The Last Train to London Read online

  “And this little one, he is a scared little Jew brother sitting on a bench on which Jews are forbidden?” the storm trooper taunted.

  “He’s not my brother,” Stephan said.

  Žofie, with a steady voice, said, “He’s mine. He’s my brother, sir.”

  Stephan licked his lips, his mouth unbearably dry.

  The storm trooper turned to the rest of his men. “I think this young Jew has come to this park in search of exercise, yes?”

  Stephan didn’t know if he was speaking of himself or Walter. He felt a small trickle of urine, but somehow managed to stem it before he visibly wet himself.

  “You will show us how well you goose-step, then,” the man demanded, clearly speaking to him now.

  A crowd was gathering around them.

  “I am being unclear?” the man demanded.

  Stephan, with a dry swallow, goose-stepped forward, afraid to put distance between himself and his brother, but with no choice. He made a circle of the straight-knee kicks, returning to a spot ever so slightly closer to Walter.

  “Again,” the man demanded. “Surely you can do better than that. You will sing. It is easier when you sing. ‘I am a Jew, do you know my nose?’ You know this song?”

  Stephan chanced a quick, pleading glance at Žofie. The man drew out his billy club.

  Stephan goose-stepped forward again, away from them, the man shouting after him, “You must sing!”

  Still, he goose-stepped silently, unable to bear more humiliation than that with Žofie and Walter watching.

  When he turned back toward them, he saw Žofie-Helene’s long braid hanging down her back, her hand firmly gripping Walter’s smaller one.

  His little brother, crying silently now, glanced back at him as Žofie mercifully led him away.

  The storm trooper stepped right in Stephan’s path, grabbed his foot as he marched, and pushed it upward. Stephan’s planted foot came out from under him and he landed hard on his back, the air knocked out of him. The growing crowd jeered at him. Dieter too jeered.

  “I said you will sing,” the storm trooper demanded.

  Stephan climbed up, straightened his glasses, and began goose-stepping again, this time singing the humiliating song now that Žofie and Walter were no longer there to hear.

  The storm trooper drove him down the promenade, followed by the jeering crowd.

  When Stephan grew so tired that he no longer could raise his legs high enough to please the storm trooper, the man again pulled his foot up, spilling him backward.

  And again.

  And again.

  Stephan was sure one more fall would break his back. But each time, he would find Dieter’s face in the jeering crowd and rise again.

  He goose-stepped to the end of the promenade and turned around.

  Halfway back again, or maybe more, or maybe less, Stephan peered up from the ground through skewed lenses, no longer able to find Dieter’s face in the mob. He tried to conjure in the storm trooper’s spitting mouth Dieter’s lips fumbling the script lines he so meticulously wrote, Dieter’s mouth calling him a Jew, Dieter’s hand on Žofie’s beautiful hair as he kissed her up on the Burgtheater stage. But there was no anger left, nothing to marshal against the storm trooper beating him and kicking him as, in the distance, the Ferris wheel circled its long climb around and around against the sky.

  Letting Go

  Truus arrived at the bare grounds of the Zeeburg quarantine unit, where the children were already gathering in the cafeteria—all but the seven, including little Adele Weiss, who had tested positive for diphtheria and been quarantined. Adele’s case was mild, the doctor had suggested the prior morning. She had the gray throat and the cough that were indisputably the disease, but her neck was less swollen than those of the other children, her breathing not badly labored, and she had as yet developed no lesions on her body.

  And today was a good-news sort of morning: that very afternoon the healthy children would board the ferry to England, where Helen Bentwich had foster homes waiting for every one of them.

  As Truus hurried along, she was startled by something flying from a window and splattering just at her feet. Was that . . . She examined it more closely, the bile rising in her throat, but that was the good news, the morning sickness. Was the gray blob a dumpling? She wasn’t sure what troubled her more: that the food the children were meant to survive on here was of such poor quality that they threw it out the window, or that the amusements were so few that throwing food out a window passed for fun. This dumpling—or whatever it was—came from the diphtheria unit, where the children were not even allowed walks along the canal and the occasional treat of seeing a barge pulled from land by a team of men.

