The Last Train to London Page 15

  Lisl took Ruchele’s blanket carefully off her and shook it out over the railing, so that the splinters and soot floated down onto the Nazis working below.

  Stephan returned to his mother’s wheelchair, took it in hand, and pushed his mother from the hall into the room.

  “Wall, can you and Peter go fetch Mutti a glass of water?” he asked.

  After his brother left, Stephan said, “Papa, shall we get Mutti’s chaise for her?”

  And by the time Walter and his little stuffed rabbit had returned with a half-filled water glass and a long trail of drips on the wood floor, Ruchele was arranged on the chaise, with her blanket covering her legs.

  Stephan disappeared, to return a minute later with the radio. Lisl had no idea how he had managed it; Jews were now forbidden radios. He closed the door and set one of his father’s saved books at its base to keep it closed, muffling the sounds of the whole of their lives being recorded in a Nazi ledger, to be scattered to Reich art museums or sold to fund Hitler’s rampage or, because what they had was so often the finest, sent to Germany for Hitler himself.

  Release

  Your wife will still need a lot of rest, Mr. Wijsmuller,” the doctor said. “No travel. No stress. Recovery from—”

  “Doctor,” Truus interrupted, “I am here in the room with you and perfectly capable of taking my own instructions.”

  Joop put a hand on Truus’s—a gesture meant to comfort, Truus knew, but also, annoyingly, to hush.

  “Days at the hospital are terribly long, Doctor,” he said. “We’re glad to be going home.”

  After the doctor left, Joop began laying out the clothes he’d brought for Truus to wear home: a shift that would require no girdle, nothing to uncomfortably bind.

  “Truus,” he began gently, “you can’t—”

  “I am perfectly capable of understanding what the doctor said, Joop.”

  “And you’ll abide by his instructions?”

  Truus turned her back to him as if modest, and removed her hospital gown. She felt his warmth as he approached her, as he gently fingered the braid down her back. He wrapped it into a bun at the nape of her neck, and pinned it up.

  “And you will abide by his instructions?” he repeated.

  She pulled the dress on, thankful for its loose fit, and turned to him.

  “I am perfectly capable of understanding what he said,” she repeated.

  He put his arms around her and tilted her chin up. “I’m not sure you’re the better liar,” he said, “but you are quite good at avoiding questions, and at keeping truths to yourself.”

  “I would never lie to you, Joop. When have I ever—”

  “Recha is arranging the exit visas?”

  “That isn’t precisely what I said, Joop. I said—”

  “You said in response to my question about exit visas that Recha was arranging everything. Not a lie, but meant to leave me believing an untruth.” He kissed her forehead gently, then again. “That isn’t what matters, though, Truus. You know that isn’t what matters.”

  Truus felt the tears welling, despite every effort. “It’s been so many times, Joop. I just didn’t want to have you hope again until it was more certain.”

  He wiped away a tear spilling down her cheek.

  “You’re all I need, Truus,” he said. “You are all I will ever need.”

  “I’m a woman who can’t bear a child in a world that values nothing else from me!”

  He pulled her to him, so that her cheek was to his chest, to his slow, steady heartbeat. “You’re not, though,” he said, stroking her hair as if she were the child they’d lost. “You are a woman doing important work, in a world that badly needs you. Only you have to take care of yourself first. You can’t help others if you aren’t well.”

  Old Friends

  Otto Perger, at a bread stall at the Naschmarkt, turned to the quiet hush of a familiar voice. Stephan Neuman, waiting patiently at a meat stall just two down, was admonishing his little brother. The younger boy’s nose was pressed to a case of chocolates at the stall between them, where Otto had just purchased chocolates for Johanna and Žofie-Helene.

  Otto watched the older brother, oddly missing him. So many customers he could take or leave, but it had always made him smile to see Stephan show up at the barbershop door even before the boy and his granddaughter became such friends. Now, of course, the boy didn’t come anymore, and Otto couldn’t serve him if he did. Now even Žofie-Helene didn’t see the boy.

