The Postmistress

by Sarah Blake

  When Frankie walked off the train in Lyon five days later, she pushed through the doors and climbed the four flights up to the studio. A man about her age, dressed in a tan linen suit, took one look at her and dropped his chair back to upright.

  “Hello, Beauty,” he said.

  After days of riding the trains, speaking only in French or her cribbed German, the broad, wise-cracking son of the Midwest made her nearly want to weep. “Hello,” she said uncertainly.

  “Jim Holland.” He stood up and held out his hand. “I’ve been on the lookout for you. Big boys are worried as all hell.”

  “Frankie Bard.” She shook it.

  “Looks like you could do with a hot bath and a drink.”

  “I could do with a place to change, if that’s what you mean.”

  He reached for his hat and his coat and piloted her back to his rooms, where he sat outside the single bathroom of the boardinghouse, in a chair tipped against the door, his long Nebraska legs stretched across the hall while she bathed. Then he shepherded her back to the studio into the familiar business of setting up for a broadcast, typing out her script for the censor, waiting to get London on the line, sitting at the mark in front of the mike.

  “Jesus, Frankie.” Murrow came through the line.

  “Hello.” She nodded, smiling at the taut, familiar voice.

  “What the hell happened at Strasbourg?”

  “Never made it.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said, her eyes on the German censor who had come in and sat down in the chair by the door. “Doing fine.”

  “Getting anything?”

  She paused. “The whole deal, Boss.”

  “Good girl,” he said. “What’s the story going to be?”

  The hands on the clock said eight-twenty. The technician held up one finger, and Frankie nodded at him. “So long,” she said quietly. “I’m on.”

  “Good luck.” Murrow signed off.

  The censor placed both hands on either side of her script on the table. The three of them waited in silence as the hands of the clock clicked past. When the technician looked at her, Frankie leaned forward and pulled the mike close. “This is Frankie Bard of the Columbia Broadcast System coming to you from Lyon, France. Good evening.”

  Frankie composed her face amiably for the censor, but he was reading the script. He wasn’t paying attention to her lips or the tone she had injected into her voice.

  “Many years ago, the noted reporter Miss Martha Gellhorn came to speak at my alma mater, Smith College. She was speaking then about the condition some people lived in during the first terrible years of the Depression. She gave as heart-wrenching, as riveting, and as specific an account of the pain and the suffering of these people as anything I ever heard. After she finished, one of the head girls raised her hand and asked, ‘What are we to do about all that, Miss Gellhorn?’ There was a little quiet around the answer as Miss Gellhorn took her time. And it made some of the girls nervous. ‘Pay attention,’ Miss Gellhorn retorted at last. ‘For God’s sake, pay attention.’ ”

  In Franklin, in the post office, despite herself, Iris James turned around. “For nearly three weeks, I’ve been traveling the trains, with the scores of mainly Jewish men, women, and children standing in lines to get out, get away. I’ve shoved into compartments, I’ve asked countless questions, I’ve heard story after simple story of flight. In station after station, I’ve seen lines of people waiting for too few seats on too few trains, and I’d like to get those haunted faces out of my head, but I can’t.

  “All the half-finished stories over here, the people one sees and then loses without a word, call to mind a man I met last month, an American doctor—”

  Iris stared at the wireless.

  “And he said something I dismissed at the time as being just the sort of mash of American spirit and cockeyed optimism we all seem to have been raised on. He said to me: Everything adds up.”

  What American doctor? Iris had turned all the way around from the window and was standing in front of the radio with her hands on either side of it as if it could be shaken into an answer.

  “Yesterday afternoon, in an ordinary market in Bayonne, I began to believe it myself. I had gone into the market because it is the start of summer and I was hungry, and I had seen a man carrying a tiny carton of strawberries in his hands. I went into the market in search of strawberries. It was very hot, and the market was beginning to close. Besides myself, there were a handful of German officers, also, it seemed, in search of fruit. They moved quietly through the crowd, in the direction of the strawberry vendor.