  Inside the cafeteria, Truus addressed the gathered children, who cheered at her news and rushed off to the barracks to pack. It was a good-news day, she thought as she shooed one last lingering child off, saying, “I’ve a home for you and Jonah, Sheryl. Now run along and pack.”

  The girl said, “I can’t leave him.”

  “Leave who, sweetheart?”

  “Jonah.”

  “Of course you won’t leave him.” She reached out and took the hand with the thumb that sported one half of her ring. “I’ve a home for you both in England. Now hurry along. I won’t let him leave without you, but you must allow time to return my rings!”

  “Jonah is sick,” the girl said, and silent tears slid down her cheeks.

  “Sick? But he’s had the vaccine.”

  The girl just stood there crying.

  “Oh, sweetheart, I expect it’s just a little . . .” She wrapped the child up in her arms, praying. Surely it couldn’t be another case of diphtheria.

  TRUUS HELD LITTLE Sheryl’s hand as they entered the office of the head nurse. Yes, the girl’s brother had awoken in the night with chills and a sore throat. He’d not begun to cough and as yet showed no symptoms beyond the gray tonsils. They’d considered quarantining the sister too, since the two were inseparable. But to expose an asymptomatic child to the illness?

  “No, of course not,” Truus said, already working through the implications of this child being diagnosed just as the others were to leave. She would have to tell Helen Bentwich. She would have to hope Helen would accept children who might in a few days show signs of illness they didn’t currently. Helen was sensible. The doctor had pronounced it extremely unlikely at this point that others would become ill—assurance Truus took for the child she carried as well. All the children had received vaccines when they arrived. The ones that had become ill had only done so because it wasn’t always possible to prevent exposure before the vaccine took effect. Surely Helen would see that the relatively low risk of a sick child arriving in England was a small price for getting all these others out of this godforsaken place and settled in homes. It was diphtheria, not smallpox or polio. And Helen was a woman who never said no when a yes was possible.

  Truus touched her ring that the child wore on her thumb, pushing aside thoughts of those American children who’d died due to bad vaccine batches in 1901 and in 1919, focusing instead on the story about the Alaskan mushers, the Great Race of Mercy: twenty mushers and one hundred fifty sled dogs who’d raced 674 miles in five days to deliver antitoxin that saved the small town of Nome. This ring was not an omen; she’d become pregnant again only after she’d given it to these children—or had come to realize the pregnancy, which seemed the same thing. If the ring went to England with them, she would not likely ever see it again, but perhaps that was a blessing. Perhaps the ring was a curse for her, but wouldn’t be on the hands of this boy and girl.

  “You must trust me on this, Sheryl: I will make sure Jonah joins you in England as soon as he is well,” she told the girl. “You can go ahead and make friends with the family so that when he comes you can introduce them, all right?”

  The girl nodded solemnly, such a small child to be made to endure so much.

  An assistant was found to help the girl back to her barracks. T
ruus would like to have taken her back herself, but she needed to visit the sick children, to explain to them that they weren’t being left behind, there were homes for them in England too as soon as they were well.

  “The others are recovering?” she asked the head nurse.

  The woman opened the door to the unit: plain white cribs and beds lining the room’s walls, all made with plain white sheets. A window was open on one side, where that dumpling had made its quick exit. One of the older girls sat on a bed, creating creatures out of what appeared to be the remains of her lunch. Two boys in the center of the room played a made-up game, the sole point of which seemed to be to catch some half dozen things tossed into the air all at once. Others, the poor dears all with their necks swollen, slept or read books or darned socks. Darning socks—that was what passed for amusement for the quarantined children, for heaven’s sake. Truus supposed it was a good sign that some child in the unit had the gumption to toss a dumpling out the window.

