by Karen White
Murphy cleared his throat. Cata dug her painted fingernails into her palm for lack of hatpin. Could he tell from her faded wool coat that she wasn’t of the first first class or was it the bags under her eyes? She hadn’t slept more than three hours a night on the boat. She eyed her shoes. She’d been sure to shine them with a little margarine wrapped up from the hotel’s breakfast table. No scuffs. No hanging threads on her hem, either. Her makeup and hair had been done with extra care. She looked respectable enough to afford her seating. So why was this Murphy treating her like the plague? Damn the perfume—the stink must’ve given her away to him, too.
She drove her index finger into her palm as deep as she could without breaking the skin.
“Of course you may stay here if you like, but your things are way up in train car three. It might be easier if . . .”
“If I’m at the head of the train so as not to slow people down de-boarding,” said Mr. Krupper. The forced grin remained.
“No, no,” Murphy defended. “It isn’t that at all.”
A deafening silence settled despite the open window and rumble of steel wheels.
Murphy cleared his throat again, shuffled his feet a little then stood up tall. “As soon as I’m finished taking tickets on this carriage, I’d be happy to escort you to your private roomette, Mr. Krupper. I think you’ll be far more comfortable there. Please, sir, allow me?”
Mr. Krupper simply nodded. Once.
Cata had unconsciously released her talons, leaving a seam of purple half-moons.
“I shall return shortly,” said Murphy with an air of professionalism usurping his earlier geniality. “Good day, miss.”
Cata kept her eyes to her T-straps. So it was similar in America. Discrimination. Even for a man who was obviously of the very first first class. She thought the reality might make her feel less ashamed of the Lebensborn Program and its strict codes of perfection, but instead, it made her sad. She hurt for Mr. Krupper. Though she’d only met him this hour, his heart was perceptibly kind and genuine. Regardless of his outward visage, physical insufficiency or financial sufficiency, he was a man due respect based on character alone. She couldn’t say the same for herself.
As soon as the door closed, Mr. Krupper addressed her. “I’m sorry about all of that.”
“It is fine,” she assured. “You are a rich man. You deserve the best.”
Mr. Krupper shook his head and said with a tsk, “Nonsense. I am a blind man but I am not blind.” He held a finger straight up then pointed it precisely out the window. “Can you see the wind’s direction?”
She looked outside. Between the train’s movement and the foreign landscape, she could not.
Mr. Krupper continued, “I cannot see which way the tree leaves blow or feel the needle pull of a compass in hand. Yet I know it is from the northeast today.”
“How?”
“Aw, that is the secret. When one is lacking in one area, he is amplified in others. It’s a law of life. As definitive as seedtime and harvest. To every heat wave there is a cold front. To every drought there is a coming flood.” He sighed and smiled. “So many people believe that this minute is all there is to the story, when in truth it is so much larger and freer than that. It is the wind sweeping up to the stars and bubbling down through the fathoms, round and through the planet regardless of our temporal lives.”
She was fascinated and slightly frightened of Mr. Krupper. Already, she’d been misled into believing one charismatic man’s rhetoric, and look where that had gotten her. Hitler was dead and she was a criminal in exile. She thought of all of the officers she’d slept with. All of them were certainly dead or exiled as well.
“How do I know it is truly northeast wind? Where is the evidence?” she countered.
“I have faith in—”
She scoffed reflexively before he’d finished. Faith? She had no faith left.
He remained still for a full minute. Even the wind through the window seemed to quiet its whistle. Then Mr. Krupper cocked his head to the side like a bird on a branch watching a dog below try to climb its tree.
“Do you believe in God, Miss . . . ?”
“No,” she answered hastily.
“Mm. I got the impression you might not.”
