The Last Train to London Page 8

  Dieter looked at Žofie expectantly, the excitement in his eyes very like that time Jojo had spiked such a high fever and kept calling Žofie “Papa” even though she only knew Papa through photos and stories, Papa had died before Jojo was born.

  Stephan said, “I’ll take her home, Deet. I’ll catch up with you later.”

  She and Stephan backed farther into the shadows as Dieter rushed down the theater steps, toward a gang of Nazis surging toward an old man who came out of a building to protect his shop window. A brownshirt began taunting the man, and others joined. One swung a punch at the poor old man’s stomach, and he doubled over.

  “God,” Stephan said. “We should help him.”

  Already the man had disappeared under a swarm of brownshirts.

  Žofie looked away, to men raising a Nazi flag over the Austrian Parliament, with no one there to stop them: no police, no military, not even the good people of Vienna. Were these the good people of Vienna? All these people shouting their support for Hitler, these boys who might have been peering in the store window to see the model train at Christmastime?

  “We can’t get home through the streets,” she said.

  Chaos. It was the one thing that even mathematics couldn’t predict.

  WITH SCISSORS SHE found in Grandpapa’s barbershop without turning on the light, Žofie pried open the grate below the mirror. She led Stephan through the ducts they’d traveled that first day they met, to an opening to the underground she’d later found but never taken, too afraid of getting lost by herself.

  “Ooof,” she said as she dropped into the cave-darkness, much farther down than she’d imagined.

  Stephan dropped down too, and Žofie groped blindly for him, feeling a shock of comfort when her fingers found his sleeve. He took her hand in his. Again, comfort, and something more.

  She said, “Now which way?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’ve never been in the underground except with you.”

  “I’ve never been in this part,” Stephan said. “Well, we’re not going back up through the theater, not without a ladder.”

  They crept forward together, the trickle of water and the scamper of scurrying things all around them in the startling darkness. Žofie tried not to think about the thugs and murderers Stephan had told her about. What choice was there? Aboveground, the thugs and murderers had taken over the streets.

  THE SOUNDS OF the crowds were distant, but Stephan could still hear horns honking and “Heil Hitler” repeated again and again as they emerged from the underground through the octagonal manhole near Žofie’s apartment, Stephan lifting a single triangle ever so slightly and peeking out first to see that this back street was safe.

  At her building door, Žofie keyed the lock. “Be careful going home, okay?” she said to Stephan, and she kissed him on the cheek and disappeared inside, leaving him lingering in the cold brush of the arm of her glasses against his skin, the warmth of her cheek, the soft dampness of her lips.

  She’d kissed Dieter snot-nose full on the lips, though.

  No, Dieter had kissed her.

  In an upstairs window, a shadow man behind thin curtains threw his arms out, wrapping up the slight shadow girl who was Žofie-Helene arriving home to her father. Except that Žofie’s father was dead. Stephan watched closely, making out the squat round body that was Otto Perger, the two shadows connecting in a hug of love and relief. He ought not to watch; Stephan knew that. He ought to turn and slip back into the underground, make his own way home. But he stood there as the shadow grandfather and granddaughter separated and spoke together, as Žofie raised up a little to kiss her grandfather on the cheek. Her glasses would be brushing her grandfather’s cheek, her skin would be brushing her grandfather’s skin.

  She disappeared from the window, but her shadow reappeared a moment later, holding something. Faintly, the opening notes of Bach’s Cello Suite no. 1 trickled out to join the distant horns and the cheering voices, the unknown future of whatever was to be Vienna after tonight. And still Stephan watched, imagining what it would be like to wrap Žofie’s slight body up in his own arms, to feel the press of her breasts, to kiss her on the lips, on her neck, at the base of her throat where the infinity necklace her father hadn’t actually given her touched bare skin.

  Empty Dance Cards

  The Hamburg inn’s glossy oak taproom was overrun with beer-laden SS. Truus put a hand on Klara’s across the table. The poor woman’s fingers were trembling. Her schnitzel sat untouched on her plate.