  “I’m afraid it was a rough night,” the nurse said.

  Truus braced herself, sensing what was coming and quickly counting: the girl and the two boys, Adele in— Had they moved her crib?

  The nurse said, “I suppose it’s a blessing that these children are orphans, that there are no parents to be told.”

  “An orphan,” Truus said, feeling crushed, yes, but also awash with a relief she knew she shouldn’t feel. If the child had no parents to be told, then it must be the toddler. “Poor sweet little Madeline?” she asked.

  THAT NIGHT, TRUUS held back her tears, unwilling to break Joop’s heart with the news. He would have taken little Adele Weiss into their own home. They would have been a family—that word they no longer spoke aloud. She wanted to tell him about Adele and she wanted to tell him about this other child too, the child growing inside her. And yet she couldn’t, not yet, not until she was more certain, and certainly not tonight. Tonight, she could only hold her husband and try not to think of the little flower he’d loved the moment he held her in his arms.

  Friendships Come and Go

  Stephan was typing in the library when Walter burst in, announcing, “Žofie is here again! She says to tell you she really wants to see you.”

  Stephan, looking up to see his brother in the mirror above the desk, caught a reflection of himself, his eye no longer the mess it had been but still yellow-orange streaked with purple, his lip where it had been split no longer swollen but with a scar the doctor said would never go away. He’d been lucky, actually. An old couple had come upon him lying unconscious in the park, and they’d woken him and helped him into a waiting motorcar, where the woman urged him to lie across the back seat to avoid being seen as they brought him home.

  “Tell Žofe I’m not here, Wall?” he said.

  “Again?” Walter asked.

  Stephan stared at a line of dialogue on the page in his typewriter: Sometimes I say things wrong just to see who will notice. Mostly nobody does.

  Walter backed out, leaving the door open so that Stephan could hear his every slow step down the marble stairway to the entry hall, his little-boy voice rising up from the entryway, saying, “Stephan says for me to tell you he isn’t home.”

  Žofie-Helene didn’t ask Walter to try again this time, or say that she just wanted to see him, to know he was okay. She said, simply, “Give him these for me, Walter?”

  Stephan waited for the sound of the door closing before he returned his fingers to the typewriter keys. He stared at the page, but the words no longer came.

  Reading

  Walter, with Peter Rabbit in hand, climbed into Mutti’s fancy wheelchair in the elevator, opened one of the dozen identical booklets Žofie-Helene had brought for Stephan, and began earnestly to try to read to Peter. Only he couldn’t read. He wanted to ask Stephan to read it to him, but Stephan was in a grumpy mood.

  A Kindness

  Truus sat in a window in a café on the Roggenmarkt square in Münster, Germany, beginning to feel conspicuous. The late afternoon when Jews were allowed to do their shopping, after Aryan Germans had what they wanted, was an odd time for a Christian Dutchwoman to be lingering over cold tea. Recha Freier appeared up the street, finally, seeming both bigger and yet more gaunt than Truus remembered, the black scarf over her head and the plain coat not particularly flattering for her masculine brow and face. She passed by without a glance into the café, but she reached up with a gloveless hand to adjust the unflattering scarf.

  Truus waited until Recha was well down the street, then stood, nodded thanks to the waitress, and followed at the span of a block. Recha turned toward St.-Paulus-Dom, where Truus, following the instructions delivered to her back in Amsterdam, had left her car. Six weeks, she’d had to wait for this meeting. Six weeks since Adele Weiss had died.

  Recha passed the cathedral and disappeared into a building farther down the block. Truus passed the full ten minutes in a nearby shop, inquiring about scarves. Only after her purchase was carefully wrapped did she circle the building Recha had entered, again following the instructions.

  As the back door closed behind Truus, Recha said without greeting, “There are only three.”

