by Alan Furst
Kasia said nothing, lit a cigarette, and watched the fields go by.
* * *
—
The local train never went much over thirty miles an hour, stopping at stations only a few miles apart, village stations, serving villages on roads that for centuries had been reached by horse or foot, the roads still flanked by very old plane trees. Ricard said, “We had better go and have something to eat,” and the two went off to the dining car. The SNCF—Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français—had done the best it could: pale green canned peas in a thin mayonnaise, a two-egg omelet with scallions, four pieces of bread in a straw basket, and a battered pear with one bad bruise. Ricard and Kasia were grateful for whatever was served, finished everything, then went back to their compartment. They were almost dozing, heard only the clatter of the train wheels, but the German troopers’ hearing had been sharpened in battle, and they both woke up suddenly. “Scheiss!” one of them said.
His companion pulled up the window, stuck his head out, and looked up at the sky. Only now did Kasia and Ricard become aware of a low, droning sound somewhere behind the train, a drone that became louder each second. “What is it?” Ricard said.
The trooper replied in German and Kasia translated. “It is the RAF, the British bomb this line.”
Suddenly, the train sped up. “What’s he doing?” Ricard said.
The trooper looking out the window said, “He’s trying for a tunnel ahead of us, he can hide the locomotive under there.”
Two bombs straddled the train, sending fountains of dirt into the air and blowing window glass into the compartment. Then the train stopped with a screech of air brakes. The trooper said, “The engineer has got the locomotive under the tunnel.”
Ricard touched a place beneath his eye, extracted a small shard of glass stuck in his cheek, dabbed at the blood with his handkerchief, then began to brush shattered glass off his trousers. From one of the cars ahead of them, a passenger dove out of a window, then rolled into a ditch by the side of the track.
The British plane was a dive-bomber, and the pilot, having dropped both of his bombs, now began to strafe the train from end to end.
Bullets punctured the roof above Ricard’s compartment. An orange tracer round penetrated the roof and passed on through the floor, leaving a hole in the wood and a wisp of brown smoke that curled up in the air. On his way back down the train, the British pilot saw the man hiding in the ditch, fired his machine guns, and the man stood up, then sat down and tilted slowly backward.
One of the German troopers retrieved his rifle, put a round in the breech, leaned out the window, and tried for a shot at the bomber. “Horst!” his companion said. “Don’t make him mad!” and Horst sat back down.
As the drone of the bomber’s engine faded away, it was replaced by a quiet, rainy afternoon. From the edge of the field, crows called out as they flew above the trees. Some of the passengers left the train, as did Kasia and Ricard. Up ahead of them, where the train’s engine had stopped under the tunnel, the engineer stumbled out of his cab and sat on the embankment that supported the tracks, one hand held to his heart. A small spaniel had gotten away from its master and ran, barking hysterically, across the field. One of the passengers approached a conductor and said, “We have a dead woman in our compartment.”
“Which car were you in?” the conductor said. The passenger told him and the conductor replied, “I’ll bring a blanket and we’ll cover her up…that’s all we can do until we reach Brussels.”
It was two-thirty in the afternoon with a slow, steady rain and low cloud that darkened the sky until the train stood in twilight. The engineer—a conductor supporting him with an arm around his waist—returned to his cab and restarted the locomotive. Then, as the train gathered speed, a second British bomber appeared, first as a dot in the sky, then an airplane, losing altitude as it descended toward the railroad track.
At that moment, the train was chugging around a long curve, and Ricard could see the cars ahead of him. He saw the first bomb miss, landing far to the left of the train, but on his second run the British pilot improved his aim, and a bomb fell next to the coal car behind the locomotive. Ricard saw its right-side wheels rise into the air, then the car fell on its side, crashing down the embankment and spilling its coal. But the coupling held, causing the passenger car next in line to go over as well. Then the locomotive fell, spewing steam in the air as it lay on its side while the engineer scrambled out the window and jumped to the ground. Meanwhile, the following passenger cars tilted over, and tumbled down the embankment.
