Chapter Thirty-Six

 

Some Six Years Later

 

STEVEN SPREAD THE PAPERS OUT ON THE BUREAU, before he put on his reading glasses.

“Shoemakers, Artists, Actors, Carpenters ...would you believe, darling?” he muttered as I stood beside him, looking over his shoulder, with my arms around his neck.

“What are you mumbling about now?” I asked as he turned around in his chair and pulled me down to kiss me.

“These are the last papers we’ll get from the Treblinka affair, my love and I can’t say I’ll be sad to see the back of them.”

“Oh … my dearest darling … all that is finished now, surely … Poor Gerry, Poor Gerry. I often think of him.”

Steven stroked my arm gently with his strong, firm hands.

“And Freya?” he asked, raising a cynical eyebrows and I hesitated for a few moments.

“I don’t think so much of her,” I lied, “Have you got any further ahead with her parentage? Do these documents help you there?”

He whistled happily and turned some more pages.

“Yes, I think they do,” he said and I looked at him with surprise as I didn’t really expect such an answer from him, since it was the question we had been asking each other for years.

“You’re joking ... You must be, darling. We could never trace Freya’s father from the little evidence we have had up till now ...you know that. What have you got that’s new then?” I asked and tried to take the papers from Steven’s hand but he pulled them away from me playfully.

“Well ... He wasn’t a shoemaker, or a candlestick maker. That’s for sure,” he went on with an all-knowing smile on his face, “but he was a carpenter ...and a brilliant one at that. His name was Casimir Jagus ...a Pole, aged twenty-three when he fathered Freya.”

I was stunned at the knowledge that Steven was spouting with so much confidence.

“But how can you be so sure, Steven ...So precisely accurate?”

He removed his spectacles and placed them gently on the table near the bureau.

“Oh! He was a carpenter alright ...and he didn’t imagine he was Henry the Eighth nor Bluebeard, nor even Napoleon as many of the others did.”

“I suppose he thought he was God,” I said, having been unable to resist that remark when I thought of Freya ...and I didn’t tell Steven of my recurring dream about her ...well, recurring nightmares, I should day. She followed me in my thoughts when I was asleep, whether I was happy or sad in those times and those large, wet eyes; .those tortured red eyes accompanied me everywhere and I was often glad to wake up so that I could be free of the evil obsession that surrounded me.

“No ...Not God,” said Steven and he paused for a few moments before he spoke again and I could see that his face had changed. He was no longer smiling. “He thought he was a horse ... a rocking horse,”

I felt the blood chill in my veins as I turned to stare into the garden. Could those fearful eyes that I saw in Dobbin be real and could that tear that fell to the carpet those many years ago have been more than a figment of my imagination ...and could that strange affiliation between Freya and that awful thing be something of a ‘blood relationship?’ We had found the rocking horse burnt to a cinder and hardly recognisable as anything but an old toy, after the fire ... but what about Freya? Could she have been what the fireman thought to be a toy elephant strapped to the horse’s back? There were many questions racing through my mind as Steven took me in his arms.

“That’s all irrelevant now my darling. It doesn’t really matter at all now, but today does.”

I looked at him blankly and he rubbed his nose against mine. “It’s our anniversary, darling. We’ve been married six years today,” he said and swept me across the floor as he led me into a waltz.