The Last Train to London Page 21

  There was not a star in the sky.

  He scanned the roof’s chimneys as he tugged on a shoe, trying to see in the darkness. Was that smoke rising from that chimney? From the next one? He was tying the shoe when he heard a window open.

  He hurried to one chimney and felt it—warm. Then another, also warm. Already, someone was pulling himself up through Mutti’s servants’-floor window onto the roof.

  “Crap, it’s cold,” the Nazi called down toward the window.

  And slippery, Stephan thought. He might be able to push the soldier off the roof and hope it looked like a fall.

  “Any sign of him?” a higher voice asked—two of them now up on the roof. No hope of pushing two, much less having that coincidence go unnoticed.

  He could make out the shadows of them in the darkness, but they wouldn’t yet see him; he had their voices to help locate them, and his eyes had had time to adjust, while they’d just climbed from the light.

  Keeping them in sight, he crept toward a third chimney. It was cold, as mercilessly cold as his one shoeless foot.

  His coat! He must have left it by the first chimney.

  A bright light flared across the rooftop, a flashlight coming on, then a second.

  Stephan scrambled up over the top of the chimney and wedged himself just inside, the brick rough against his thin shirt and slippery from soot at the same time, and cold against his one stockinged foot.

  He set the other shoe in his crotch so that he could better brace himself with his hands.

  The deeper-voiced Nazi called down to the soldier patrolling with the dog on the ground below. No, no one had come down from the roof.

  The two spread out, their voices coming from different directions on the massive roof and their flashlight beams occasionally crossing over Stephan’s head. They began to talk about the other roofs around them, as if Stephan might actually have leapt the entire gap of the street.

  The higher voice came from near the first chimney now, near Stephan’s forgotten coat.

  Stephan’s thighs were burning from holding himself up in the chimney. A five-story chimney. Could he climb down it, or would he fall, his legs already exhausted? Could he get past the flue? If he could, the room it serviced might well be empty. The chimney was cold, after all. A room somewhere in the center of the palais, given the chimney’s placement. The kitchen? The windowless kitchen, where he would be trapped, unable to get out of the palais unnoticed. He ought to have found a cold chimney at the building’s edge, one that might lead to a room with a window, an exit. But there had been no time.

  He adjusted a little, trying to strengthen his grip. The shoe at his crotch slipped. He reached out to grab it before it could clatter against the metal flue below, and slipped himself. He barely caught the shoelace with his left hand.

  He quickly stuck the laces between his teeth and pressed his arm back against the cold brick to stem his slide. His right knee was shaking with the effort, or the cold, or the fear.

  The Nazis were laughing. What were they laughing at? Had they found his coat?

  The high voice said, “I told you we were no gymnasts!”

  They considered together where he might have gone. And still, Stephan braced himself inside the chimney, the shoelace between his teeth oddly steadying.

  There was a groan, and laughter, and the thud of the Nazis tumbling back inside the little apartment. It was just a game to them, an adventure.

  He waited some time after the voices ceased before edging himself up a little higher in the chimney and peeking over its edge. He climbed from the chimney and lay flat on the roof, waiting and watching, willing his legs to stop quivering. He was still lying there when he heard the creak of the window. It was safe to go back inside! He wouldn’t have to return to the awful underground.

  The opening notes of Bach’s Cello Suite no. 1 drifted up to him.

  Stephan listened through the opening notes, the plaintive longing in the bobbing, broken chords that were not the “Ave Maria.” Finally he pulled his second shoe on over his wet and soot-covered sock. He crept across the roof to find his coat, and he pulled it on and slipped down the tree. He hurried to the nearest Ringstrasse kiosk and down the narrow steps inside it, only breathing the smallest relief when he reached the cold and dreary, rat-infested underground.

  Viscount Samuel’s Appeal

  The Bloomsbury Hotel’s run-down old ballroom was crowded with folding tables and filled with the din of sixty women processing immigration papers with all due speed. They had devised a system with color-coded two-part cards, one part of which would remain in England while its counterpart was sent to Germany, a card for each child. “Turn it up!” someone said. “Helen, your uncle is on the BBC, starting his plea!”

