around the corner, too. It was the end of the long, hot summer – and the beginning of a new phase of life.
‘Thank you for translating,’ Sylvia said. ‘It must have been strange for you, hearing all that about your parents.’
‘A little.’ Evelyne paused. ‘A lot.’ She looked down at her coffee. ‘It wasn’t a surprise, any of that. I mean, I was there. I know what my father is like, how he treated her. But I suppose I never really thought about it beyond the physical. I never thought about what she’d lost. I just accepted it. I was a teenager when she came to the farm and I was so caught up in my own battles with my father that I didn’t consider how hard it must have been for Anna to be away from her own family.’
‘Do you know anything about them?’
‘Not really. I never asked.’ Evelyne picked up her coffee cup and Sylvia saw her eyes were shining.
‘You were a child too. You couldn’t be expected to do anything.’
‘Maybe not. But perhaps I could have been her friend. I just thought she was this skinny, morose kid who never smiled, but in my arrogant youth I never really thought to do anything about that. It’s ironic, you know. The other day I was in Geneva protesting the bulldozing of a centre set up to help women, and yet I was too wrapped up in myself back then to help a young girl in my own home.’
‘Well, you can be her friend now. She’s going to need one, that’s for sure.’
‘I know, and I will.’ Evelyne shifted in her seat, took a sip of coffee. ‘We needed the money, you know, and the extra help. It’s not an easy life, farming.’ She paused. ‘But I know that’s not an excuse for how we treated Anna.’
Sylvia said nothing, sensing that Evelyne had more to say.
‘Mother has been writing me letters.’ She laughed, but there was bitterness in it. ‘That’s pretty brave of her really. I can just imagine her waiting until Father has gone down to the cows, and then whipping out her notepad. Scurrying furtively to the post office.’ She shook her head and her smile dropped. ‘Breaking contact with my mother was like collateral damage. She wouldn’t stand up to him, so I had to leave her too. I didn’t want to.’
‘She’s a product of her generation. And so are you – breaking free of all that.’
‘I suppose so.’ Evelyne shrugged. ‘I’ll never forget the moment I understood that things didn’t have to be as I’d been brought up to believe. It was 1969, I was about Anna’s age, or a little older. I heard a report on the radio about a women’s march in Bern, protesting that the government was intending to ratify the European Convention on Human Rights, even though women didn’t yet have the vote! It was unbelievable, as though they didn’t even consider women to be humans with rights.’ She shook her head. ‘The march was led by a woman called Emilie Lieberherr. God, she was a powerful speaker. Equality. Women’s rights. The vote. These weren’t notions I’d heard too often before then, but everything she was saying just made complete sense to me. It was like someone had provided the answer before I even knew I was allowed to ask the question.
‘That was the beginning of the end for my relationship with Dad. And then he didn’t even vote for women’s suffrage in ’71,’ Evelyne laughed. ‘He told me, threw it in my face like a boast. I knew after that, I couldn’t stay. There was simply no middle ground.’
‘Will you ever see them again?’
‘I hope so, one day. I may not like him much right now, but he’s still my father. And I still have good memories from when I was little, before farming ground him down, before I woke up to the path he was sending me on. I suppose it’s like Anna implied: however tough it was for me, at least they were my family, at least there was love, even if my father buried it well.’
As Sylvia raised her glass, a sharp, sudden pain stabbed her in the abdomen, taking her breath away. She dropped the glass on the table, spilling its contents.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes, I think so. Just a strange pain for a second.’
Evelyne pushed a paper napkin to her and Sylvia mopped up the lemonade. She could feel the baby move almost constantly now. Just five weeks to go. Almost fully baked. How strange it felt to think back to a year previously, when this was the furthest thing from her mind.
‘How does it feel, to be having a baby?’
‘Bizarre. Surreal. Bloody uncomfortable.’
Evelyne gave a wry smile. ‘Perhaps I’ll change my mind one day, but I just can’t see that I’ll ever have a child. And I know I’ll never get married. It feels like social conditioning, a way for society to cast me in a mould and keep me in check. I want a career that earns me enough money to eat expensive dinners and travel to Paris for the weekend and drink cocktails.’ She laughed. ‘I want to have steamy affairs at music festivals and sleep on the beach in India and drink beer at Oktoberfest. I want to sleep with a man half my age when I’m fifty. I want to be free to do as I please, for as long as I please.’
Sylvia smiled. ‘I wanted all that too,’ she said, before amending her sentence at Evelyne’s raised eyebrows. She twisted her wedding ring around her finger. ‘Okay, I know I’m not as radical as you, but I wanted the career and expensive dinners and the freedom to do as I pleased.’
‘No steamy affairs?’
‘Well…’
Evelyne laughed.
‘Getting pregnant at this age was the last thing I wanted. I feel like I’ve veered off down a path I never intended.’ She and Jim now had a taupe-coloured sofa, a coffee machine and a crib in the spare room. Had she lost her aim in life like a coin down that sofa?
‘Then fight.’ Evelyne grabbed Sylvia’s hand across the table. ‘Fight to make things different. Fight to have a career and be a mother too. If we all fight in our own small way then maybe things will change.’
Sylvia smiled, hearing Maggie in Evelyne’s words. If those two brilliant women thought she could do it, maybe she just could. ‘I suppose we’ll just have to see what happens,’ she said. ‘To the both of us.’
Evelyne picked up her cup of coffee. ‘To women. Santé.’
‘Santé.’
It was just after they’d toasted the future that Sylvia looked down to see a circle of blood growing steadily outwards across her skirt.