Midnight Train to Prague

by Carol Windley

  Every day, she silently spoke to her mother. The dead get buried, she said, and there are prayers at the grave, and the Kaddish is said, and everyone cries, even the British doctors and nurses cry. Today, however, for the first time, no one has died.

  Natalia looked pale and thin, lying there on her pillow. But she would get well. Anna wouldn’t let her not get well. She bathed Natalia’s face and arms with a cool cloth to bring down her fever. Natalia’s scalp itched, and she was afraid she had lice again. But Anna told her that no one had lice anymore—bad reactions to insecticidal powder, yes, but no lice. She changed Natalia’s bedsheets and washed her nightgown in the bathroom sink, and helped her to eat. At first it took half an hour for Natalia to finish a small bowl of broth, but at least she kept the soup down.

  Are the thermometers disinfected? Anna would ask the nurses. Are you sure this hypodermic needle is sterile? Where is the adhesive tape? Don’t you think this patient needs a chest X-ray? She preferred being at the hospital to the hut where she slept, even though it had been thoroughly cleaned and supplied with blankets and mattresses.

  A social worker with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration interviewed her in an office at the hospital and let her know that she couldn’t stay at the camp; everyone was being transferred to more suitable places. If possible, they were being returned to their countries of origin and reunited with their families.

  Anna said she couldn’t leave without Frau Faber. Frau Andorján, she corrected herself. But you must understand, Anna, that no one is staying here, he said. Some are, she said stubbornly. She happened to know that a school was being started for the Jewish children who had to wait for the British government to arrange for them to go to Palestine. If the Jewish children were allowed to stay, why couldn’t she, also, attend the school and perhaps also go to Palestine, where she had a friend called Rosa. She could live with Rosa’s family, and she could go to school with Rosa. It seems like a very practical solution to me, she said, looking out the window. Then she turned to face the social worker, who wore pinned to his uniform jacket a badge with his name on it: JAMES GRANT. He told her he was from Seattle, Washington. She pretended she knew Seattle, who didn’t? She took the chocolate bars he gave her. American chocolate, she said disdainfully, and told him her grandmother, whose name was Katharina, had made the best chocolate in Prussia at their chocolate factory in Halle an der Saale.

  The room where James Grant interviewed her was above the kitchens, which were staffed by British soldiers, who cooked and baked from early morning to night, so that the smell of boiled meat and potatoes and freshly baked bread wafted through the building. It was the kind of smell that induced acquiescence, she thought, and she tried not to think of being hungry. James Grant moved his chair out from behind the desk and wrote in a file folder balanced on his knee. Three times he asked her age, and three times she gave a different answer. “Fifteen,” she said at last. Her real age.

  He tried to get her to talk by talking about himself. He told her he had a degree in sociology. His parents owned a department store. His older brother, Owen, was a captain in the U.S. Army. He had a pet dog. What about you, Anna? Any pets at home? She didn’t answer. What a stupid question, she thought.

  Did she have relatives in France? A number of the camp children were going to live with French families. “I’ve never been to France,” she said.

  “Any family in England?” he said. “Sweden?”

  “Why would I want to go to Sweden?”

  “One of the nurses told me your mother was a doctor.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, my mother was a doctor.” She looked away. She let herself float out the open window into the June sunshine and over the fields until she became a mere speck in the sky. She thought: What a relief it would be, to be done with the me that is me.

  * * *

  On a warm summer morning, James Grant removed his uniform jacket and hung it on the back of his chair. His hair was thick and straight, light brown with streaks of blond, and his features were neat, well organized. He had a lot of straight, very white teeth. He looked not quite real. If anyone qualified as a displaced person, it was him, not her, Anna thought.

  “How would you feel about going to the United States?” he said. “An air force flight leaves from Bremen in five days. I think we could get you aboard. You’d be staying with a family I have in mind. A nice family. I know they’d look after you very well. What do you think?”

  “I am not leaving here,” she said. “I told you before; you can send me to Palestine if you want. I am willing to go there.”

  “Anna, you are not Jewish.”

  “Don’t you ever listen to me? I have a friend in Palestine,” she repeated, this time in English. “Her name is Rosa.”

  “But still, you cannot go to Palestine.” He sighed. “Anna, you can’t stay here. You’ll understand when I tell you there are active cases of tuberculosis here. For that reason alone, we’d like to get you away. Germany is not the place for you right now. Do you really want to go to another refugee camp, a displaced persons camp? I don’t want that to happen.”

  “Why do you care?”

  “I just do, Anna.”

  “I can’t go because of Natalia,” Anna said. “We’re going to stay together.”

  “I’ll talk to her, then,” James Grant said.

  “She won’t want to talk to you.”

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  The next time she saw James Grant, he presented her with a pair of shoes that matched, a new pair of shoes. She took them out of the white cardboard shoebox and held them. “Do you like them?” he said. “Try them on. Let’s see how they look.”