  “Well, leave it on then, but do keep working,” she said. “All of Britain opening their doors to take in children will do no good if we can’t get them out of Germany.”

  The women kept to their tasks, listening as Helen’s uncle spoke on the radio. “. . . Heartbreaking though separation is, almost all the Jewish parents, and many ‘non-Aryan’ Christians, wish to send their children away, even as they can find no refuge themselves.”

  By mentioning the Christians, Viscount Samuel meant to make the proposition more attractive, Helen knew.

  “A world movement has been launched for the rescue of these children,” her uncle said.

  A world movement in which only Britain moves. But surely other countries would follow their lead.

  “The case is urgent,” Viscount Samuel continued. “We therefore appeal to the nation herself to take these children and care for them, to board them in private homes. Will the churches, the Jewish communities, and other groups now come forward and each offer to be responsible for some of these children, who are being thrown upon the mercy of the world?”

  Wishes Big and Small

  Stephan curled up on a crate of cocoa beans and wedged his bare hands between his thighs, trying to keep warm. He woke, shivering, after a minute or five, or fifteen, or several hours. Time didn’t pass in the underground darkness, without any cues to mark its changing. In his groggy state, he reached for the chain to the overhead electric bulb, only realizing just in time that it would cast a light at the door at the top of the stairs. Was anyone upstairs in Neuman’s Chocolates to open it and discover him?

  He ought not to stay here, he knew that, but it was dry and it was familiar, and where else could he go? He wanted to return home and crawl into his own bed, not the bed in the servant’s room he shared with Walter but his own bed with his own favorite pillow and newly pressed sheets, his books and his desk and his typewriter, all the paper in the world, all the dreams. How could this not be a nightmare? How could he not be sleeping, about to wake up, still in his pajamas, to go to his desk and his typewriter, to capture the nightmare before he lost the details that might make a story if only this weren’t real?

  He collected the flashlight from the hook at the bottom of the cocoa cellar stairs; he could keep the beam away from the door and he could turn it off more easily than the overhead. He kept an ear to the upstairs as he took the crowbar and pried open one of the crates.

  He took a handful of cocoa beans from one of the jute sacks, then carefully closed both the sack and the crate so that if you didn’t know it was short a handful, you wouldn’t notice. He put a couple of the beans in his mouth and chewed—hard and bitter. He wished he had water to wash them down. So many wishes, big and small.

  He poured the rest of the handful into his coat pocket and was just returning the crowbar to its proper place on the hook when he heard voices overhead—workers coming for the day’s cocoa beans. Startled, he killed the flashlight and slipped quickly under the stairs and down the ladder. As he heard the door overhead creak open, he realized he still held the flashlight. He stuck it in his pocket, hoping they wouldn’t miss it.

  He crawled through the tunnel to the underground, trying to think where else he might hide. From the tunn
el’s far end came other voices—“This way!”—and running. Nazis searching the underground for men and boys in hiding, like him.

  Trapped, he scooted backward to the tunnel’s inside end, sure the pounding in his chest would give him away.

  Nazi boots sounded outside the tunnel, running just feet away from him.

  Otto

  Otto scooped Johanna up and kissed her.

  “I want Mama,” the little girl said.

  “I know, sweetheart,” Otto said. “I know.”

  Žofie, who’d become so subdued since her mother was arrested, so adult, asked him if he’d gotten in to see their mother.

  “I’ve confirmed your mother is being held here in Vienna,” he said. “Why don’t you let me finish making the dinner?”

  “It’s only kulajda,” she said.

  Kulajda. It was Žofie’s favorite. Whenever they visited her Grandmère Betta, she came back talking about how Johanna and she got to gather the eggs from the henhouse for their grandmother to poach, one egg set carefully in each bowl of creamy potato soup.

