The Postmistress

by Sarah Blake

  “There!” Frankie cried out. “There he is!”

  At the same time as Frankie shouted, his mother had caught the sound of his crying and started pushing against the human tide to get at him. People roared at her and shoved back and the boy, hearing her cries, cried back, Mama! Mama!

  “There!” Frankie shouted again, frantic. The mother could not get at her child. “There he is!”

  Mama, Franz was wailing. Mama, Mama!

  “Shut up, Fräulein,” Thomas hissed at her. “They’re going to shoot. For God’s sake, shut up!”

  “There!” Frankie pounded against the window. And one of the German officers, disgusted by the commotion, turned around and shot.

  The crowd went silent. Hands that had been waving dropped. Truly frightened people did not scream, Frankie saw—they went quiet, they went watchful. Had he shot into the crowd? Had someone been hit? It was too hard to tell. There were too many. Where was the mother? Frankie stood at the open window, her mouth still in the shape of her cry. And then the officer who was a few feet from her window looked up at where the sound of her banging had come from and slowly leveled his revolver on her. She stared back at him, both hands on the glass, unable to breathe. And then she was yanked down off the seat by Thomas and pulled away from the window onto the floor. Outside the train, the quiet continued and the two of them lay there, Frankie sobbing into her hands, too frightened to look up. She couldn’t bear the quiet. What had she done? Her heart was pounding so fast, she thought she was going to be sick. Someone shouted. Frankie looked over at Thomas who was sitting up, his ear against the compartment wall. Perhaps the soldier hadn’t seen Thomas, perhaps from the outside it had merely looked like she had fallen backward off her seat.

  The floor beneath them shuddered and bucked, and very slowly the train began to move again with the two of them inside. Frankie caught Thomas’s eye, but he shook his head. What had happened? The roof of the station slid past in the window above her head. The train was going to leave the boy and his mother behind. Halt! Halt! Shouting broke out along the platform, but Frankie couldn’t tell if it came from the people or from one of the soldiers. The train kept going, moving along almost to the end of the station. Where it stopped.

  Frankie’s heart heaved and dropped and she looked at Thomas sitting across from her on the floor in the dark compartment. For a moment there wasn’t a sound, and she thought they might start off again, but then a whistle blew nearby and the carriage door was thrown open. Someone came up the steps and along the corridor; the compartment door slid back. She looked up at an officer of the Gestapo. Behind him, another man waited.

  The officer bowed to her and asked her to get up on her feet. Very politely, she and Thomas were asked to come down off the train. Polite, and their guns were not drawn. There was something wrong with the engine. There was a bus waiting. Could they come, please. Numbly, Frankie reached for her suitcase and the disk recorder and passed down the corridor, aware of the three men behind her. The train had evidently been halted in the field just past the station. She climbed down the steps of the train onto the grass by the side of the train tracks. There was, in fact, a bus waiting; inside it, Frankie made out the heads of three others. First, there was the issue of papers.

  “Is something wrong?” She faced the Germans.

  “No, no,” the first officer answered mildly, “nothing.” But Frankie saw him change his grip on the gun in his hand, and a sick dread rose up in her chest. She turned to Thomas, beside her. He had closed his eyes. “No,” she whispered, and put her hand on Thomas’s arm and felt how thin he was beneath the cloth.

  “Step away, Fräulein.” The officer was genial.

  Frankie turned her back on the officer and spoke into Thomas’s closed eyes. “Thomas”—her grip tightened on his arm—“Thomas?”

  “Go on.” He shook his head.

  “Thomas,” she whispered, “please. Let me—”

  “Fräulein!”

  Thomas opened his eyes and looked at her at the same time as Frankie felt herself roughly pushed aside and the officer took his shot. Thomas fell at Frankie’s feet with a sigh.

  Frankie blinked. The officer behind her stepped away. She stared ahead at the empty spot in the air where Thomas had just stood. Slowly she turned around.

  The officer’s eyes slid from him to Frankie. She stared back at him.

  “I could detain you.”

  Distantly, as if from another lifetime, from inside the station, the telephone rang.

  Across the field it rang twice, three times, four. Someone answered it. The officer looked up and, with an expression of disgust, he waved Frankie toward the bus. Shaking, she bent to pick up her suitcase and the recorder, looking one last time at Thomas. Blood streamed from his ear and across his neck into the ground. She whimpered.

  “Go.”

  She turned around, and she walked away from Thomas, from the boy and from his mother somewhere back there on the station platform. She walked ten feet down the tracks away from the police before she started weeping. She walked a few more feet, waiting to hear a shot, waiting to hear a shout, anything at all. She lifted her arm and wiped the tears off on her sleeve. Between the train behind her and the bus ahead on the country lane there was nothing but the sound of her own breathing and her feet clipping stones and then the cool metal of the rail that she grabbed as she climbed on.

  16.

  THIS IS FRANKIE BARD, CBS news, from Mulhouse, France, just west of the Franco/German border.