  “It’s frightening, I know,” Truus said soothingly, her voice low-pitched so that only Klara would hear. “But the Germans will allow only a five a.m. train, so no one will see the children leave, and it couldn’t go today.”

  “Because I said ‘package’ rather than ‘delivery.’”

  “In this business things don’t always go by the clock,” Truus said gently.

  Klara said, “It’s just that . . . Mr. Van Lange is so nervous for me. And we can’t stay here waiting forever, especially if— Do you suppose it’s true? These men seem to think Hitler will invade Austria tonight, or perhaps already has.”

  Truus lifted her fork and collected a bite of schnitzel, thinking an Austrian invasion would explain why there wasn’t a train for them. The trains might all be moving troops.

  “That’s not our worry tonight,” she said. “Our worry is thirty German orphans.”

  They ate in silence for a few moments before they were approached by one of the SS, who kicked his heels together sharply and bowed so low that his head nearly touched Truus’s plate.

  “I am Curd Jiirgens,” he said, his voice slurring.

  The song that played was a bad omen: “Ah, Miss Klara, I Saw You Dancing.”

  Truus took his measure. She did not offer their names.

  “Mutti,” he said, addressing Truus, “may I ask your daughter to dance?”

  Truus looked him up and down. She answered firmly but politely, “No, you may not.”

  The room fell silent except for the music, everyone turning to watch.

  The owner of the inn hustled to their table, taking Mrs. Van Lange’s plate although it was barely touched, saying, “Perhaps you ladies are ready to be escorted back to your room?”

  The Anschluss

  When Stephan came up from the underground through one of the kiosks on the street, Nazi storm troopers had replaced the guards at the chancellery, and the crowds were even more raucous. Staying in the shadows of the buildings, he wound his way to the royal palace and ducked through the arches to Michaelerplatz, where a banner on Loos Haus read “The same blood belongs in a combined Reich!” He went the back way home from there, to find the curtains still drawn and the house dark, and still no Rolf.

  He slipped back into the palais, quietly closing the door behind him, and crept up the stairs, hoping to sneak back in unnoticed, as if he’d been in his father’s study next to the library all this time. He listened outside the open library door to Papa and Mutti arguing to the drone of the radio, Walter asleep in Mutti’s arms and his rabbit on the floor.

  “You have to take Walter and go on to the train station,” his mother was insisting. “Lisl will have gotten the tickets. I’ll send Stephan along.”

  “You’re overreacting, you and Lisl both,” his father said. “Who can my sister imagine will bother her? She’s married into one of Vienna’s most prominent families. And if I left, who would run Neuman’s Chocolates? President Miklas will have order restored by daybreak, and you can’t stay alone here, Ruche—”

  Lisl burst through the front door and ran upstairs, rushing past Stephan into the library just as Mutti was saying Helga would take care of her and she could join them when she was well enough.

  “Don’t be a fool, Ruchele,” Aunt Lisl said as Stephan, ignoring the ruckus spilling in from the door she’d left ajar, tried to slip in behind her.

  “Stephan! Thank heavens,” Mutti exclaimed as Papa demanded to know where he had been
.

  Aunt Lisl said, “The eleven fifteen to Prague was packed by nine o’clock—completely sold out before I got to the station. And there’s nothing else tonight. Anyway, as soon as the train boarded, those awful thugs began pulling off any Jew who had a seat.”

  The grandfather clock struck a single chime, a half hour or one in the morning. The radio continued its low murmur, replaying part of an address Chancellor Schuschnigg had made earlier in the evening, saying that the German Reich had presented an ultimatum demanding that unless a chancellor chosen by them was appointed, German troops would begin to cross the border. “We have, because even in this solemn hour we are not willing to spill German blood, ordered our army, in case an invasion is carried out, to pull back without any substantial resistance, to await the decisions of the next few hours,” the chancellor said. “So in this hour I take my leave of the Austrian people with a word of farewell uttered from the depth of my heart: God protect Austria!”

