Lost Kin

by Anderson, Steve

  Max patted his pockets for a nail to smoke. None. Of course, they had taken them. The four young Soviet Army grunts—Ivans, Americans called them—had searched Max and Harry but greedily with random slaps and jabs, hoping for valuables. Max and Harry only had the grimy, bloodied clothes on their backs now. Their rucksacks and bedrolls, food and water were long gone. Good and nabbed, he and Harry were. How were they to know that four Ivans had been roaming those hills above the train station?

  The Ivans had dragged Max and Harry straight down the hill, letting the tree branches whack at them, and a couple trunks managed to strike their shoulders, faces, shins. Harry was out cold for most of that. He only came to when they neared the little train station. Max, having become quite the tragedian, was certain those Ivans would drag them straight over to the meadow and stack their corpses atop the Cossacks. But, no. Comedy lives on—harsh and wretched but a comedy of errors to be sure. And so Max and Harry ended up in this cold sandstone room, dismal and gray, the floor a rocky dirt, the shelves storing more grease and dust than stocks. Cobwebs hung at every angle and intersection.

  The window was high and their only light was a square of shadowed daytime. Outside they heard occasional shouts and vehicles roaring about.

  Harry pulled himself up, peering around. “We’re in the station house, looks like,” he said through grunts, “in the cellar.” He was coming to his senses. Good man.

  “That’s right,” Max said. He had an old hanky around his neck, a hint of respectability for his vagabond outfit. He scooted over and, wincing with pain, wrapped it around Harry’s head to help stop any bleeding.

  “Thanks, brother,” Harry said. His hand was sticky with drying blood. He stared at it and wiped it on his trouser leg.

  “You rest,” Max said.

  “The hell I am,” Harry said. “We rest, we’re dead. They are.”

  Apparently Harry could handle more worry, even with that hole in his head. “Bravo,” Max said. “So, what’s next?”

  “You know what,” Harry said.

  “Do I?”

  “You should know better than I.” Harry leaned closer. He whispered, “They’re going to send the big bad wolf in here, give us the third degree. Who the hell are we.”

  A shudder of dread moved up through Max, seizing his aching ribs. Harry was right of course. Whenever had he not been? Still, Max had to protest their lines being rewritten with the show only minutes away. “But we’re just vagabonds,” he groaned. “Wasn’t this the plan?”

  “Before we got caught, it was. Look, I’m telling you what you already know—as an actor. To be believable? Every good role, every good story, it has to have a kernel of truth in it.”

  I must have some kind of a death wish, Harry thought. His head still throbbed and Max’s hanky probably wasn’t helping, but he left it there to mollify Max, to help prepare him for what was to come. In the cellar darkness, in whispers, he told Max the way it would have to go down. They would admit they were not simply vagabonds but deserted American GIs wandering the land. It was more rare of a catch but also a more sensitive case for the Russians. As the Soviets’ Allies, American citizens were harder to make disappear.

  They had one good shot at this.

  Max’s face had paled, his upper lip damp from a cold sweat. “I vowed never to do it again,” he whispered. “I told you. The last time I played that role to the hilt …”

  “No choice now,” Harry said. “Besides, we’ve been speaking in English this whole time.”

  “Oh, yes. So we have.” Max held up a hand to the heavens. He sighed, from deep in his chest, and it rattled a little with regret.

  “Just one more time,” Harry said.

  “Zugabe,” Max muttered. The encore.

  Harry whispered, “But, what about the camera—”

  Shouts. Boots. Heels pounding down the stairs, to the cellar.

  Max shook his head. “Later,” he whispered.

  The boots stopped at the bottom of the steps. Harry expected the cellar door to fly open. Max pressed his shoulders against the wall to brace himself.

  A soft knock sounded at the door instead.

  Harry looked to Max. Max took a deep breath, let his shoulders relax, and crossed his legs with one stretched out lazily. He shouted, “What, ya need an invitation? Come in already!” in his best American English.