  “I heard what sounded like music coming from somewhere high up, as though someone in the shuttered apartments above the market was practicing his violin. The music repeated and grew louder, and I realized it was more than one someone, it was five or six violins, and they were playing the opening movement of Beethoven’s Fifth, played it out over our heads into the air. And it was the same four notes, repeating. Then somewhere close by me, a man began to whistle, joining the fiddlers above, though you’d never have seen who it was.

  “Little by little, the market hushed, and I saw the woman selling strawberries straighten up and look at the German soldier choosing fruit. The violins sent the notes again into the air coming from one of the windows. Gradually, the six or seven soldiers in the squad looked at each other, looked for each other around the square, because it had now gone eerily quiet, completely quiet. Save for that music.”

  Frankie glanced at the censor sitting in front of her, one long finger resting easily on the switch of the microphone, like a pianist waiting for the downbeat of the conductor’s arm. He looked up. She smiled at him and switched gears.

  “If you have Beethoven’s Fifth—surely a triumph of German passion and heart—go and put it on. Go and listen and you will hear the Europe—under Germany”—she kept speaking into the microphone, her eyes on the man across from her, whose fingers had closed on the button. And she started to hum—Da da da Dum—”

  He pulled the microphone away and switched her off. She sat back, exhausted, giddy with skating the edge like that, and looked straight at him, daring him. She had just sung out the Morse code for the letter V.

  Jim Holland pushed through the studio door.

  “What are you doing, Fräulein?” The censor was studying her.

  She smiled back at him, guileless. “I love Beethoven. I wanted to hum a little of it.”

  The man before her was graying and precise. He may have been a professor at one time, a linguist. She couldn’t tell whether he knew where she had been headed in the broadcast, or because with an instinct for trouble, the minute she had strayed from what she had promised to say, he’d shut her down. She could see him considering. Was she a greater danger? Ought she to be questioned?

  “How about that drink?” Jim Holland broke in.

  She raised her eyebrows at the censor, like a schoolgirl asking permission.

  The man paused for another moment and then finally, with an expression of disgust, waved them both out of the studio.

  Jim shepherded her down the stairs and out onto the street, one hand on her elbow. She held on to the recorder and let herself be taken along the street, around the corner, and into the tiny bar where he found them a table and two drinks and an ashtray. She sank down.

  “Jesus, you cut that close.”

  “Humming the Fifth?”

  He nodded. “It spooked him.”

  “Good,” she chuckled. “Those people were humming resistance, humming it.” She smiled and sipped her drink, then leaned back against the wall with a satisfied smile.

  “How long you been over here?” She shook out a cigarette.

  “Couple of months.”

  “Here in France?” She leaned into his lighter.

  He nodded.

  “Seen much?”

  “Seen enough.” He looked over at her, his eyes lingering on the neck of her blouse. It didn’t matter tha
t she was one of Ed Murrow’s, nor that that broadcast had been brave, even well-written; he didn’t give a damn. She had as fine a pair of legs below the sweetest narrow hips he’d seen in a long while. And she’d come from London, where the big boys were. He asked her questions he didn’t care about the answers to and nodded while she answered, though after a while she didn’t answer much, and thought about the moment that would come at the end when he’d pull her toward him, his hands on those hips. Pull her against him. He smiled at her.

  The hairs on her arms lifted under his gaze and she crossed them over her chest. He slid his attention back onto the crowd in the bar.

  “Listen,” she said, “let me play you something.”

  “What is it?”

  She was woozy from the drink. “I want you to hear someone.” And she reached down for the recorder she had put by her feet, looking around the bar for a quiet spot. Jim stood and carried their drinks over to a table in the corner by the telephones, under the stairs and out of the chatter of the crowd, and Frankie followed him there. He sat down and lit a cigarette, watching her open the case again, slide the disk from the sleeve in the lid, and then, looking at him, switch it on.