  The chancellor had resigned, turning the government over to the Nazis? Austria was not even going to defend herself?

  Voices from downstairs startled them. Stephan helped Papa quickly lift Mutti into her wheelchair, still holding the sleeping Walter, and Papa pushed her to the library door. It would be safer on the upper floors.

  Already young men and boys swarmed the palais, voices echoing excitedly in the entry hall.

  Papa backed Mutti into the library again and threw the lock.

  From below came the thuds and crashes of furniture being upended, the tinkle of crystal breaking, not just a glass or a vase but perhaps all of the crystal and silver and china Helga had laid out on the table in case they might want a proper dinner. Raucous laughter followed. Someone played the piano, surprisingly beautifully. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Nazis called to each other about a cigarette box, a candlestick, the statues lining the ballroom. Some began chanting, “Heave-ho. Heave-ho,” followed by a heavy thud that could be nothing less than one of the large marble statues toppling over onto the ballroom floor. The invaders cheered and cheered, several now stomping up the main stairs to the upper floors, to the bedrooms where Stephan supposed they hoped to find the family.

  Something crashed overhead, followed by more laughter. Papa’s money clip would be on the dresser. Mutti’s jewels might be out too. It wasn’t clear if the invaders were taking things or just reveling in being in the opulent house with its doorman who had always blocked entry. Where was Rolf?

  Poor Helga on the servants’ floor must be terrified. Would these hooligans harm the servants?

  The library doorknob rattled. No one moved. It rattled again. Still, the radio continued its revealing murmur.

  The piano played in the music room, the C-sharp—the note Stephan did think seemed like the moonlight on Lake Lucerne might sound if it were audible—now ominous.

  A voice said, “Who’s in there? Have you locked yourselves in?” It might be Dieter’s voice, but Stephan couldn’t believe that, not really.

  A body bumped violently against the door, then again, followed by laughter, and shoving, and another thud at the door as different voices urged one and then another to step aside, they would be the one to break open the door.

  “That statue,” someone said. “We could use that to force the door.”

  A chaos of chatter and sliding feet was followed by laughter. The statue was marble. Like the one they’d toppled in the ballroom, it weighed over five hundred pounds. Žofie had calculated that.

  Another body thumped against the library door.

  “How about this table?” someone said.

  Stephan listened as if by listening intently enough he could stop them. His mother’s collection of silver trinkets clanged to the floor outside the door. And still the radio murmured, still the piano played.

  Stephan moved to the doorway, his body one more barrier against them. His mother shook her head, trying to dissuade him, but no one moved or said a word.

  The radio announcer called attention for an important announcement: President Miklas had given in. Major Klausner announced “with deep emotion in this festive hour that Austria is free, that Austria is National Socialist.”

  A roaring cheer sounded out in the street.

  From down by the front door, someone whistled loudly.

  The boy who sounded so like Dieter shouted, just outside the door, “Over the rail!”

  A splintering crash in the marble entryway met with cheers and a stampede down the stairs. The front door slammed, leaving them to the muffled sounds from outside and the low murmur of the radio, and Moonlight Sonata still being played on the piano. The final two long, deep notes of the first movement sounded, followed by a moment of quiet. A last set of footsteps hurried across the entryway. The door opened, but did not close again. Had he left?

  Before the stillness inside had time to settle, the voice on the radio giving way to a German military march, Stephan opened the library door and peered out. There was chaos everywhere, but no piano player.

  He crept down the stairs, stumbling the last few steps. He threw the lock on the front doors. He leaned back against them, his heart thudding like some frantic visitor banging the knocker outside.