  The door opened. In walked a Soviet officer flanked by two soldiers with machine guns slung on their shoulders. The officer was little older than his young guards. He spoke in Russian and the two Ivans stayed by the door. He walked the ten feet over to Harry and Max and folded his arms on his chest, which only served to show how lanky the kid officer was.

  “You are speaking English?” the officer said in German.

  Max looked to Harry, shrugged.

  Harry attempted an American’s broken German, sputtering, “Bitta sprecken langsam. Vee nix versteh’ Deutsch goot.”

  The officer blew air out one side of his mouth and left. The two Ivans stayed at the door. Harry recognized one and thought about thanking him for the dent in his head.

  Half an hour later the cellar door flew open, banging against the stone wall. The Ivans stood at attention although the man who came through the door wore a drab brown civilian overcoat over a simple gray suit. The Soviet man had close-cropped hair and a soft, doughy face. He scanned the room as if looking for a lost storage box. His eyes passed over Harry and Max. He kept looking for that box. His eyes found Harry and Max again. “So. One hears your German is not so good, what?” he said in accented yet solid British English.

  A rush of relief loosened the knot in Harry’s stomach. If they’d gotten an American-educated interrogator, they would have even less of a chance. He shrugged again and replied, “Hey, it’s a tough language, Mac.”

  And Max said, “We’re your Allies, see, and you go treatin’ us like the krauts?”

  The Soviet man stood before Harry and Max, looking down on them, his blocky rubber overshoes inches from their feet. “You are Americans. But what sort are you?”

  “Sort? Ain’t it clear? Ones who picked the wrong place to camp,” Harry said.

  “Minding our own business, see,” Max added.

  Harry thinking: Don’t tell them we’re deserters because that would give them an excuse. Let them assume what they assume.

  “Is this so?” Soviet man said.

  “The hell’s it look like?” Harry released a snort of contempt. Max shook his head and cleared his throat. They were a real couple of born losers, the two of them. Such was the plan.

  Soviet man drew their opera glass from a pocket. He held it to an eye and looked out the window. He looked at Harry and Max with it. “How, then, do you explain this?”

  “Explain it? A Joe’s got to see where he’s heading, don’t he?” Harry said. “Cost me half a Lucky on a Graz street corner.”

  “Me, I jus’ love da opera,” Max added.

  “Graz is not in the US zone. We are far removed from your zone,” Soviet man said.

  “Our zone? Forget that!” Max blurted.

  “Ain’t no zones for the likes of us,” Harry muttered.

  The Soviet man shook his head. He left.

  The night came and the cold with it. Harry and Max tried to sleep, huddling under a sooty, oily blanket they found in a corner. For Harry, it was an ache-filled sleep, his head feeling as light as cotton and then as heavy as a concrete block. At some point he heard what sounded like a mouse hissing. It was Max, sobbing in his sleep.

  Harry woke later with a sensation rushing through him, cold then warm under his skin, and he couldn’t resist it: He found himself wishing that Max’s bogeyman Aubrey Slaipe was directing them after all, if not with them now. The man could simply watch over them. There to pass a tip or nudge him the right way. But then again Harry had wished that about his own bogeyman, Colonel Spanner.

  They got a beating in the middle of the night, this one unauthorized judging from the smell of grain alc
ohol on the Ivans’ breath, the squealing laughs to go with it, and the flashlights throwing stabs of white light. It was messy business with wild kicks to the head and stomach, but most swings missed. And then more chilled darkness came.

  Twenty-Two

  MAX FELT THE OVERWHELMING URGE AGAIN, like a relentless thirst—he found himself pining that Aubrey Slaipe were near, if only there to observe them like his drama teachers used to do for him. He yearned for the approval, the recognition. He wondered if it was the shock or possibly hypothermia setting in. In any case he had to fight it. Slaipe would be the only thing worse for his health right now. Groggy, he could only make out faint vertical lines in the darkness, like venetian blinds in a fog at night. The air hung stale and thick.