Ricard, stunned, found himself lying on top of Kasia, the two troopers sprawled next to them. From a nearby car, a woman screamed. Ricard managed to get to his feet, then said, “Are you alright?” Kasia raised her hands and, gently, Ricard helped her to her feet. She looked down at the jacket of her new suit, which had survived intact, but Kasia brushed at it anyhow, saying, “Those bastards, don’t they know we’re on their side?”
“They don’t worry about that, they’re ordered to bomb a certain train and that’s what they do.” Ricard now reached up and tried to open the window above his head, but it wouldn’t budge. Standing next to him, the trooper called Horst said, “Cover your eyes,” and, with the butt of his rifle, broke the window, careful to smash out the glass at the window’s edge. Next he told Ricard to cup his hands. He put his foot on them and thrust himself upward through the broken window. Then he lay flat on the side of the upturned railcar and reached inside. “The woman first,” he said.
Kasia was easy to lift. Briefcase in hand, she slid down the side of the car, stood in the field, and lit a cigarette. When Ricard had climbed through the window, he joined her. “What happens now?” she asked. As passengers left the train, they sat on the embankment, grateful to be alive. After an hour, on the far horizon, a convoy of gray-green trucks appeared, then stopped. “Ah, the Wehrmacht arrives,” Horst said. Ricard helped Kasia to her feet and they, among dozens of other passengers, began trudging across the field toward the trucks.
* * *
—
On the night of 12 November, Ricard and Kasia wandered around Amsterdam, looking for a place to stay—their train to Hamburg would leave on the morning of the thirteenth. But the city was busy, the hotels packed with Germans on leave. All they could find was a hotel room in Die Wallen, the brothel district, where naked women sat behind windows in rooms painted red and lit by red light. In Ricard and Kasia’s room was a single bed they could share, a wooden stool, and a lone bulb hanging from the ceiling on a cord. The madam who showed them to the room had grown fat a long time ago and wore a loosely tied floral-print wrap. Eager for company, she invited them up to her apartment, where she produced two quart bottles of beer with ceramic plugs and three water glasses. “Where are you two coming from?” she said.
“Paris,” Ricard said.
“Ah, Paris,” she said, with a nostalgic smile. “What’s it like, these days?”
“Occupied, but not too bad. The Boche want to keep it a playground for their troops on leave, so all the cinemas are open and, if you can afford it, there’s good food to be had. Still, Germans everywhere.”
“Don’t like ’em?”
“Not much.”
Having established that the two shared her feelings for the Germans, she said, “Do you like to listen to the radio?”
Ricard said they did.
“What time is it?” she said.
Ricard looked at his watch and said, “Almost nine o’clock.”
“Nine o’clock is always a good time to listen to the radio.”
This took Ricard a moment to decipher, and it was Kasia who said, “You mean the BBC, don’t you.”
“I do, sweetheart, I never miss it, I can get the French service here.”
She lumbered over to a small Emerson radio next to a fern in a pot and began to fuss w
ith the dial. In a few minutes, they heard the four opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—dot-dot-dot-dash, Morse code for V as in “V for Victory”—that signaled the BBC broadcast. The announcer’s voice was smooth and unemotional, the news itself hopeful, as though, Ricard thought, the war had begun to turn—one notch, no more—in the Allies’ favor.
The lead story: German forces had now occupied all of France—an acknowledgment that France would never be Germany’s friendly neighbor, as the Germans had foolishly hoped. Next, British and American troops had invaded North Africa, landing on the beaches of Morocco and Algeria, heading for Casablanca, Algiers, and the Algerian city of Oran. From there, Ricard knew, they could launch an invasion of Mussolini’s Italy. Churchill, in a speech on the radio, had said, “This is not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” All in Churchill’s deep, rumbling, and fiercely inspiring voice. In the Pacific, American marines had invaded the island of Guadalcanal, meaning to take the Japanese-built airstrip. Meanwhile, the Wehrmacht, fighting in waist-high frozen snow, could not break through the Russian lines that defended Stalingrad.