  He had to lean toward the disks turning to catch Thomas’s voice, and he stayed that way all the way through until the silence turning at the end. He looked back up at her.

  “He was dead within an hour of this,” Frankie said.

  Jim raised his eyebrow.

  “I’m starting to think that none of it matters,” she said, and snapped the machine off, “except this. Nothing we can report can do better than that. A man speaking. Just his voice. Just him talking before he is killed.” She snapped the lid of the case back down around the recorder.

  Holland shook his head. “That’s not reporting. You need a frame. People need to know where to look. They need us to point.”

  “We get in the way, don’t you see?”

  “You can’t just go around and wave your wand and expect people to talk and then to expect that’s enough. You’ve got to have a story around them. Otherwise it’s just sound.”

  “But what if the sounds you record are enough?”

  “You’re a reporter, Miss Bard”—Holland pushed back—“not a collector. You report.”

  “I don’t know.” Frankie was exhausted. “Maybe people talking, just being there, alive for the minutes you can hear them, is the only way to tell something true about what’s happening over here. Maybe that’s the story,” she finished, “because there’s no way to put a frame around this one, no plot.”

  He seemed to think about it for a minute.

  “Listen”—he leaned over the few feet between them—“what’s the point in having such a nice body if you’re not going to use it?”

  She blinked.

  “I am using it,” she answered, and closed the lid on the recorder, stood, and pulled it off the table. She walked out of the bar without another look and found the street that led back to the station. Within an hour, she was back on a train, this time traveling west.

  17.

  FOR THE NEXT ten days, Frankie got on and off trains, headed west as far as one train would go, and then turned around and headed in the opposite direction, toward the boats at Lisbon, toward the ports in Bordeaux, the microphone held out to catch the answers to her questions: What is your name? Where are you going? Where have you come from? How long have you traveled? How much do you have? Will anyone meet you? Through the bulge of France, across the central plain, heading south and west, there were men and women crossing who spoke every language Frankie had ever heard—Jmenuji se Peter Kryczk. À nevem Magyar Susannah. Je m’appelle Charlotte Maret. Regina Hannemann. Ich heiße Hans Jakobsohn. Je viens de Brancis. Je vais à Lisbon. Mein Name ist Josef. À Lisbon. In Lisbon. Oui, juif. Oui, je suis juive. Und das ist meine Frau, Rachel.

  In her notebook, for each voice, she wrote a paragraph. How the man answered, saying each word so slowly it was as if he pulled the language down from air. Und. She copied his intonation into her book. Das. Ist. Meine. Frau. When he was done he looked at her, smiling, looked away. There. How a piece of wood in a child’s hands was worn smooth on one side to show a penciled face. How one mother’s rings slid down the long line of her fourth finger, and how she’d push them together again, staring out the window. Merci, Mademoiselle, a man had said quietly, after she’d asked the questions, after he’d said his name into the microphone, carefully and slowly. De rien, she’d mutter, her throat closing over. Jim Holland had been right. She was collecting them; she knew it. She was gathering their voices without any clear idea yet of what she thought she was bringing back to Murrow, but she had to stuff something in the mouth of that quiet. She wanted to get as many voices as she could, and send them soaring, somehow outward, upward, free. The days and the nights slipped past like beads on a wire. One day there was suddenly a burst of women, all of them set loose from the detention camp at Gurs. Gurs, Frankie had asked to be sure. Gurs? The name of the camp that had stood for so long in her head as the center of the story she meant to get to sounded a clear sharp note, like a bell struck from a time she could hardly recall.

  She had been riding trains that stopped and started in the middle of nights so often that she had lost the ordinary markers of nights spent in specific beds, in particular places. Some nights she’d close her eyes and the train and the whistles and the sleepers all around would cast her backward, and when she’d wake, for a minute it was Thomas sitting there, still alive, in front of her. Sometimes she lost track of which direction she was facing, she lost track of everything except the faces and the voices and the start and stop of the knobs in her hand; and she kept asking, kept recording as if she’d lose them all if she didn’t get them down.

