by Paul Griner
Horst had tilted the wheelchair onto its back wheels. “If I can find a porter, perhaps we can get this on board.”
“No,” her mother said, breath smoking in the frigid air. “We won’t need it.”
“You have one in Berlin?” Horst said.
“We have relatives. We’ll be fine.”
Horst looked unsure, but the train whistle decided him.
“All right,” he said, and pushed it a foot away over the snow-covered bricks and then climbed back on board. He hadn’t shut the door when the train started up again, and people were still pushing their way onto the platform, raising their hands and beginning to run. The train picked up speed quickly, leaving them behind.
“You see,” the Polish woman said to her daughter, sighing and sitting back. “We’re lucky. We might not have made the train at all.”
London in reverse, to Kate; when she and Horst had been forced to flee in the war’s opening weeks—Horst as a German national no longer welcome in his adopted country—they’d been given two days to get out before they’d face arrest. At Charing Cross they’d pushed through a hissing crowd to board the last train for the coast, and as it pulled out, Kate had been shocked to see their luggage and that of all the other passengers sitting piled on the platforms, people already starting to go through it; even more shocked to realize that dozens of boys were pelting the carriage with handfuls of potatoes and dung. If they were her countrymen, she didn’t recognize them. She and Horst hadn’t lived anywhere permanently since then, moving with their field hospital dozens of times; now they were hoping to make Hamburg home.
After the train cleared the station Kate stood. “No,” she said, when Horst began to rise. “I’m fine. I want to walk.”
The privation of the war years had grown worse after the peace, and it showed in the hollowed faces and mean clothes of the passengers. Even the train had not escaped; leather was gone from the window straps, plush covering from the seats, fine woodwork from around the windows; the compartments were horribly uncomfortable. The truth was she couldn’t sit for more than a few minutes without her back hurting.
In the corridor men stood staring out the windows, rocking with the train’s motion, one straddling a saddle, perhaps planning to sell it in Berlin; it might have been his last possession. She and Horst were down to her fur coat and his surgical instruments and cigarette case, though at least in Berlin they could visit his bank.
The train rounded a long turn, the rear cars curving smoothly into sight, men on their roofs with their feet dangling over the edge, black cutouts against the blue sky, so thickly clustered they looked like grapes. Were they mad? It seemed impossible they could hold on in the bitter cold. Behind her the corridor door opened and three English officers appeared, laughing and speaking loudly, and though she was curious to hear English—aside from Hound of the Baskervilles and a few other English movies shown in the occupied towns of Poland, and Horst’s occasional English endearments, she hadn’t heard her native language in years—she didn’t at the moment want to face the boisterous victors. She turned away, toward the second-and third-class carriages.
Second class was darker and colder, third class almost black. “No light ration,” a porter said, seeing her stop to adjust her smock and then fasten her coat more tightly, but it wasn’t the lack of light, it was the smells, the stink from cabbage cigars and putrefying flesh. A German soldier had an entire seat to himself, his suppurating leg stretched across it, and though he affected not to notice his lack of company, she was sure he knew what it meant. She wanted to talk to him, to comfort him, but he exuded a fierce isolating pride that she was loath to puncture, and she moved on.
“Please.” The porter came up to her again. “You’re a nurse. Can you help me?”
“Perhaps.”
“This way.” He shouldered a way clear. “I have an injured soldier.”
Just one? she thought, following him through the murmuring crowd. His back was broad, his frame still solid, his posture so erect he might have been in the military. His coat was military too, though his hat and gloves were those of a porter. What had he done throughout the war to stay so healthy? She decided she didn’t want to know. People did what they had to to survive; perhaps he’d been entirely honorable.
They passed several musicians clutching violins and oboes, and a troupe of actors still in their gypsy costumes and garish stage makeup. Beyond them was a group of consumptive German soldiers, former prisoners of war, their faces the color of frozen mud.
“Not here,” the porter said, and pushed on. When they were clear of the soldiers, he stopped and looked back. “It doesn’t seem like it, but they’re the lucky ones. The Russian workers released them in a delirium of fellow feeling, but most were shot and killed as they made their way west. Two thousand started out, they said. Only those six survived.” Contemplating their journey, he stroked the yellowed ends of his mustache, and she realized she’d been wrong about him, that the recent years had marked him; he appeared to have an ancient face grafted onto a much younger man’s frame.
At last they came to the soldier, just a boy, really, not much older than Josef had been, his pale open face a mixture of fear and pain, shivering in the cold and reeking of eau de cologne. In the stations, Red Cross volunteers were still spraying the wounded; they knew the Germans were continuing to fight, even if no one else seemed to. If they couldn’t bathe them, they could at least mask their odors.
“It’s his leg,” the porter said.
“Show me.”
The porter pulled aside a blanket. The boy’s trousers were split over his right thigh, revealing a long but not deep wound; muscle showed, rather than bone. She bent to smell the leg, raised her head, lowered it, sniffed again. “He’s fine,” she said, straightening.
Relief swept across the man’s face. The boy must have been more than just a soldier he was concerned about. His son, perhaps; they had the same Roman nose. “But what about that black material?” he asked. “What’s that?”