When the broadcast ended, the madam of the Amsterdam brothel, with a broad smile on her fleshy face, raised her glass of beer and said, “To victory, my friends.” Ricard and Kasia repeated the toast. Not long afterward, they returned to their room, stripped down to their underwear, and crawled into the narrow bed—so narrow that the only way they could both fit on the lumpy mattress was to lie on their sides, Kasia tight against Ricard’s back, her arm wrapped around his chest, the heat of her body warming his skin.
Because it was dark in the room, and silent in the blacked-out street, Kasia spoke in a whisper. “What train do we take tomorrow?”
“The 2:08 from Central Station. We’ll be in Emden by six or so.”
“Emden?”
“The border post between Holland and Germany. Then we go on to Lübeck.”
“In Germany.”
“That’s where it is, my love.”
She was silent for a moment. “Do you worry, about being in Germany?”
“Yes.”
“But you go.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Ricard laughed. “It’s a long story.”
“What will they do to us if we’re caught?”
“Throw us in jail. For starters. But I have an assignment letter, and permission from the Propagandastaffel.”
“It will work?”
Ricard shrugged. “I believe it will.”
She brooded over this, then tightened her arm around Ricard’s chest. “I’m frightened, Ricard. I don’t show it, we Poles don’t, we expect each other to be brave…but I’ve been in prison.”
Ricard reached back and pulled her closer. “We’re not going to be arrested, Kasia. For what? Our papers are good, we haven’t done anything wrong.”
She nodded, felt better, and, not long after, her breathing changed and she twitched and muttered in her sleep, kicked him once, then quieted down.
AT THE BORDER post in Emden, dusk with night fast closing in. The rain had stopped and there were faded red streaks amid the dark clouds. A light wind toyed with the red-and-black swastika flags, and the passengers, leaving the train for document control, knew they were in Germany now, so they didn’t say much, or spoke in undertones. A kind of hush, on the German side of Emden, where guards in Wehrmacht uniform watched the passengers carefully while their Alsatian shepherds strained at their leads: chains attached to broad leather collars. They had been trained to attack civilians and they wanted to do it.
Ricard and Kasia stood patiently on the long line, eventually reaching a junior officer who took their documents in hand. He was young, nineteen or twenty, likely a former member of the Hitlerjugend, the Nazi youth program which one entered at the age of fourteen. He certainly had the Aryan look: tall and pale with steel-framed eyeglasses. Slapping Ricard’s passport against his upturned palm, he said, “What brings you to the Reich?” The you was accented, as though Ricard’s mere existence was offensive.
“I am writing an article for a French newspaper,” Ricard said.
“You have a permit from the Propagandastaffel?”
“Yes, sir.”
The officer didn’t like Ricard. “Let’s see it,” he said.
As Ricard rummaged through his briefcase, the officer rested his hand on the butt of his holstered pistol, ready to arrest Ricard, wanting to arrest him. Ricard found the letter and started to give it to the officer, but there was an interruption. A senior officer appeared from the customs shed with a mousy little fellow held by the collar of his jacket and hauled upward, so that he had to walk on his toes. Then the officer shouted at his subordinate, “Klebner! What are you doing, Klebner? How did this little Arschloch—asshole—get past you? He’s a smuggler, Klebner, he’s got a suitcase full of stockings. Silk stockings!” The officer’s face was red with anger, smuggling provocative clothing for women was worse than just smuggling.
Klebner, a pink flush of shame on his cheeks, apologized to his superior. Taking hold of the man’s shoulders, he spun him around, manacled his wrists, and began to march him away. The man, his voice high and pleading, said, “But sir, I am just a simple salesman.”
Kasia began to whisper something to Ricard, but the officer yelled, “And you, you shut your mouth.”
