She wiped her fingers down her skirt and skipped across the hall. Bonfires. The English burned a guy every November. Built a bonfire and placed the stick figure on top. Guy Fawkes, that was his name. Uncle Otto had taken her to Hampstead Heath. They’d stood and watched the bonfire, felt its warmth wrap them, seen the effigy shrivel to nothing and the fireworks shoot and drop from the sky. She could smell them now. Like her fingers. Swan Vesta. She was running low on matches. Would have to get some more.

Catharsis. That’s what Uncle Otto said it was. Catharsis. A bonfire once a year to free the soul of stress and passion. The Nazis had had a bonfire. Burned the books they didn’t like and danced like devils round the roaring flames. Black clouds of smoke swirled across the stairwell and Dora could smell its acrid stench. Forest fires. Burned the old, made way for the new. That was nature. Renewal. Redemption. The basement. Still the basement.

Dora opened the baize door, down the narrow staircase into the kitchen with its tiled floor and walls. She heard a rustle, saw a rat slither into a hole in the wainscot. The gas pipes that had once fed the ovens rested against the wall, tall copper pipes which had blackened with time. They looked like upright snakes, like the one Dora had seen in Greece, cooling itself in water, long and straight and black. She walked over to the boxes she’d seen, opened them. They were full of paper and old newspapers. Dora crumpled them up and spread them over the floor, a trail to the stairs, to the old pantry, to the boiler room. The empty copper pipes. Dora turned the valve. There was no hiss, but she fancied she could smell gas, even so. She walked into the old dormitory. That night crashed into her memory, thrashing from side to side, slamming against the hard, bone walls of her skull.

Hotel Maison Victor Hugo: February 1944