  She studied her feet in the mismatched shoes, one black with perforated holes in a swirly pattern, the other brown and too big, and thought she’d become accustomed to them. She bent and undid the buckle on the black shoe and the laces on the brown shoe and stepped out of them. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she slipped her feet into the new shoes. Never had she worn such beautiful shoes, not even from the Bata shoe store in Prague. She remembered that when James Grant had traced her foot on a piece of white paper, she had actually thought it was nothing unusual, that it was part of the UNRRA bureaucracy, another means of identifying her as a refugee, another paper to go into that file folder James Grant carried around. Nothing seemed too strange to believe. He told her now that he’d sent the outline of her foot to Seattle, and his parents had chosen the shoes in the shoe department at their store. She nodded, picturing this American couple she didn’t know opening shoe boxes and examining shoes, trying to decide which pair would be suitable for a girl like her. A girl with nothing.

  She got up and walked around, a little shocked at the sight of her stick-thin legs ending in these pretty shoes. “Thank you,” she managed to say. She took the shoes off and tried to give them back to him, but he wouldn’t take him, so she put them on again and walked out of the room, the old shoes in her arms.

  * * *

  “Natalia, you have to get out of that bed,” Anna said. “If you lie there one more day, your muscles will waste away. You have to learn to walk again, Natalia,” Anna said, “or you’ll be in a wheelchair or leaning on two canes, like an old woman.”

  “Thank you for your candor, Anna,” Natalia said. She got her legs over the side of the bed and, with Anna holding her hands, stood up. “Well,” she said, after a moment. “How strange the world looks vertical.”

  * * *

  James Grant gave Anna another chocolate bar. Dark chocolate, with bits of some kind of nut in it. She shared it with Natalia, sitting on a bench in the sun. “Is that it?” Natalia said, shaking the empty foil wrapper. “Is it all gone?”

  Nearby, a man played a violin, and when he took a break he came over to where Anna and Natalia were seated and said this was his farewell performance. He was leaving in the morning for a displaced persons camp. “Do I congratulate you?” Natalia said.

  He
laughed. His name was Zoltan; he was Hungarian. He was from Keszthely.

  “Oh God, I know that town,” Natalia said, shading her eyes from the sun with her hand. “I met my husband there. Or near there.”

  “I’m not going back,” said Zoltan. “Budapest is in ruins from the siege. What the Germans and Russians did to Budapest is an atrocity, I am told. I have friends who emigrated to Los Angeles years ago. They’re in the film industry, and they’re going to see what they can do for me.”

  “You’re a filmmaker?”

  “A playwright. That is, I’m an architect. I was an architect, and I got inspired to write one play, a smidgeon of a one-act play, two actors, lots of high-flown rhetoric, but eventually it got produced at a theater in Budapest.”

  “My husband is a writer,” Natalia said.

  “What is his name?”

  Natalia told him her husband’s name.

  “Are you kidding?” He held out his arms, the violin in his hand. “I knew him, for God’s sake. A long time ago, in Budapest. There was a group of writers, architects, musicians, composers, who called themselves the Elastics, and I hung around with them, and so did your husband, sometimes, occasionally, when he was in Budapest. By the way,” he said to Anna, “do you know why we called ourselves the Elastics?”

  “The shoes,” Natalia said.

  “Exactly. The shoes we wore, with elastic sides, no laces.” After a moment he said, “I want to ask, and I’m afraid to ask. Where is your husband? Is he well?”

  “You mean is he alive? I don’t know. I’m going to find him.”

  “Yes, of course you will. I wish you luck,” the man said.

  Anna listened to Natalia and this man called Zoltan and leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, so that she could admire her shoes, which did not, thank goodness, have elastic sides. Every night she polished them with her skirt. She slept with them under the pillow.

  A British soldier was playing soccer with some of the boys. They were all different ages and spoke many languages, but they all knew how to play soccer. People walked past where she and Natalia were sitting. Six weeks ago, they were in Hell and now they were strolling in the sun. How did it happen? People were remarkably durable and resilient. Maybe too resilient. It shocked her a little. She didn’t know what to make of it. Perhaps on the inside, in the soul, in the heart, it was a different matter. She felt happy, and yet she also felt angry, all the time.

  Once, in a group of doctors walking past, Anna saw her mother. Her crown of braided hair shone in the sun. She was wearing a gray wool-flannel skirt, a blouse she liked, and over this a doctor’s white coat. Look, Anna nearly said to Natalia. Look, my mother is here. But she knew that her mother was not, in fact, there.

  * * *

  “Would I be allowed to ask a question?”

  “Of course you can ask a question,” James Grant said.

  “This is my question. I want to know, what happened to the guards?” Anna said.

  “The guards?”

  “The SS guards. The British army came. The SS guards waved white cloths at them, and they were made to work. They were made to see and touch what they had done. I would like to know what happened after they were taken away from here.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I saw one of them shoot a woman.”

  “Oh, Anna,” said James Grant.

  “She was digging with her hands in the dirt, trying to find a potato or a turnip. We all were. There were no turnips, no potatoes left in the dirt; dig as hard as you could, you couldn’t find a thing. One of the guards came over to us, and he shot a woman. I crawled away in the dirt.”