  Otto watched as the meat seller, ignoring Stephan, chose a nice piece of meat for a woman who had arrived after the boy. It was what so many adults did, tending to older customers while children waited. But when the seller finally served Stephan, he charged him twice the proper price for a single nasty gray chop.

  Stephan objected, “But you just charged—”

  “You want the meat or you don’t want it?” the seller demanded. “It’s all the same to me.”

  The boy looked defeated. That’s what Otto thought as he watched the meat seller eye Stephan’s money as if it might not be currency of the Reich. It was, he saw in the boy’s expression, why Stephan had turned Žofie-Helene away again and again in the days after the humiliation in Prater Park, which Žofie-Helene had told her mother about and Käthe had in turn described to Otto. The poor boy could not bear to face Žofie after she had witnessed his humiliation; he could not imagine that that humiliation was not somehow his own fault.

  “But why can’t we get chocolates?” the little brother demanded. “We used to get them all the time! At Papa’s, we—”

  Stephan took his brother’s hand and again gently shushed him, and pulled him to stand beside him while the seller wrapped the chop. “We’ll get chocolates another time, Wall.”

  “Stephan!” Otto exclaimed, joining them as if he’d only just noticed them. “I haven’t seen you in so long. I believe you may be in need of a haircut.”

  He stooped to the younger boy’s level and handed him a chocolate. “You are just the person I need, Walter. The vendor has given me a second for free, and I’m far too old and portly to be eating two sweets myself!”

  He surreptitiously slipped the other chocolate into Stephan’s satchel as they shook hands. The boy was impossibly thin, impossibly older. Otto would like to have made sure Stephan ate the sweet himself, but he knew the boy would give it to his little brother. Otto wished he could buy a whole box of chocolates for them, but there would be so many things they needed more than candy, and it would do nobody any good for him to be seen helping them.

  He glanced around. The meat seller had moved his attention to another customer. No one was paying them any mind. He returned his attention to the boys, noticing the scar on Stephan’s lip. Where had it come from? It hadn’t been there the last time Otto cut his hair.

  “I believe I owe you a haircut for that time when, as my Žofie noted, I didn’t really cut your hair,” he said.

  “Nor did you charge me, Herr Perger.”

  “Didn’t I? Ah, memory doesn’t fit as readily into an old brain as into a young one.”

  The boy’s hair looked neat. Perhaps he was going to a Jewish barber, or perhaps his parents were trimming his hair. Otto couldn’t say why he extended the boy the invitation for a haircut. He knew Stephan couldn’t come, and he knew Stephan knew it. He supposed he wanted the boy to know he wished it weren’t so.

  “Well,” Otto said, “the truth is, I would love to hear about your latest play, and I expect Žofie-Helene would as well. She quite likes being the star of the show, you know.”

  Stephan said, “There’s no place to rehearse anymore except the Jewish center.”

  “I . . . Yes,” Otto said. The boy who’d once brought his friends to rehearse in his family’s ballroom was now confined to a few servants’ rooms, without servants anymore, as Aryans under the age of forty-five could no longer work for Jews even if the families could pay them.

  Žofie-Helene rushed up to Otto, a fussy Johanna in tow, s
aying, “Do tell me you’ve gotten the chocolates, Grandpapa. Johanna— Oh!”

  Oh how I’ve missed you, Holmes, Otto thought, although he couldn’t have said which of his granddaughter and her friend was Sherlock and which Dr. Watson.

  Stephan said simply, “Žofie-Helene.”

  An awkward silence followed before the two spoke at the same moment, Žofie-Helene saying, “The Americans made a movie of Zweig’s Marie Antoinette,” and Stephan, “How are your proofs coming along?”

  Žofie-Helene answered glumly, “Professor Gödel has left for America.”

  “Ah. He’s a Jew?” Stephan said with an edge of accusation. Otto could hardly blame the boy.

  “He . . . Hitler abolished the Privatdozent,” Žofie-Helene answered. “So Professor Gödel had to apply for another position under the new order, and the university turned him down. I believe they dislike his connection with the Vienna circle.”