  Then he remembered. After their beating from drunken Ivans, they had attempted something like sleep again. A voice rattled them awake: “Wakey wakey …” The Soviet man was standing over them in the dark. “Now listen to me, you lot. You may be deserters. You may not be. If you are not, then we hope your experience here—our little stay with us—shall help send a clear and resounding message: The next spies we catch shall visit the Gulag for a frightfully long time. Understood?”

  He remembered those loutish and still-drunken Ivans had pulled a black burlap hood over their heads, tying it with rope at the neck.

  He felt for the rope, fingered the knot loose, and ripped the hood off, gasping for the fresh cold air that wafted in between those vertical lines that, he now saw, were the slight gaps between the slats of the wall.

  It was daylight, Thursday morning—November 1. Before dawn, Max and Harry had been locked in some sort of rectangular shack, with hoods on. The plank floor had clumps of dirt and straw and smelled like dried shit. Nothing to sit or lie on, so they’d hunched in a corner with their backs up against the slat-wall.

  Harry slept on. He had been moaning in his sleep, Max recalled. The daylight let Max see the dried blood coating the side of Harry’s neck. His hood lay across the floor.

  His eyes popped open.

  Max smiled for his brother.

  “What are you doing?” Harry said.

  “I was thinking about taking in a musical. Or maybe just stroll Broadway, watch the pretty girls go by.”

  Harry smiled. “I could tag along. Popcorn’s on me.”

  Max chuckled, which made him wince again. “One good thing about a little pain … it helps keep the hunger away.”

  “You did good, Max,” Harry said.

  “Likewise. Where are we, you think?”

  Harry started to speak, but his voice cracked. He tried again, “I’m afraid we’re sitting inside a freight car.”

  A freight car. Of course. Thus the slats for walls. Max hadn’t considered it, but his brother would certainly know a train when he saw one given his renegade past liberating a freight of ignoble plunder. Harry would rather be back down in that grimy cellar.

  “I’m sorry, Harry.”

  Harry showed him a thin smile. “I always tell myself, never set foot near another freight train again.”

  Two narrow windows were up high on either side. The door was metal, a black square as high as the ceiling.

  “Already tried the door,” Harry added. “Locked tight.”

  “Window?” Max said.

  “It’ll take both of us. But, do we really want to see?”

  “A fair point.”

  Were they only waiting for the locomotive? A train of more prisoners? They heard nothing outside, not even the rustle of fall leaves. Harry said they must be sitting a ways down the tracks from the station, on a side spur, waiting.

  “Better not to think too much about it,” he added, and he let his head slump.

  Max had never seen Harry like this. Luckily he knew just how to cheer up his brother. He had planned to wait, but it had to be now, timing was everything. He sat up and clapped his hands. Harry lifted his head. Max straightened out his arms and shook them, letting his cuffs dangle. “Now, for my next feat of magic …” He extended his right arm nice and long like he was doing the old Heil Hitler and then wiggled his shoulder until the Riga Minox poked out from his cuff.

  Harry’s eyes lit up. He heaved himself upright. He looked both ways as if anyone was bothering to peer in through the slats.

  “Don’t worry. One good thing about a locked freight car—we’re all alone.”

  Harry grinned. A curl of his hair hung down and he pushed it away. “How’d you do it, Max? Huh?”

  Max’s ribs ached from the performance, but he disguised his grimace as a grin to match Harry’s. He raised his arm over his head, and let the harmonica-shaped camera slide back down to under his armpit. “Those Ivans were too busy thumping us to do a proper frisk job. And this old arm of mine with the camera way up its sleeve? Too busy clutching my ribs in pain to give them a good angle for the frisking. Then they found cigarettes on me and a gilded pocket watch in my trousers. Then they must’ve found that opera glass on you, figured those were the choicest goods. Plus, knowing a few magician’s moves didn’t hurt. Then, there was luck—for once there was that.”

  “What now?” Harry said.

  “I keep it in my armpit.”

  “Do you think that’s wise? Supposing where we might be headed.”

  “What are we going to do, develop it here? With shit and straw and blood?”

  Hope is a question, waiting to be answered, Harry reminded himself.