  “You just relax, Engelchen,” he said. “Read for a little while.”

  Her copy of Kaleidoscope was on the table. He took it into Käthe’s bedroom and put it back in the hiding place under the rug. He brought her, instead, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.

  Žofie sat at the table with a graph book full of equations, shunning even Sherlock Holmes. Johanna settled beside her, sucking her thumb. Otto turned on the radio to listen while he finished the soup: Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop was heading to Paris to sign the proposed Franco-German peace accord; an enormous number of secondhand books were available due to the closing of Jewish bookstores; and a curfew on Vienna’s Jews had just been imposed.

  Žofie-Helene looked up from her graph paper. “When will they let Mama go?”

  Otto set the stirring spoon down, and took the chair beside her. “She just needs to promise she won’t write anymore.”

  Žofie, frowning, returned to her equations. Otto returned to the stove, to the satisfaction of being able to care for them, at least.

  Long after Otto assumed Žofie-Helene was well lost in her mathematics, she said, “But she’s a writer.”

  Otto stirred the soup slowly, watching the line of swirl appear, and blend, and disappear. “Žofie,” he said, “I know Stephan gave you that book. I know it means a lot to you. But it’s banned. If you take it out again, I’ll have to burn it in the incinerator.”

  The telephone started ringing then, of course it did, just when it was least convenient.

  “I don’t need to keep the book,” Žofie said. “I’ll take it down to the outside rubbish bins myself after dinner. I promise.”

  He nodded—yes, that would be for the best—and answered the telephone.

  “Käthe Perger?” a woman asked, her voice crackling through the static. An overseas line?

  “Who is this?” Otto demanded.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman answered. “It’s Lisl Wirth, Stephan Neuman’s aunt. I hoped I might find Žofie-Helene, actually. I’m calling from Shanghai. I’ve just received a call from my sister-in-law that Stephan is . . . They came to arrest him and he fled, but now Ruchele is being forced to move. She thought Žofie might know where Stephan—”

  “Surely someone else can help find him,” Otto said.

  “No one knows where he is,” the woman insisted. “And Ruchele—Even her maid has had to leave because Christians can no longer work for Jews. It’s only her and Walter. She simply can’t manage. She thought Žofie might know where Stephan . . . She doesn’t want to know where he is, she—”

  “Žofie-Helene has no idea where Stephan is,” Otto said.

  “My sister-in-law just wants to get a message to her son so he’ll know where to find her.”

  “My daughter-in-law is imprisoned because of you people! You must leave us alone!”

  He hung up, his hand trembling.

  Žofie-Helene stared at him. “I can find Stephan,” she said.

  Johanna sat watching him too. She removed her thumb from her mouth and said, matter-of-factly, “Žozo can find Stephan.”

  Otto stirred the soup again. It didn’t need stirring, but he needed to stir.

  “You don’t know where he is, Žofie,” he said. “You will stay here and do your proofs, and when your mama is released we’ll go to your Grandmère Betta’s. Your mother can’t stay here. When they free her, we’ll go to Czechoslovakia.”

  Searching for Stephan Neuman

  Žofie-Helene slipped out of bed, still in her clothes. She pulled her secret-things box from under her bed and set the book she’d been reading to stay awake until Grandpapa was sleeping back inside, the Stefan Zweig stories she’d promised Grandpapa she’d throw out. It was both true and not true that she’d kept her promise: she had taken the book down to the rubbish bins outside the building, but then she couldn’t bear it, and she’d brought it back up. Kaleidoscope. She’d so often wondered why Stephan had given her the second volume of the collection rather than the first. She might have asked him, but the puzzle of it pleased her, the deducing, the untangling of the mental knot. He might have chosen it for her because of the title; he would have known the title would appeal to her, all the reflecting surfaces tilted toward each other so that one simple thing became many, the image repeated over and over to become something else, something beautiful.