  The entryway and the imperial stairway were awash in broken and dented things: furniture and crystal, paintings and sculptures, delicate silver flower bowls and sugar boxes, baby rattles, water vessels, thimbles and bottle stoppers and things that had no purpose whatsoever now irreparably dented. Scattered among it all were the trampled photographs and papers and letters that would be, in all the mess left in the invaders’ wake, the sight that would make the tears pool in Mutti’s eyes. Only the piano seemed unharmed, the player even having taken the trouble to pull the cover back over the keys, a task Stephan himself so often forgot. As he approached it, he came upon another mess of scattered pages. Faceup among them, trampled almost to illegibility, was a page on which was typed only a title: THE LIAR’S PARADOX.

  Part II

  The Time Between

  MARCH 1938

  After the Refusal to Dance

  Truus peered into the darkness outside the guest room at the little Hamburg inn just as Klara van Lange, awoken by the voices or perhaps up all night, asked what all the noise was.

  “The boys from the bar are standing on the flat roof below our window, singing.”

  “At four in the morning?”

  “I believe they mean to serenade you, dear.”

  Truus let the drape fall closed and climbed back into bed.

  Minutes later, the alarm clock rang out. The two women got up and, without turning on the lights given the boys outside, shed their nightclothes and began to dress. Truus felt Klara watching her finish the hook-and-eye fastenings of her corset and choose a stocking. It was unnerving, to be watched in half nakedness, even in the darkness. From inside. From outside.

  “What is it, Klara?” she asked, stocking in hand.

  Klara van Lange looked away, to the window. “Do you suppose we would be doing this if we had children of our own?”

  Truus slid her stocking over her toes and around her heel, over her calf and knee to her thigh, a bit of it catching in between the two intertwined bands of her center ring, but not laddering. She carefully clipped the stocking into place as, outside, the boys were giving up and leaving. In a moment Truus might turn on the light, or Klara might.

  “You’re still young, dear,” Truus said softly. “There’s still time for you.”

  Choices

  The trolleys outside the Hamburg station were as silent as they had been the prior morning, the tracks below as empty. Truus and Klara van Lange entered again through the doors beneath that awful swastika, descended the same dirty stairs to the same dirty platform, brushed the same bench with a fresh handkerchief—the only bit of Truus that was fresh this morning; she hadn’t packed for the delay. Again they set their overnight bags beside them and waited. It was not yet dawn.

  Mr. Snowman approached and, without turni
ng or pausing, whispered, “The train is delayed thirty minutes, but your package will arrive before it leaves.”

  Just as, finally, the train could be heard approaching, two supervisors—an older woman with gray hair and a younger one with a baby in her arms—led a gaggle of children down the same stairs Truus and Klara had descended.

  Truus asked the younger supervisor to introduce the children as the gray-haired one checked names off a clipboard list and handed the paperwork to Klara. With a warm hand for each child—touch was so important to establishing trust—Truus told them they could call her “Tante Truus.”

  After all thirty had been checked off, the younger supervisor shot a nervous glance to the older one and said, “Adele Weiss.” She handed the baby in her arms to Truus and hurried away, the child now in Truus’s arms crying, “Mama! Mama!” and beginning to wail.

  “Her paperwork?” Klara asked the older supervisor.

  Truus cooed at the girl to calm her as the train hissed to a stop.

  “We can’t take a child without paperwork,” Klara whispered.

  Truus nodded toward the Nazi attendant just stepping down from the train to the platform. “Mrs. Van Lange, I believe you’re on,” she said. “I’ll have help enough here getting the children onto the train.”

  Klara, with a dubious glance at the child in Truus’s arms, extracted her ticket and approached the Nazi, whose gaze fixed on Klara’s pretty calves and ankles under her shorter skirt.

  “Entschuldigen Sie, bitte,” she said to him. “Sprechen Sie Niederländisch?”

  The train attendant looked for all the world as if Helen of Troy had just abandoned a train station bench to chat with him.

  With little Adele Weiss on her hip, Truus took another child’s hand and walked to the train carriage, the Nazi glancing up only briefly before returning his attention to Klara van Lange. Truus climbed aboard, and the supervisor began to help the children climb up to her.