  An unfamiliar chill ran through Truus, which might have been the unseasonably cold day, but she supposed was on account of her pregnancy. She followed the sound of Recha’s voice to find her hidden in a small alcove from which both the front and the back entrances were visible.

  “We’ve made arrangements for them to go to England next month,” Recha said. “The woman helping the boy has undertaken to arrange a home but needs time to do so.”

  The woman would be Helen Bentwich, the boy Recha’s own son Shalhevet. How had Recha found the strength to send her son to England with the intention that he would go on from there to Palestine, so far away? Truus was to take these three children to the safety of the Netherlands, and provide for them until they could be sent on.

  “All right. I’ll manage it somehow, but I— Listen, one of the last group, she died of diphtheria she contracted at the quarantine unit,” Truus said, not wasting a moment lest they be interrupted. “Not one of the orphans, but little A—” But little Adele Weiss, she had almost said, even though she’d rehearsed this so carefully, a way to communicate the situation without using names. Edelweiss. A rare flower, beautiful but short-lived. “It was the child of the rescue worker; she put her baby in my hands for safety and . . .”

  And Truus, in her arrogance, had taken the child, imagining she was saving her when, had she handed the child back to her mother, Adele Weiss would still be alive.

  “Surely you understand that I must tell her myself,” she managed.

  Recha remained uncharacteristically quiet, leaving Truus to remember the little face lying in the crib in the quarantine barracks, still with her thumb in her mouth, and the tiny coffin.

  “I need to tell her mother myself,” she repeated softly.

  “You mean this as a kindness. I understand this,” Recha answered. “But it will be no kindness to put the mother at risk to salve your own guilt. We all must carry our guilts. I am sorry this one is yours to carry, but there it is.

  “Now, the bishop is waiting to hear your confession, the sin of . . .” Recha paused, gathering herself. “The sin of loving one of your children more than the others.”

  Recha knocked twice on the wall beside them. In the pause before she knocked once again and disappeared through a hidden doorway, Truus tried to imagine that: having so many children that one might tug at your heart more than any other, that you might send one to safety while keeping the others close.

  She walked out the front door, then, and down the block, and into the cathedral, into the dim, stained-glass filtered light and the stone chill, the lingering odor of incense and burnt candle wick, wood pews and leather kneelers, the improbable survival of faith.

  Confession

  The little wooden confessional door slid open, revealing in shadow behind a screen a big man with more eyebrow than hair and a h
eavy cross on a heavy chain around his neck. Truus found herself wanting to weep in the dim, cramped space, as if the man’s very presence suggested a possibility of setting her burdens down.

  After a long silence, the bishop prompted, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  Truus managed, “The sin of . . . of loving one of my children less than the others.”

  Had she loved any one of the children she’d carried less than any other? Less than this child she carried now?

  Had she loved Adele Weiss any less?

  She looked through the grate, registering the bishop’s silence.

  “More than the others,” she said. “I’m sorry. Loving one more than the others.”

  He peered at her, clearly torn between the code error and her obvious grief.

  “I am sure, good lady,” he said, “that your God finds your soul worthy of any forgiveness you might need.”

  He gave her a moment to collect herself before opening the door behind him, letting in enough light to reveal his long nose and thin lips, his comforting eyes. A child joined him in the little room, and peered through the screen from the inside, to Truus. She was a girl of perhaps seven, with straight lashes like Joop’s over big brown eyes that held more fear than a child her age ought ever to feel.

  “This is Genna Cantor,” the bishop said.

  The girl continued staring.

  “Genna is the oldest,” the bishop said. “She is going to introduce the others, aren’t you, Genna?”

  The girl nodded solemnly.

  A second girl entered, so like Genna that they might be twins.

  Genna said, “This is Gisse. She’s six.”

  “Genna and Gisse,” Truus said. “And you’re sisters?”

  Genna nodded. “Our biggest sister, Gerta, is in England, and Grina is our sister too even though she went to God before we were born.”