  She didn’t tell James Grant what she had thought when she saw that woman die. She had thought: Now I know what it’s like, when someone is shot dead in cold blood. Executed. This is how my mother died, she had thought. This is how my father died. And Franz, he died like this.

  “Anna, what is important now is your future. Soon you’ll be on your way to the airfield at Bremen,” James Grant said. “I’m going to drive you to Bremen myself. I’m going to see you get on the plane safely.”

  “I can’t go. No one can force me to go,” she said.

  He left and came back with tea and biscuits and a clean handkerchief, which he handed to her. He showed her a photograph. He was in the photograph, standing on a beach, his hair ruffled by the wind. He was with his brother, Owen, his parents, his sister, his dog.

  She glanced at the photograph. So he had a family, she thought. Big deal.

  “I have to stay and look after Natalia,” she said.

  James Grant said he would see that Natalia was looked after. He would help Natalia to reach her home in Hungary. Anna did not have to worry about Natalia.

  A week later, James Grant drove her in a jeep to Bremen. She wore her new shoes and carried a new canvas rucksack, in which she had an apple and bread, a change of clothes. James Grant waited with her until it was time to board the plane. She was frightened. Her heart was racing; her mouth was so dry she couldn’t speak. She got on the plane; this was the first time in her life she had ever flown.

  Part

  Three

  In my heart I was opposed to war as to any other kind of murder. . . .

  —SOPHIE ANDREEVNA TOLSTOY

  Chapter Eighteen

  On the road from Hanover to Berlin, James Grant pulled the jeep over to let a convoy of American and British military trucks pass. The trucks carried food, medicine, drums of gasoline, carpentry tools, lumber: everything needed to carry out the occupation and rebuilding of a ruined country. After delivering their cargo they would return to port cities—Ghent and Antwerp—to take on fresh supplies. It would go on like this for months, for years, James said. For as long as it took.

  The dust and heat made Natalia feel feverish. Had her fever returned? The nurses said she was well. They had packed a few clothes and toiletries for her in a cardboard box meticulously tied with a length of white string. They walked with her to the hospital door. The door was open, and she’d had no choice but to walk through it.

  Hundreds, thousands of people were traveling on foot, on the road and in the fields beside the road. An inchoate dark line against the bright summer sky. At first the scene made no sense to her, or, what was worse, it made the most awful kind of sense, as if the barbarity of the last six years had been distilled in this last moment. Some of the people carried infants in their arms. Some pulled carts or pushed baby carriages or wheelbarrows piled with cook pots, clocks, violins, radios, blankets, a birdcage, and even, in one case, a rocking chair—everything left to them, the meager scrapings. The elderly leaned on their middle-aged daughters’ arms. Small boys ran after the military transport trucks, hands out to catch candy and chewing gum tossed to them by the soldiers.

  There were concentration camp survivors, slave laborers, prisoners of war, all going home to Belgium or France or wherever home had been the last time they’d seen it. Some, undoubtedly, said James Grant, were German citizens fleeing west to escape the Red Army. Many of the refugees were ethnic Germans expelled from the east, where they’d been settled by the Nazis. About these people, the Germans, Natalia didn’t know how to think.

  They came to Magdeburg. How many bombs, Natalia wondered, did it take to reduce a city to this state? All but one of the bridges across the Elbe had been destroyed; the traffic had backed up, and the long lines of waiting vehicles and people on foot, pushing or pulling various crude conveyances, began to look to her utterly static and remote, a painted scene from a chaotic, troubled past or a future gone terribly wrong. At one point, when the line began slowly moving, the jeep stalled, and they had to wait for the engine to cool down before James Grant could start it again. They drank the last of the water from their canteens and James unwrapped cheese sandwiches that had been supplied by the kitchen at the hospital.

  Once they crossed the bridge, it took only a short time to reach Dahlem, on the outskirts of Berlin. They passed the pretty little train
station, which had not been damaged and looked just as it had when she’d lived near Dahlem, she told James Grant. American military personnel strolled in the shade of leafy trees. Everything seemed familiar to her and yet remote.

  They stopped at a mansion on Dahlem’s Cäcilienallee that had been requisitioned by the American army. A white villa, with a garage and outbuildings, a stone wall around the garden. A woman in uniform greeted them at the door. Willkommen, she said. Her name was Daphne. She was a British UNRRA welfare officer. In the kitchen she introduced Natalia and James to Gudrun, the cook. Gudrun had set the kitchen table with what she called an English tea: sausage rolls, buns, sliced tomatoes, corned beef sandwiches. Someone was playing a jazzy tune on a piano somewhere. Natalia sat with her little cardboard box at her feet. Later, after she’d had something to eat, Gudrun took her upstairs and showed her the room where she’d sleep. On the bed were a nightgown and a flannel housecoat.

  James said she could stay in this house. She would be expected to help Gudrun with the cooking and laundry, and she’d receive a small wage. German women didn’t always get paid for working for the Americans, he said, but here, at least, they were trying to be fair.

  “Do you think you can manage the work?” he said. “Do you feel up to it?”