  “Not a Jew, but too friendly with Jews,” Stephan said. “Something so many in Vienna are careful to avoid these days.”

  Žofie-Helene studied him frankly, through smudged lenses, unbowed. “I didn’t realize,” she said. “Until that day in the park, I didn’t realize. I didn’t understand.”

  Stephan said, “We have to be going,” and he took his brother’s little hand and hurried off.

  Otto watched his granddaughter watch them until they disappeared, and then the space where they’d been.

  He turned back to the chocolate vendor. “It seems I need two more chocolates,” he said.

  —Sara—

  Lisl stood outside the servants’ entrance of Palais Albert Rothschild at No. 22 Prinz-Eugen-Strasse, her umbrella raised against a late October rain turning toward the first slushy snow of winter. She pulled her fur coat closed, thinking of the many times she’d been driven up the U-shaped front courtyard to this home that filled a full city block, to enter through its main doors into a world of tapestries and mirrors and paintings, five-hundred-candle crystal chandeliers, the unforgettable marble staircase kept impeccable by a servant whose sole task was to polish it. She’d dined in the Rothschilds’ silver dining room. She’d danced to music from the two orchestrions built into a niche off the gold-leafed ballroom, which together sounded like an entire orchestra. She’d basked in the art collection both here and at the even more stunning Palais Nathaniel Rothschild on Theresianumgasse. Now a banner strung over the gates between the street and the front courtyard declared this “Zentralstelle für Jüdische Auswanderung,” the Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration; Baron Albert von Rothschild had been forced to consent to the appropriation of all his Austrian assets, including the five Rothschild mansions and the art in them, to gain his brother’s release from Dachau and their safe passage out of Austria. And now Lisl stood in the line of applicants here, hoping for permission to leave the only country she’d ever called home.

  As she waited, a fancy car drove up to the gates. Two Nazi soldiers hurried to open the heavy wrought iron. The car pulled to a stop in the cobbled courtyard, where an attaché waited with raised umbrella, getting wet as he held it over the car’s back door.

  Adolf Eichmann emerged. He set off across the courtyard, protected by the umbrella held over him by the increasingly drenched attaché as a second attaché took the place of the first, holding an umbrella over the open car door. Eichmann’s slope-backed German shepherd climbed from the car and shook himself. The attaché held the umbrella over the beast as it followed Eichmann across the courtyard and into the palais.

  LISL LOWERED HER umbrella and ducked into the back servants’ entrance, glad to be out of the weather, if not yet to the front of the line. She followed its slow progress into a salon where she’d so often taken tea. The furniture and the art had been removed, replaced now by a folding table manned by a clerk surrounded by piles of furs, jewelry, crystal and silver, and other valuables.

  When Lisl reached the front of the line, the clerk said blandly, “Your things.”

  Lisl hesitated, then handed over the fur she wore and the few jewels Michael had given her to bring.

  The clerk tossed them onto the appropriate piles.

  “Your umbrella,” he said.

  “My umbrella? But how will I get home in this weather, without even a coat?”

  At the clerk’s impatient expression, she handed over her umbrella, smiling politely although she burned with fury that she should need the permission of this little Nazi fool to do anything at all. Michael had schooled her to be on her best behavior. The Nazis often withheld permits even after an applicant had satisfied their every demand. She did not want to be left with nothing but a one-way trip to a labor camp.

  The clerk looked to the next person in line, done with her.

  She queued in the next line, remembering that somewhere here—was it on the second floor?—a small wooden staircase led up to the Rothschilds’ private observatory, where she’d once peered through one of their telescopes to see the rings of Saturn. They had been as clear as if the planet were a toy on a table in front of her. How had her world shrunk now to such a small thing? Living in the upstairs servants’ rooms with Herman and Ruchele and the boys. Going out to the market herself each afternoon, when Jews were allowed to pick through whatever the rest of Vienna had passed up. She was thankful, of course; but for Michael’s efforts, she and Herman’s family might have been moved to a grubby little place in Leopoldstadt. They had no kitchen at the palais, but Cook, who’d stayed on to serve the Nazis, did manage to make meals out of the meager bits Lisl bought, and Helga brought them up the back stairs—no longer on a silver tray, but they had never been more grateful for their servants’ loyalty.

