Put Out the Fires by Maureen Lee

corrected herself, the young. She undid the plaits coiled on her neck and let them hang loose. She felt that if she tried really hard, she could erase the last twenty years from her mind and become the young Ruth again.
    Did she want to? She leaned forward and asked her reflection quite distinctly, “Do I want to?” But the I reflection provided no answer. One of their friends in Graz, a psychiatrist, had used hypnotism to treat his patients. She wondered if she could be hypnotised to forget she’d ever had a husband and two children.
    She closed her eyes and had an immediate vision of Benjy hanging from the stairwell. She quickly opened her eyes again. It was guilt she felt more than anything when she thought about Benjy, because she hadn’t loved him for a long time. She found his middle-aged paunch and the ridiculous mutton-chop whiskers he’d affected quite repugnant.
    Even in death, it was easy to feel guilt, but hard to feel sympathy for a man who’d taken his own life rather than stand up to the German monsters.
    By then, the house had been stripped bare. The hated Huns had taken everything of value: the pictures, the Steinway, the furniture, even her furs. The children had gone the same day as Benjy. That’s what had tipped him Over the abyss into despair. Ruth arrived home to find she no longer had a family. Benjy was dead and the children had disappeared.
    “Where?” she asked faintly. Jews seemed to be vanishing daily off the face of the earth. There would soon be not a angle one left in Graz. It could only be the barbarians who’d taken, her children. They’d left the most precious things till last. But no, to her relief it wasn’t as calamitous as she’d first thought, not quite.
    Gertrude Bruening, wonderful, loyal Gertrude, more like an angel than a cook, who had hidden her in her own home for the next two dazed and wretched years, was sitting on the bottom stair, rocking to and fro and wailing like an animal which had returned to its lair and found someone had stolen all its young.
    “A group of Simon’s friends came from the University,”
    Gertrude said breathlessly when Ruth calmed her down.
    Both ignored the body swinging overhead. “Oh, you should have seen them, Frau Hildesheimer, their eyes were fever bright and they were bursting with excitement.: They were planning to escape to America. But Simon and Leah had to make their minds up there and then if they wanted to go with them. There was no time to wait for you to come home. Mr Hildesheimer, poor man, he tried to stop them. Me, I insisted they go, I knew it’s what you “, would have wanted.” She burst into tears. “At least I hope so. If not, you’ll just have to give me the sack.”
    “It’s what I wanted, Gertie,” Ruth whispered. “Let’s” hope they’ll be safe.”
    Perhaps they were, perhaps they weren’t. That was two years ago and Ruth had received no word from her children.
    There was a noise from the yard and she got up and went to see what was happening. Her father was dragging a sack of coke into the yard. He must have bought it from the coalyard across the street. He looked happy again, as if the money from the musical box had changed the course of their lives forever. At least, Ruth thought dispassionately, she could make sure he lived comfortably from now on.
    But she could never love him as she used to. He was old.
    One day he -would be taken from her, and losing another loved one would be too much to bear. She would keep him at a distance, keep the whole world at a distance. From now on, Ruth Singerman would have a heart of stone.
    She went back to the mirror, and for some reason she was never able to explain, she picked up a pair of nail scissors which had been in the box with the jewellery and began to hack away at her plaits. She’d had them for as long as she could remember, and it took ages to cut through the thick browny-red hair.
    It looked terrible when she’d finished, as if her head had been