  She tiptoed into the kitchen and removed a knife from the block. She edged a drawer open and fumbled in the dark for a candle and a box of matches. She gathered her coat and pink plaid scarf, and she was about to leave when, as an afterthought, she took the remains of the bread left over from dinner, still in its paper wrapper from the bakery, and slipped it into her coat pocket.

  Outside, she rounded the corner, lifted a triangle of the octagonal manhole cover, and slipped down the stairway into the underground—which was so dark and spooky that she had to light a match. It wasn’t enough light to tell much, but it did at least send the rats scurrying away. She set off in one direction, but soon had to wrap the scarf over her mouth against the stench. She’d gone the wrong way, headed toward the sewer rather than away. She turned around and wound her way stealthily forward. If she was found by someone, she would say she was searching for her cat.

  After a time, she stopped and listened: someone snoring. She crept toward the noise until she could see the source—a big heap of a man. She backed away and carried on, relieved to reach one of the passageways illuminated by a work light. Once past it, though, the darkness was even worse.

  She hated to use the candle, which she’d brought for Stephan, but it was surprising how much light it made. She found her way past the convent and the gate by St. Stephen’s, the stack of skulls she avoided looking at although perhaps she should have looked, perhaps it would be less haunting if she replaced the memory of borrowing Stephan’s bravery with her own.

  At the tunnel to the cocoa cellar, she paused, inhaling. Keep your mouth open, just let the chocolate sit in your mouth. Leave it there, make it last, taste every moment. She’d wanted to take Stephan’s hand that first time in this underground, but how did you take the hand of your only friend without ruining everything?

  She knelt on the cold stone and crawled into the tunnel she’d been so delighted to discover that first time.

  “Stephan, are you there?” she whispered, both wanting him to be and not. The friendship paradox. How could he survive down here in the cold and damp? How could he sleep down here with the ever-present rats?

  “It’s me, Žofie-Helene,” she whispered. “Don’t be afraid.”

  The lower cavern was empty. She held the candle toward the ladder to the cocoa cellar. The rungs were not particularly dirty. They’d been recently used. Elementary.

  She climbed the ladder slowly, carefully. She heard something. She blew out the candle flame and listened, then took the last rungs as stealthily as she could. At the top, she peered into the darkness. She heard nothi
ng.

  “Stephan?” she whispered.

  There was no answer.

  She lit another match, and turned to the sound of some creature scurrying off.

  She groped in the air until she found the string to the overhead bulb, which lit the cavern so brightly that she had to close her eyes.

  A new flashlight hung by the stairs, but the cavern was otherwise unchanged. There was a small gap between the cocoa crates at the far end of the cellar. They might have been left askew when they were first loaded into the cellar, the last work of a tired laborer at the end of a long day. She moved closer. Nothing there. If Stephan was living here, he was leaving no trace beyond the relatively clean ladder rungs. But where else could he be living?

  She returned reluctantly to the ceiling bulb, bracing herself against the return of darkness. The cold. The animals you couldn’t see. Their sharp little teeth, and the diseases they bore. She waited a minute, hoping the light would draw Stephan, before turning it off and descending the ladder again.

  Where could Stephan possibly be sleeping, if not in the cocoa cellar? Someplace warmer, and without rats, she hoped. But she had no idea where that might be.

  She took the wrapped bread from her pocket, unwound her scarf, and tied one end of the pink plaid like a purse around the little package. She tied the other end to the ladder, to affix the food up off the floor, out of the reach of vermin, she hoped. She crawled back through the low tunnel, and stood and scratched “S—>” in the stone in several places, hoping to help Stephan find the food. She began to scratch more letters, then instead returned to the cavern, untied the bread and put it back in her pocket.

  She climbed the ladder back into the cocoa cellar, groped in the dark again for the overhead. After her eyes again adjusted, more quickly this time as she’d been fewer minutes in the dark, she took the pen from the clipboard and wrote on the paper bread wrapping: Your mother is being made to move to Leopoldstadt. I’ll find out where and leave a note and a blanket. Leave me a note about anything else you need.