It was clumped at the edge of the wound, where the skin was nicely pink, and she bent once more to examine its grainy texture. When she stood she was smiling.
“Were you carrying a Dixie?” she asked the boy.
He nodded. “How did you know?”
“Coffee grains,” she said to him. To the porter she said, “We had several of these during the war. Shell splinters destroyed the coffee urns, sending shrapnel into the carrier’s legs and sides. Coffee grounds too. Don’t worry, it’s a good thing. They seem to prevent infections.
“He’ll be fine. Bathe the wound with clean water, and wrap it with clean linen, if you can find some.” She looked around. “No one here, but one of the first-class passengers might have it. You could perhaps trade something.”
He laughed. “Yes. We seem to have gone back to a bartering economy. But I don’t have much I can trade.”
“In any case, it will be all right for a while. Keep that blanket off it. The air can do it some good, and the skin at the edges is pink. It’s healing. One thing: don’t be surprised if some metal splinters rise to the surface. Don’t take them out with your fingers, and don’t let him do it, either. That will infect the wound.”
Her breath condensed between them. “It’s awfully cold here,” Kate said.
“It is. You’re on half rations of heat up there and we have none.”
“You should move him forward. If he’s shivering, his wounds won’t heal.”
“No. He must stay here. But I’ll find him another blanket, or a coat.”
He glanced at hers, and what he was thinking seemed obvious, but she couldn’t give it up. Wouldn’t. She had an obligation to Horst and to herself to stay healthy, and the coat was the only thing that kept her from freezing. The boy would be all right if the train proceeded at a reasonable speed. Four hours, perhaps five; in Berlin he’d be able to get warm. Besides, the porter’s coat was a rich wool twill. For years the military alone had been given the best fa
bric; the boy could be wrapped in that.
The porter thanked her and began walking her back, again making room for her with his shoulder. Near the gangrenous soldier the air was so foul that people were now riding with the windows open despite the calamitous cold. She couldn’t look at him.
At the doorway, the porter stepped aside. “I have to stop here, I’m afraid. I can’t go forward, the engineer won’t let me.”
“How would he see you?”
“He’ll come back. Soon. Once we cross the border into Germany, probably.”
“Really?” She wasn’t sure she believed him, though he seemed to have an honest face; she’d never heard of an engineer coming back into the train.
Before she had a chance to ask, he said, “May I keep your coat for you?”
Reflexively, her hand went to her throat.
He blushed. “No. I don’t want to take it, just to hold it for you. Safekeeping, you see. Because the engineer will confiscate it, I’m afraid.”
This she didn’t believe, but, not wanting to be impolite, she said, “No, thank you. I’d be too cold without it, and I doubt it would fit him.”
The porter touched her arm. “Don’t be polite, now,” he said. “It won’t help you, not with these people.”
When she opened the compartment door, she saw the three English officers; one had taken her seat and he smiled at her without standing. Even when Horst stood, his glance left her only briefly. She flushed under his stare.
“Please,” Horst said in German, and pointed to his seat.
“Bloody fool,” the Englishman said of Horst to another officer. “I was hoping she’d sit on my lap.”
The lieutenant laughed and stared too. “Yes. Quite the little fräulein, isn’t she? And she smells so pretty.”
Horst was looking determinedly out the window at the passing telegraph poles and looping wires, and Kate refused to let them know she spoke English. Doing so might make her feel better, but it would further embarrass Horst and perhaps endanger him. If an argument ensued, they could order him from the train.
The one with a crescent scar on his cheek looked Kate up and down and said, “Rather uncomfortable traveling clothes, I should think.”
Because of the English, they’d been ordered to stay in Poland, and because of them they’d been left to die there. Not these specific men, of course, and yet she couldn’t help but be angry with what they represented. The war was over, for God’s sake, the English had won, they ordered Germans about at will; did simple humanity have to go too?
They chatted on. Kate had always wished they hadn’t had to leave London so quickly, that they’d had time to take a few pictures with them: of the Royal Chelsea Hospital ballroom where she and Horst had met, of its grounds where she’d spent hours correcting Horst’s pronunciation of the names of surgical instruments, of its chapel where they’d married, of the Surrey downs where she and her brothers had summered. Now in these English voices she heard those places again, missed them acutely—from the officers’ accents, they might have been her neighbors—and wondered if she would have been as insufferable if she’d stayed behind; victory brought with it no certainty of wisdom. Her own brothers had worn the uniform; at least one of them was still wearing it. Had he been posted to Germany too? Was he as arrogantly self-assured, as sublimely insensitive? She tried not to judge them harshly until they laughed at Horst, who was shivering in his thin coat. No, she wasn’t like them; she prayed that her brother wasn’t either.
The train began to slow, and beside her, the Polish woman slid off her rings.
“Here,” she said to her daughter, “pull up your coat too. And your skirts.”
“Oh, Mother.”
“No. You must. Let the braces show.”
The daughter did as she was told and the mother pushed her rings deep into her own pockets. When they were safely hidden, she unlatched her necklace and folded it away as well.
“Is something wrong?” Kate asked. The train had come to a complete stop.