  Emma turned around from her mailbox, a letter in her hand. The clipped female tones emerged into the post office from the green Bakelite box behind Miss James’s head. There is a great deal of speculation about who is trying to leave Germany where—we are told—conditions have never been better, where the war is being won on all fronts, and where peace and bread are plentiful. The voice paused. There are, it is true, plenty of crackers to be had here. Emma looked at Iris. That last was a joke, wasn’t it? The woman on the radio sounded like she was smiling, though she also sounded exhausted. Still, people are leaving, are trying to leave, by the dozens. You have to imagine walking out of your house or apartment and closing the door and never going back. In your hands are a suitcase and maybe a shopping bag filled with a piece of sausage, some cheese perhaps, whatever you were allotted in the store, something to tide you over, you hope, until you reach the border. In the suitcase, if you are a Jew, are two changes of clothes and your papers—her voice snapped off, and then came back on—You have a window of escape you are shooting for. If you are one of the very lucky few, you have an American visa. More likely, you have a visa for Cuba, or Argentina, or Brazil. You have ninety days to reach your destination or the visas expire. But you have to get on a train. And cross Europe to get to the boats at Lisbon or Bordeaux. You have ninety days, and the trains are few and full. Everywhere. So the windows from here look to be closing. Now the voice was shaking. Emma closed her box and locked it and walked closer to the voice. You must imagine a Europe no longer made up of houses in villages where generations remain. Imagine people without houses, without the frame and mortar and brick around them, floating out here, trying to swim as hard as they can to get away. You have to imagine that there is right now, in Europe, a sea of people moving. If one of you were to write them a letter, you have to understand, there is nowhere a letter would find them—Iris turned around and switched it off.

  “We don’t have to imagine a goddamned thing,” she said evenly to Emma. “It’s a mess over there, and that gal should get control of herself.”

  Emma was staring at the wireless as though it might spring back into voice.

  “He’s okay,” Miss James said to her gently. “It’s okay. You know where he is. You have a letter in your hand.”

  Emma looked down at it. “Yes.”

  “So. There you are.”

  There you are. That’s what Will always said. Lord.

  THE EYE of the evening train moved slowly forward into Mulhou
se station and stopped. Some of the faces on board turned to look down on Frankie standing there on the platform waiting. Some of the faces stared, and she couldn’t look at them too closely and bent to pick up her baggage and walked, under their gaze, to the single open door. She was the only passenger, and the train jolted forward and started sliding away from Mulhouse even before she had found her way down the corridor to a seat. It followed the main railway corridor west, through Belfort into Besançon, where she stopped for her first sleep in a bed in five nights. Too tired to do anything but point at a bottle and a loaf of bread and some cheese, she carried everything up to her room and sat down on the cot to undo her laces, and woke up the next morning lying across the bed, her feet on the floor, still in her shoes. Only half-awake, she slid out of her shoes, got under the covers, and fell back asleep staring up at the plaster ceiling.

  Frankie woke again far into the afternoon to the sound of church bells. She lay in the middle of a bed, in the tiny upstairs room of the Burghorst Pension, at the edge of a French provincial town and listened to the world going on outside her door, outside the window without her. Clap. A man shouted at schoolchildren running by, and their fast footsteps and laughter carried up through the open window. Clap. She frowned, trying to make sense of this steady clap, the sound of wood on wood and then, when it came again, she understood that someone’s shutter was banging. Someone’s window needed to be pulled closed. She lay there, floating like a child. No one knew her. No one called for her. She felt relieved of duty. There had been a change in plan.

  She snorted. Change of goddamned plan. Try to get all the way to Lisbon, Murrow had said. Stop and broadcast in Strasbourg, Lyons, and Lisbon. She was pretty sure it was the twenty-third of May, and by now the patched-in report from Mulhouse would make it clear she was going to miss Strasbourg. She wondered if it had even gone out on the air, let alone made it to the States. She ought to cable Murrow.

  She sat up at last and stood to step out of her skirt. The rim of an envelope poked out of the pocket when the skirt fell to the floor. Frankie looked at the envelope, uneasily. The doctor’s letter was beginning to hold the faint power of a relic. She ought to mail it, oughtn’t she? Get it on its way. Kicking the skirt to the side, she went to run the water in the sink and put the plug in, watching the sink fill. She tried to put the days in order. When had he died? Five days ago? Six? Frankie sniffed and turned off the water, reaching for the sponge and some hand soap. She pulled off her blouse and brassiere, and stood naked on the rug, giving herself a baby’s sponge bath. In the mirror, her hand guided the sponge across her breasts and down the long shine of her stomach, where it disappeared from the glass. For a moment she stared at the torso in the glass, the sponge dripping soapy water down her leg, and she crossed her arms over her breasts.

  You must be pretty tough, the doctor had said down there in the dark. She shuddered, remembering how nervous and cross he’d made her when he was asking about Billy. She unfolded the towel left by the sink and rubbed herself dry.

  What happens to the people after their story is told?

  I don’t know.

  You must be pretty tough to bear not knowing.