  As Lisl waited in line, she saw through a passageway an attaché gently drying the paws of Eichmann’s German shepherd. The dog’s patience was rewarded with a piece of meat that would have made an entire dinner for Lisl and Herman’s family.

  Another clerk at another folding table said to Lisl when her turn came, “Your passport.”

  The nasty little clerk inked a stamp on a red pad, then pressed it to one corner of the passport.

  As the clerk set the stamp aside—Lisl’s passport now marred with a three-centimeter-high red “J,” for Jew, never mind that her marriage had been in a Christian church, attended by all of Vienna society—Eichmann and his dry-pawed dog entered the room. Another Nazi followed, the two men watching as the clerk laid a second ink stamp firmly across her middle name, Elizabeth. Elizabeth, which sounded more British than Jewish. Perhaps that was why her parents had chosen it. When the man lifted the stamp, the name was overwritten with “—Sara—” in purple ink. Sara, a woman so beautiful that her husband had feared more powerful men might steal her away. Selfless Sara, who, believing herself barren, sent her Egyptian handmaid to her husband’s bed. Sara who, after being visited by God when she was a hundred years old, bore a son herself. Lisl had known nothing of Sara’s story until August, when the Nazis started this practice of stamping passports of Jewish women with the name, and those of Jewish men with “Israel.”

  The man with Eichmann said to him, “You see, it is working like an automatic factory, Obersturmführer Eichmann. You put in at the one end a Jew who still has capital—a factory or a shop or a bank account. He passes through the entire building, from counter to counter. When he comes out the other end, he has no money, he has no rights. He has only a passport in which it is written ‘You must leave this country within two weeks. If you fail to do so, you will go to a concentration camp.’”

  The clerk handed Lisl’s passport back to her.

  Eichmann eyed her the way men did, but said to her, “Don’t think you might slip over the border now. The Swiss don’t want you Jews any more than we do.”

  Lisl would have no need to slip over the border, though. She had insisted for months that she wouldn’t leave Herman, who wouldn’t leave Ruchele, but on September 23 Hitler had occupied Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland with not one country of the world standing up against
him, and the next morning she’d allowed Michael to begin arranging her passage to Shanghai. It had taken more than a month, and he’d had to pay a small fortune to secure a berth for her on a ship leaving in just two days now. She hadn’t even told Herman yet. She couldn’t imagine how she would tell her brother that she meant to flee. But she was going through the process now, moving from one room to another.

  She was lucky. She reminded herself of that as she passed into the next room. Her assets went to Michael, who would protect them until the world had righted itself. She had only to forfeit these few token things: the least valuable of her fur coats, a few carefully selected jewels, her umbrella that might have kept her dry, her name, her dignity.

  Raid

  It was not yet dawn, and cold for this early in November. Eichmann wore his greatcoat. He preferred to conduct these raids in daylight, with an audience to spread the message that really, everyone in Vienna ought to fear Adolf Eichmann. But he wouldn’t risk the possibility of an outcry upon the public arrest of an Aryan woman—a mother and a widow, at that, albeit of the Lügenpresse, the lying press. The Vienna Independent, indeed.

  The soldiers burst the door open, finally, and flooded inside. They began pulling out desk and file drawers and spilling out the contents, rummaging for incriminating material. They toppled desks and chairs, broke windows, and scrawled “Jew Lovers” on the walls and on the outside of the building, letters dripping from their carelessness with the paint. He let them have their fun. He too had been undisciplined in his youth—all those brawls in Linz before he fled to Germany. And youthful fury could be used to advantage. What could be more frightening than young men full of unbridled fury unburdened by an ounce of sense?

  One of the Hitler Youth, a big, stupid-looking boy, pointed a pistol at the Linotype. The boy fired, then fired again, the bullets ricocheting off the hard metal.