Read Online Cabin Fever by Diane Awerbuck - Free Book Online Page A

unfoldable along quite the same lines. One of them was reading his book. He cringed when he saw it, and held his journal more tightly. Luckily no one would recognise him from his author photo: the publishers had used an image of a uniformed Heber from another century. At least here in Eastern Europe he would not see his young self stretched out on posters and billboards.
    Thomas Heber – the first of two children born at the same time – had never been a fearful man. In the manner of British Jews, he did not allow himself to be bent to the world of spirits. It was Hallowe’en, the time when Christians set free the old ghosts to chase across Europe: he was immune. A pumpkin was a pumpkin, and Thomas the Twin was lucky to wander in English shops that laid them out so, in hard polished rows, the memory of famine lodged in the bright flesh divided by a clean slice of the knife.
    His family name was his shield. Heber: the one who has been passed over – and you could take that either way. Over the centuries Jews had learned to toughen their hearts but in the last decades he had seen the insult reclaimed, like a sliver of sea bed made fit for dry living. No one said ‘hebe’ anymore: dislike had been driven underground. ‘Zionist,’ they said, instead. His sister Miryam had been given a cat named Israel.
    The thought of Miryam hurt his heart. Thomas the Twin distracted himself by peering at the other travellers. He pressed his hands to his eyes and sighed. How time doubled back on you, stretched out or pulled you back to other places so that the events of forty years ago seemed more real than the present: the faces of prisoners of war rather than the Japanese girls here on the train who slept with their small mouths open, the wide-eyed present Americans tonguing their phrasebooks. How could a person’s body be in one place and their mind in another? He was nearly eighty and still he didn’t know.
    And neither did Miryam, though nowadays she had plenty of time to contemplate these mysteries as she lay swelling softly in her hospital bed, swelling like a woman left for dead, horizontal. The chemotherapy had turned her hair silver; it was falling out in strands. Every morning the clumps lay on her restless pillow, marking time like candle wax. Thomas the Twin had abandoned his interviews, his TV appearances, the lunches. He triangulated the route between Miryam’s empty house and his dark one and the hospital, a zigzagging arrow on a war-room map. Someone had to feed Israel. The cat had settled at last in Miryam’s chair, and there was no budging it. How was it, Thomas wondered, when he rattled pellets in the plastic dish, that someone could be gone but leave behind their hair in the brush, their slippers under the bed, Chanel No.5 on a cushion? He stood in Miryam’s fading flowery living room with the bowl in his hand and considered the mountains of shoes collected by thrifty guards at Bergen-Belsen, sad and momentous, the old skins left behind. When his cellphone rang, he ignored it. The publicist could wait.
    The train clacked. Heber turned his mind away from his sister but she was replicated in the faces he saw on the notices, in his book, in the eyes of his fellow travellers. The hospital did not allow mirrors near the terminal patients: the nurses kept the dying from taking their last image into the next world. He kept Miryam’s face in his head. He was preparing himself, he knew. There was so much to grieve: the dead of centuries, his old life, now Miryam. Thomas the Twin peered at a rusting tractor in the rich Czech grass and wondered, What will I be called when she is gone?
    But Miryam was not dead yet. In one of her lucid periods she had turned from her memory to her waiting twin and clamped her hand on his wrist. Its heat made him shiver; she was burning in her bed. Thomas wanted to push her off but he could not. She had held him close, whispering as though she was telling him a marvellous secret, as though