  Sinking down on the bed with the towel around her shoulders, she pulled out a cigarette. The smoke shot deep into her lungs and she closed her eyes, exhaling it. She lay back and smoked the cigarette all the way down to where its fire crept close to her fingers. Then she stood and fastened her skirt around her waist and buttoned her blouse at the neck and cuffs, then pulled her jacket on. The doctor’s letter lay on the floor. She picked it up and pocketed it again, and closed the clasps on the suitcase.

  Around the square the stores had reopened, and old women and housewives passed in and out, and old men sat on the benches at the center under a linden tree. There looked to be meat in the butcher shop and bread in the bakery. In every window hung a picture of the Führer, though Frankie saw no sign of the German police. At the edge of the square one shop was shuttered, and in block letters a notice had been written on the metal: Qui achète des Juifs est un traître. She stood in front of the store and wondered if the family inside had made it out of this town, had gotten onto a train and somewhere they’d be safe. She wanted to think of them arriving. Not stopped. The tiny boy’s face on the platform below her in the crowd at the station in Kehl turned toward her. Where were Inga and Litman now? The old woman? Werner Buchman? Frankie shut her eyes. Thomas appeared, and sank to his knees, shot in front of her. Shaking, she turned away from the blank shuttered shop window and made her way back to her room.

  Get in, get the story, get out, Murrow had said. Follow a family, he’d said. Christ. You couldn’t follow anyone over here. There was no way to know for certain whether anyone would make it from start to finish.

  The bottle of wine and yesterday’s cheese stood on the table. She pulled the cork and poured a glass and drank it standing up, staring at the portable recorder in its case. She poured another glass of wine, popped open the case, and turned the knob.

  The disk moved slowly around, and there came the faint susurrus of the needle on the metal record. She set the glass down, flicked the button that stopped the turntable, and set it going backward, watching it hum. Then she flicked it and Thomas’s voice sprang out of the machine. She listened to him all the way through until the record went silent again, around and around with nothing on it. There. There they were. In his voice lay the train and the night, his eyes on her as he told her his story, the narrow ridge of his shoulders stretching the wool of his sweater. The brother and the sister listening. Thomas was dead. But here was his voice. Here he was, alive.

  Out the open window a long range of snow-topped mountains zigzagged sharply against the morning blue. The bell in the churchyard behind her rang the quarter hour, and the sound thudded with her heart. She stood for a long while staring at those bright tops and imagined herself north. North and east into the mountains, north across several peaks, from white point to white point, through the Jurals, into Switzerland, across the wide shoulders of the Swiss Alps into Austria, to Thomas’s house—where his mother and father were waking and waiting for news. Where was he? Where was their son? They would never know. If she were a bird, she could cross the silence to tell his mother—he almost made it. But what she knew had neither tongue nor voice to carry it. Surely God ought to look down and see that one part of the story had been separated from the other, and find a way, somehow, to put them side by side. How could He stand these gaps, these enormous valleys of silence? And Europe was full of people vanishing into this quiet.

  The memory of Harriet Mendelsohn standing in the kitchen on Argyll Road shaking a fork at Dowell, playfully, hit Frankie with such force, she had to grab the windowsill. Jens Steinbach, are you here? The pitiful scraps of paper Harriet had collected and brought home to stick above her bed testified to the windy silence sweeping across European towns.

  And what had Frankie thought? That she’d get over here and find the single story that would make the world sit up and listen? These are the Jews of Europe. Here is what is happening. Pay attention. But there was no story. Or rather, she turned from the window and considered the portable recorder. There was no story over here that she could tell from beginning until the end. The story of the Jews lay in the edges around what could be told. She sucked in her breath, the doctor’s words ghosting her thoughts. The parts that whisper off into the dark, the boy and the girl listening, the woman in the corner, the mother’s distracted face looking up into the moonlight, her hand in her boy’s curls as he slept. The sound of that little boy’s laughter caught for one impossible second, caught and held. There, in the wisps, was the truth of what was happening.

  The following morning, Frankie got on the first train south from Besançon and negotiated her way into the corner seat in a third-class compartment. She had sixteen days left on her permis de séjour and ninety minutes of blank disks and no plan other than to record as many people talking as she could. She was not going
to travel forward in a straight line to Lisbon—one thing after the other, stations on a journey with a beginning, a middle, and an end—she was riding trains with people. And she would get those people down until she ran out of time. She opened the case of the disk recorder and plugged in the microphone. A young couple traveling with their baby watched her preparations closely. When she was ready, she looked up. “S’il vous plaît?” The woman looked at her husband and nodded. Frankie turned the knob.

  “Comment vous appelez-vous?”

  “Eleanor.” The woman smiled.

  “Où allez-vous?” Frankie held the microphone toward her.

  “À Toulouse,” the woman answered, pulling the tiny sweater snug over the baby’s stomach.

  “Juifs?” Frankie asked.

  “Oui.”

  The husband frowned at the machine on Frankie’s lap and shook his head when she turned to him. Frankie turned the knob and the arm lifted from the disk. France passed by through the train window. Poligny, Bours—towns picked up like stitches on a needle, the names looped over and held. And Frankie rode through them, asking as many people as would answer, What is your name? Where are you going? Where have you come from?