Klebner, with his prisoner halfway to a waiting van, turned and gave Ricard a look of pure hatred. The officer who’d yelled at Klebner took Ricard’s papers, stamped them, and waved him through. As Ricard and Kasia walked over the border and headed for the train to Hamburg, Kasia said, “You’re lucky today, Ricard, that was almost the end of you. He would have found something ‘irregular’ with your permits. He intended to arrest you.”
Slowly, Ricard’s pounding heart settled down. “I know,” he said.
They boarded the train and found a compartment in the second-class carriage. Ricard opened the window—the night air was chilly and damp—then watched as other passengers trudged along the platform, suitcases in hand. They didn’t speak. Turning to Kasia, Ricard said, “Kasia, why is it so quiet here?”
“The Germans are afraid,” she said. “They go to sleep afraid and they wake up afraid. That’s Hitler and his Gestapo at work. That’s the way they want it. They like fear.”
Ricard felt his anger return. “Hitler. Why doesn’t somebody…?”
Kasia crossed his lips with her finger. “Don’t,” she said.
* * *
—
In Lübeck, a bright, windy day at the river Trave, a banner hailing the new Heinrich Himmler Brücke snapped in the breeze, and the local dignitaries, sashes crossed from shoulder to waist, held on to their hats. In the crowd were wounded veterans of the Wehrmacht, one of them legless, seated on a wheeled trolley that he drove with gloved hands. Also in the crowd: local women, who held tin cans, rattled the coins inside, and asked for donations to the Winterhilfe, which sent warm clothing to the soldiers fighting on the Russian front.
The RAF had bombed Lübeck seven months earlier, destroying the historic center of the city and damaging the bridge, which had now been repaired. Thus the ceremony proceeded much as Ricard had imagined it would. A speech by a dignitary. Followed by another speech by another dignitary. The crowd applauded enthusiastically. Then it was time for the oompah band and the chubby maidens in their dirndls, folk-dancing girls who slapped thighs and shoulders in time to the music.
As the dance ended, and the mayor of Lübeck approached one of the ceremonial banners with a giant scissors made of cardboard, a single-engine airplane passed overhead. The crowd looked up, saw no threat, but went silent until the plane flew over. Then the mayor—with the aid of a town clerk using a real scissors—cut the ribbon, and the crowd cheered.
* * *
&n
bsp; —
16 November. In the morning, Ricard and Kasia had coffee in a little breakfast room in the basement of their hotel. When their coffees were served, they sipped at their cups and lit cigarettes. “So today,” Ricard said, “we take a branch-line train to Altona, which is joined to the city of Hamburg, and from there we go up to Kiel.”
“Have you ever been to Kiel?”
“No, but I know about it. It’s a major port on the Baltic Sea—the U-boat pens are in Kiel, so that’s where somebody copied the engineering schematic, some Polish laborer at a workshop in one of the navy yards.”
For a moment, Kasia was thoughtful. “Do you think they will let us anywhere near the docks?”
“I promise they won’t, we’ll have to find another way—the Poles are forced to work there, but they come back to some sort of camp at night, so we can look for a place where they gather to drink.” Ricard glanced at his watch and said, “Time to leave for our train.”
* * *
—
In Altona, Ricard and Kasia found the railway station near the center of the town, learned that their train would leave in an hour, and settled in the waiting room. Kasia said, “Can’t we find a railway timetable? That would make life easier.”
“It would, before the war they were in every station. But the Germans don’t want the RAF to know the train schedule, so the timetables disappeared.”
In the waiting room: sailors and officers of the Kriegsmarine—the German navy—looking smart in their well-tailored dark blue uniforms, as well as the usual crowd of weary travelers sitting by their suitcases. Also in the crowd, two men, in their thirties, perhaps, wearing civilian suits and gray felt hats. These two struck Ricard as slightly unusual—men in Germany were typically in uniform—but perhaps these two were officials of some sort, headed up to Kiel on state business. They didn’t have briefcases, however, and they weren’t reading newspapers or talking. And, on closer inspection, they weren’t really the “official” type. They could have been soldiers, big guys with hard faces, but they looked more like policemen. Like detectives.