She straightened her shoulders. Her parents had been Roman Catholic but hadn’t asserted their religious beliefs. The eldest of her siblings, Cata had set the example by being enrolled in the League of German Maidens starting at the age of ten. Her education and moral curriculum had been strict and in keeping with the Hitler Youth doctrine, which superseded the Roman Catholic Church. She’d never made First Holy Communion and couldn’t recall her church baptism, though her mother swore she’d had one as a baby.
Cata had always thought her parents foolish for praying to a big spirit man in the sky and believing that priests swinging smoke pots held the only telephones to reach him. As unseen and unreal as St. Nicholas and Père Fouettard handing out gifts and punishments at the Yuletide. All were regular men in costumes. No more or less powerful. No more or less worthy.
“Do you,” she countered, “believe?”
“Yes,” he said with equal haste.
His absolute response needled her deeper than the hatpin in her flesh.
“May I speak . . .” Her English was failing her. “Ehrlich?” Frankly.
“Please do,” he replied.
She gulped. It was a risk. This talk. This sharing of true self. Like the pills she’d administered to Hazel, she wasn’t sure of the potency or the effect. But it was too late now to simply shut up. That would be more suspicious than pursuing this semirealistic charade of atheist German governess.
“Do you believe God made you blind? And if so, how can you love someone who would leave you to so much pain?”
It was a question that had been rolling around her mind far before this meeting. She’d wanted to ask it of someone—her daughter, her son, herself. She hadn’t realized how long it had been lingering until she spoke it aloud.
Mr. Krupper smiled, sadly, as if he pitied her, though he was the one blighted with God’s disfavor.
“The world is rooted in pain, and we, born to it, are perpetually suffering. Warring, hating and killing each other on partialities when our souls are all made of the same material. Who’s to say your vision isn’t the affliction and I—I see heaven’s wonders every minute?” He raised an eyebrow with an almost flirtatious charm.
He is blind and mad, she thought but didn’t entirely believe. Then it dawned on her. “You say you are in the business of disseminating educational literature, but you speak like a priest. No robes, so perhaps you are a Protestant man of God, ja?”
He grinned and nodded as if bowing to a game of chess. “Bravo, new friend. You’ve proven my assertion. You are able to see the unseen. You do have faith! You just don’t realize it.” He winked. “I am a publisher of braille books. Bibles are our bestsellers.”
“Br-ill?” The wind swept through, stealing the sound of his correct pronunciation.
“Braille,” he repeated. “It’s a means for the sightless to read with our fingers.” He lifted his left hand and smoothed his thumb from pinky to pointer. His wedding band glimmered gold across her face.
“Read with fingers?” She’d never heard of such a thing nor could she fathom how one might go about it. What next would she discover in this America—children tasting strawberries through their ears and hearing toy rattles through their noses?
“Each letter is a series of raised dots that form words and sentences,” he explained. “Just like writing only through touch. It’s been very successful and well embraced. We have a whole library at the Perkins School, in fact.”
“A school and library for blind people?”
In Luxembourg, Germany, and what she had seen in most of Europe, the blind were shut away to be treated more like fami
ly pets than members: spoon-fed their meals and walked at various hours until they expired, darkness to darkness. That was if they were lucky and too poor to go to a sanitarium. Families of wealth usually opted for professional care. But then again, she’d never met an adult blinded since childhood, and the only libraries she’d been into were part of the Hitler Youth Movement. They had a small one at the Steinhöring Home. It had been intentionally stocked only with whimsical adventure novels, entertainment for the officers and erotica that helped some of the shier men come to mood. A library for the sightless? Inconceivable. The Program hadn’t allowed for blind flesh, never mind blind books. But she was far from Steinhöring now, far from Germany and doing all that she could to propel herself far from all Nazi connections.
“Yes,” Mr. Krupper nodded. “The Perkins School is quite prominent in Boston. Charles Dickens embossed copies of his books on the school’s printing press. And Helen Keller was a star pupil.”
She knew of Charles Dickens’s work, of course, but he wasn’t blind—or at least she didn’t think he’d been. She had no idea who this Helen woman might be, but if she was prominent in Boston, Cata thought it best to be familiar.