“Fuel,” the Polish woman said, incongruously rubbing her fingers together in the sign of money. She slid her unclasped bracelets inside her stockings, showing her white thigh with no more concern than if she were alone with a maid. “They’ll be here soon.”
“Who?” Horst asked.
“The engineer.”
Kate thought of the porter’s warning. Had he been telling the truth?
“How can we give him fuel?” Horst asked.
“What have you in that bag?” the woman asked.
“My surgical tools.”
“Those would be just what they’d like. From here to Berlin we’ll be asked a few times. And there, it might be even worse. I hear the workers’ councils have taken over the city government, and that armed sailors run the city like bandits.”
One of the English officers stood and opened the corridor door and put his head out. Even through the fur coat Kate felt the blast of cold air. Didn’t he know it pained them? Probably not; he’d eaten well, to him a little cold meant nothing, and the air in the compartment was horrid: unwashed bodies, fear, a lingering odor of sickness. He shut the door and asked the lieutenant what was happening.
“I haven’t the faintest,” he said. “You’ll have to ask one of the Huns.”
To Kate, in broken French, the captain asked why the train had stopped.
In English, she said, “I haven’t the faintest, either.”
She didn’t know what she’d hoped to provoke—a sense of embarrassment, shame at having been so openly rude—but either way she was disappointed. Without visible emotion he remarked, “For a German, your English is impeccable.”
His arrogance spurred her to forget her caution. “I’m English.”
His eyes flicked to Horst.
“My husband is German.” Then, realizing that it might seem she was abandoning him, she said, “We’re German citizens.”
“So much the worse for you,” the young lieutenant said.
Before she or Horst could reply the corridor door was flung open and the short engineer stood looking them over, face and clothing blackened with soot and rancid with coal smoke. Ignoring the soldiers, he glanced first at the matronly Polish woman and her crippled daughter, then at Kate, then at Horst, who was reaching down to his medical bag.
“What do you have there?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Kate said. “Rags. Our last bits of clothing. Old socks.”
He looked at her again and said, with no preliminaries, “Your coat, please.”
Horst said, “Take my bag instead. It’s more valuable. She needs the coat. She’ll freeze without it.”
“Then let her. I’ve been freezing in the engine for twelve hours. It’s only another four to Berlin. It’s fuel,” he said, and, like the Pole, rubbed his thumb and finger together in the sign of money.
Kate glanced at the Pole, but the woman refused to meet Kate’s eyes. Horst removed his coat and held it out to the engineer.
“Here.”
“Sit down,” the engineer said. “Or you’ll be put off the train. The fur, please. Now.”
“It’s all right, Horst,” Kate said, standing. “It served its purpose.”
She handed it over and he put it on, the bloody hem puddling on the floor around his boots because he was so short. Though she wanted to refuse Horst’s coat, she would not give the English the benefit of a scene and so put it on.
As the engineer shut the door and moved down the train, Horst glared at the seated Englishmen.
“Horst,” Kate said in German, knowing what he was thinking. “Please. We don’t want trouble now.”
“Yes,” the Polish woman said, as if she knew Horst’s thoughts too. “But they could have stopped it if they’d wanted, couldn’t they?”
You didn’t do anything either, Kate thought, but she took her own advice and kept quiet. They’d endured enough already, and she couldn’t reasonably have expected the Pole to do anything; she had her crippled daughter to
attend to. Kate’s glance fell on the girl’s beautiful paisley scarf and she was glad it hadn’t been taken. The poor girl had suffered, she should be left some small measure of beauty in her life; Kate hoped the girl would have the sense to hide it before the door opened again.
As if her thoughts had called it into being, the door opened, and they all turned to look. The porter; was he to steal from them too?
“Madame,” he said to Kate and clicked his heels together and bowed his head. “When we stopped, I thought of you.”
“I have nothing else to give,” she said, her voice flat.
“No, of course. Nor would I ask anything of you.” That she might have offended him showed only in a spot of red that appeared high up on each prominent cheekbone.
“Then what?” she said.
He removed his coat and held it out to her. She’d been right, he was military, a German colonel; the Englishmen were looking over his medals and decorations. It was a generous offer—the coat was long, beautifully made, no doubt warm—but she couldn’t take it. If the Reds controlled Berlin, as the Polish woman had said, his uniform would put him in danger. Even in the east, reports of men murdering their officers during the November mutinies had reached them, and if he hadn’t removed his ribbons and insignia by now he wasn’t going to.
“Thank you,” she said, “but didn’t you say you weren’t to come this far forward?”
“Yes,” he said, still holding out the coat. “But I’m afraid we’ll have a riot in the rear cars if we stop again. They have no heat, no light, and they can’t endure further delays. It’s my job to prevent that, and so I told the engineer. Now, please, take this.”
“That’s very kind of you, but I don’t need it. I already have my husband’s.” She held it open by the lapels.
“Then he’ll be cold,” he said. “That won’t do. I’m afraid I have to insist.”
This wasn’t a polite offer. Though she’d done almost nothing, it was her reassurance he’d sought and that she’d provided; he needed to repay her.