  They heard activity outside the freight car. Harry heard men chatting in German and men shouting in Russian. Max said he smelled cigarettes. Harry thought he smelled something like coffee. Hoping, the two of them. The metal door clanked and rolled open with a roar, and the daylight made Harry and Max shield their eyes. The door rolled shut again. Harry looked around, squinting. A loaf of brown bread and a canteen lay on the matted shit and straw.

  They ate two, then three chunks of bread, being careful to ration. Then they sat in silence, the fear and worry creeping up in them like shiny black winged ants crawling up their legs and torsos from the feces-floor all around them. Harry had to counteract it somehow, anyhow.

  He told Max all about his train job in Heimgau, with every grisly detail and why he did it. The corrupt American whom he fought, phony US CIC Colonel Eugene Spanner, was a criminal deserter who had proved no better than the Nazis they came over to defeat. Harry’s risky job stealing the colonel’s freight was the only way to stem the terror the man had unleashed in the secluded rural county of Heimgau. The colonel had killed Harry’s CO Major Membre and Harry’s fellow conspirator, a fine German as it turned out and a baron by title—von Maulendorff was his name. Then Harry thought he was a dead man. But he kept fighting and ended up with only a knife that he ran through this fiend who seemed indomitable if not undead, Harry stabbing and stabbing through the man until the knife was hitting metal floor. It had happened onboard the train. In hindsight, it was almost like Spanner wanted him to do it. It gave Harry a heap of nightmares. And yet Harry would do it all over—just like Max had with Felix Menning.

  Max listened enthralled, as if being read a play script. “My own little brother,” he said, shaking his head, grinning again.

  They didn’t talk about all the blood.

  “One thing I wanted to ask you,” Harry said. “Did you know the actress Katarina Buchholz?”

  “Not personally. But who doesn’t know of her? Men had pinups of her in bunkers from Normandy to Stalingrad …” Max sat up. “Wait. You know her?”

  “She was my partner in the train job. It’s one part no one knows about.”

  “You were lovers,” Max said.

  Harry nodded, then shook his head. He told how Katarina had left Germany to join Emil, the Jewish refugee partisan who made unloading the train heist workable—to whom Harry had given all the contents of the plunder train. The two of them lived in Palestine, the last Harry had heard. “I probably shouldn’t be telling this, but what does it matter now?”

  With that, he let his head slu
mp again as if those Ivans were lowering that black hood back over him.

  “Hey, now, brother, stop with the storm and stress,” Max said.

  “It doesn’t matter. What’s done is done.”

  “I’m sorry,” Max said.

  “Don’t be. You’ve lost girls too. You’ve paid some steep dues.”

  “I suppose I’m getting closer, yes.”

  A jolt. A boom, like a howitzer, so loud they pressed their hands flat to the floor. Dust and straw floated down from the walls and the floor churned and wobbled. “Our car—they’re hooking us up to others. Yes. I hear a locomotive,” Harry said with precision as if reading out a duty roster. Then they were moving, in fits and starts. More jolts and their train was rolling along the tracks, clacking and thudding ever closer together from the speed of it.

  A few hours later, a stop. Harry and Max’s hearing had dulled from the constant roar of riding inside a rolling freight car, like being underwater in a rushing spring river. They listened as intently as they could, leaning forward to the slats, and detected a droning they couldn’t identify. They picked out shouts in Russian and German. “Wait. It’s people. People? Must be hundreds.”

  The door thundered open. A throng of refugees climbed up and inside, their faces slack from fatigue and worry. Women. Children. Men. Taking little notice of Harry and Max, they huddled in the middle of the car as a woman shouted at them to stay put while she swept up the straw and dried excrement with an old short broom she carried in her coat. She only glanced at Harry and Max once as she did so, shaking her head. The door shut, the car started rolling again. The sweeping done, the families spread out across the car’s floor. Someone set out a bucket in the other corner closest to Max and Harry. The toilet.

  They were shouting over the roar at each other and speaking a clunky old German, not Austrian Deutsch at all. The adults kept their backs to Harry and Max. Only the children started looking at them.