“How very modern,” she replied.
It was the word a governess on the ship used to describe her benefactress’s European dishwasher with electric drying coils. Cata could tell from the other women’s reactions that they were clueless but didn’t want to appear as such, so they’d all parroted the word back: modern, yes, so very modern. She used it now to similar effect.
“You should come over to the school sometime with your wards. The library is open to all, Monday through Friday. We welcome visitors, even those with sight!” He gave a chuckle.
Cata smiled at his good nature, though she failed to see the humor in what he’d said. She couldn’t imagine her cousin Milly allowing her children to coalesce with the disabled. If it were her daughter or son, she surely wouldn’t. But that was just the point. That was the old Cata and the old ways. She needed to be an altogether different woman here in deeds, in thoughts and, most significantly, in name. She placed her palm over the passport pocket.
Mr. Krupper turned to the open window and inhaled deeply. “It’s the smell of the sea.”
Cata followed his example and breathed in. It was hard to distinguish after her voyage. She’d grown accustomed to the briny tang that stuck to everything as stubbornly as the salt. She’d tried to cover it up with her 4711 perfume, and look where that got her. Now, she closed her eyes to concentrate, and immediately, there it was. Wet, cold and invigorating. She could feel the smell and taste the brackish blue. She could see Mr. Krupper’s ocean though it was far from sight.
“That’s how I know for certain that it blows from the northeast.”
She opened her eyes and he was staring directly at her without a blink.
“So that is the trick.” Another conversational phrase from her journal: the trick.
She’d received that one from a steerage passenger telling his buddies about the competitive nature of selling Coney Island hot dogs. The trick was different in America. In Europe, any trick was dishonest guile, but here, the trick was a fleck of wisdom that gave an individual the upper hand. She could certainly use every bit of that.
The door slid open. Murphy returned.
“All right now, Mr. Krupper, we got you all set up in car three. I had the porter bring over a cold Coca-Cola, too.”
Mr. Krupper shook his head. “Totally unnecessary, but I’ll enjoy it nonetheless.”
Murphy helped him stand against the train’s sway and began to lead him out, but Mr. Krupper pulled back, searching his inner jacket pocket until he found his calling card. He extended it slightly too far to the left of Cata’s shoulder.
“Should you need anything in Boston or if you have any troubles, please don’t hesitate to call. My wife is a most delicious cook, and she loves to host new friends in the city. We’d be delighted to show you around.”
An invitation to see the city from a blind man. Cata took the card. This was an unusual land, to be certain.
“Thank you, Mr. Krupper.”
He nodded. “A pleasure to meet you Miss . . .” His smile deflated, and he pursed his lips. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I caught your name.”
Here it was. The moment she’d successfully avoided for weeks, months—nearly a year, in fact. Since she left the Lebensborn Program and hid in the steamy washroom basement disguised as a laundress. The last person to speak her true identity had been Hazel. Even the gardener had called her by his dead daughter’s name. And the Ellis Island inspector had dubbed her Kate Kutter. It was more American, he said.
“Name?”
Mr. Krupper smiled. “In English or German? Nayme. Nah-meh. The same, ja?”
She nodded quickly, smoothing his card between her thumb and forefinger. Wrong or right. Death or life. Lie or truth. Choose, she told herself. Choose.
“Hazel,” she said, and the name gave her strength. “Hazel Schmidt.”
“Hazel,” he repeated. “One of my favorite names—it has a lyrical quality.”
The train shuddered to the right, pushing Murphy against the wall and taking Mr. Krupper with him. The steam horn blew and hissed the smell of burning coal.
Murphy found his footing. “We’d best get you seated before the next track change.”
The men left, leaving Cata, now Hazel, alone in the car, just as she’d wanted from the beginning. However, the vacancy was not a comfort now. She closed her eyes and let herself be in Mr. Krupper’s world. The vibration of the seat and floorboards tickled uncomfortably from finger and toe tips to core. The round thump and screech of the train wheels. The taste and smell of engine oil mingling with the ripe crops in the harvest fields they passed.