  She knew she was running out of time. And yesterday, she had run out of disks. At the end of the second side of the last empty disk, the woman sitting in the corner of the train had waited as Frankie lifted the arm of the recorder, waited, watching as Frankie stared down at the disk. There was no more room. Mademoiselle? The woman asked. And Frankie heard the woman’s question, heard the sighing of the man asleep at last in the opposite corner, heard the summer rain dashing against the side of the car, the scores of people left on the platform, wet, waiting—and couldn’t stop recording. She flipped the disk over, set the recording needle down, and simply started recording over again on top of what was already there. Vas-y, she nodded at the woman, holding the microphone toward her. Je suis seule, the woman answered Frankie’s earlier question. Frankie could be ruining the disk, erasing the earlier voices, or not recording anything at all. But it didn’t matter to Frankie now. If it worked, there would be voices on top of voices. Chords of people.

  “Mademoiselle?” The hand shook her.

  “Mademoiselle?” The hand shook her awake. Frankie pulled herself up against the hard bench, trying to crawl back up from the well of sleep. She focused on the man in front of her. “Oui?”

  “Le train.” He pointed. Frankie stood up. The platform writhed with people under the glaring station lights suddenly turned back on. She reached for the recorder and her suitcase. “Merci, monsieur.” She smiled tiredly. “Et le train, où va-t’il?”

  “À Toulouse, madame.”

  The crowd had already massed around the shut doors of the several compartments and stood waiting, looking up at the metal sides of the train with the mix of resignation and worry that Frankie had seen over and over in the last two weeks. Babies in baskets. Women looking over their shoulders at the stationmasters, wanting to be first to see motion, first to see the sign that the train was leaving, that the doors would open.

  She judged the crowd. Many of them must be bound for the boats moored along the coast west of Bordeaux. Some might be traveling as far as Périgueux and then would turn south to Bayonne and through the Pyrenees toward Lisbon. A calendar hanging beside the cash register in the station tearoom said June the fifth. Summer. She stared at the date, trying to call up Broadwa
y in Manhattan and the sound of motorcars and street barkers selling bottles of Coca-Cola and double-or-nothing Jujubes to bet on along the way. If it was June the fifth, she had four days left on her permis de séjour.

  The doors slapped open. She found an empty compartment and settled herself in the corner seat, placing the recorder on the banquette beside her. The sixteen disks rested snug in their sleeves, holding close to seventy people, she guessed. And inside her suitcase lay the notebooks, with paragraphs of all the extra details on the people whose voices she had. The day before yesterday, her German failing in the wake of an old man’s torrent of words, she had simply handed him the pen and the notebook and pointed for him to write down what he was saying. Fuck Jim Holland, she thought. It wasn’t nothing, what she had done.

  The short, harsh blast of a whistle nearby made her jump. A man shouted. She looked up and saw the single spire of a village church in the near distance. The train bunched forward and then stopped at a tiny station. Below her on the platform stood a mother and her son. She held his hand though he looked to be about ten.

  The train door slammed open and the conductor put out the step stool. Mother and son stepped up into the train. There was a whispered discussion out in the corridor, and then the compartment door slid open. Frankie glanced up at them as they pushed inside, the mother carrying one suitcase, which she placed on the rack above their heads. They sat. He looked out the window, excited.

  The train hissed up and started away. The mother closed her eyes briefly, as though she were praying. After a minute she opened them, looked sharply across at Frankie, and then, turning away, rested her attention on the boy. Out the window the sunbaked fields ran backward under the blue stretched sky. Maman! he shouted, pointing, when a man on horseback galloped alongside the train. She looked where her boy pointed, but the smile she had hung on her lips dropped as soon as he looked away from her, back outside. He slipped his hand out of hers to pull closer to the window and, emptied of his hand, the mother rested hers on the boy’s knee.