For a moment, she was transported home but not to the home she’d fled—further back to the home of her childhood and her first train ride alongside her parents. It was late summer, as she remembered. A nip was already in the shadows. Only one of her brothers had yet to be born. Not yet a year old, they’d left him in Luxembourg with her oma.
They were traveling to Amsterdam for a wedding. A friend of her mother’s? A colleague of her father’s? A distant relation? She couldn’t remember nor did it matter. All that did was that she was going to a place where no one but her parents knew her. A land of magical windmills and flowering fairy pastures, a dreamscape where she could lose herself in adventures previously known only in storybooks. She’d overheard her parents discussing it all—how very much the bride and groom had paid for the pomp and flair of the extravagant nuptials officiated by a giant windmill. Her father had called it an absurd waste and sentimentalist crud. Her mother had simply deemed it heretical: Only weddings in a holy church are legitimate. But they’d still gone, paying their respects and drinking the mulled wine called Bridal Tears until her father stopped grumbling and smiled wide at the unmarried women tying ribbons to the Wish Tree.
Cata’s mother had bought her a set of red painted clogs so that she could dance the night away. She argued she didn’t want her wearing out her good shoes. Those clogs were her most prized possession at the time. Cata couldn’t remember where they’d gone after the trip. Vanished into memory.
With eyes still closed, she pulled the two passports from her coat pocket. Paper and ink, that’s all, she thought. Man-made titles and photographs bound together. Both would burn if set to a flame. Both would rot if left under a summer cloudburst. The natural world knew no difference. Here or there. Two women. Two names. The passports would be equal in Mr. Krupper’s hands. They might as well have been the same.
She opened her eyes. Cata Kutter. She ripped the passport into fourths then flung the pieces out the open window. The shreds tattered in the wind like gunshots, and she did not watch to see where they fell. Instead, she closed the pane and slid her new life back into her pocket.
She picked it up. The stylish felt brim was soft as velvet, but less yielding. She missed luxuries like this. A man’s beautiful hat free of military insignia. Something in her stomach fluttered and she beat it down, unwilling to taint an honorable crown with even innocent ardor. Mr. Krupper had been a gentleman and a friend to her when there was every reason to be less. She would rise to his example. She vowed to make Hazel proud and live her life as a eulogy to a worthier calling. She would love her cousin’s children just as she hoped her own and all the Lebensborn children would be loved, though not of flesh and blood, imperfect and perfect.
She left the roomette and made her way down the narrow corridor and across carriages to car number three at the front of the train. The shade was up. Inside sat Mr. Krupper with face turned into the sunshine, a small silver tray beside him with a bottle of cola uncapped and fizzing at the glass rim.
She knocked. He turned toward the sound. “Come in.”
“Mr. Krupper, it izz—”
“Hazel,” he greeted.
In his American voice, her name did, indeed, sound lyrical. “You left your hat.” She held it out to him and he reached into the air just where she’d extended.
“It seems I did. So kind of you. I am in your debt.”
“Debt? Nein, no. It was my happiness to assist you.” She cleared her throat and turned to exit.
“Hazel,” he said again. “My mother used to read me fable stories from die Brüder Grimm.”
She was quite familiar. Hitler had championed the Brothers Grimm tales as part of his approved literary canon. Joseph Goebbels had proclaimed the stories excellent didactic tools. At the Lebensborn Program, the children were read them at bedtime and rest time and playtime.
“‘The Hazel Branch’ was my favorite,” said Mr. Krupper.
Yes, she knew it, though not as well as the others. It was usually skipped due to its brevity and its evocation of the Christ-child, which was not popular with the party. Jesus was Hitler’s competition in the hearts of many. She wasn’t surprised Mr. Krupper favored the story, given his Protestant faith.