The White Hotel

by D. M. Thomas

  The suitcase was very heavy—too heavy for Kolya, when he pleased her by his politeness in offering to change burdens for a while—and she was quite glad at first that there were long pauses when the crowds ahead seemed to have come to a dead halt. She was able to rest the case on the road. It was so much better than all the cases being carried by others that she felt ashamed of it. Then, during one of the involuntary halts, a terrible thing happened: an old woman in a dirty headscarf darted out from a courtyard, snatched up the case and ran with it back into the yard. Screaming at her, Lisa and Kolya pushed their way to the yard gate; but two muscular men stepped out from behind the wall and barred the entrance. There was a whole pile of goods behind the men. Lisa pleaded, cried; but the men were unmoved. The crowd was moving onwards slowly, with eyes averted. There were no police or soldiers around to whom Lisa could appeal. She turned away from the gate, tears streaming down her face. Kolya timidly put his hand in hers, and they were carried on in the crowd. She stopped crying, and dried her eyes; but felt overcome with hopelessness when she thought of the irreplaceable treasures—the clothes, letters, photograph album, the drawing by Leonid Pasternak and other precious items, so carefully packed last night.

  Faces were pressed to the windows of houses, looking down on the dense mass of migrants. Some looked sorry for them, but others laughed and jeered. Soldiers lounged in gateways now, studying the passers keenly. One group of them called out, to a young woman in front of Kolya: “Komm waschen!” They pointed to the yard behind them, as if to say, “It needs cleaning out.” The girl turned her head in their direction, and in so doing saw Lisa but gave no sign of recognizing her. Lisa knew her at once: she was the daughter of the first cellist at the Kiev Opera. She spoke her name—Sonia—and the girl looked round again at the elderly woman, searching her memory. At last she remembered her, though she was much changed. Lisa was afraid she would reject her approach, and would not have blamed her had she done so. It was fairly clear that, to save his family, Victor had bartered the freedom, and even lives, of several of the musicians at the Opera—including the girl’s father. But Sonia seemed glad to fall in with someone she knew, however distantly, and she paused to let them draw abreast of her.

  She asked Lisa if she knew what time the train was due to leave. She was worried they might be left behind. They had almost stopped moving again, and the young woman was standing on the toes of her high-heeled shoes to try and see over the crowd. It was impossible to see anything except a grey mass of heads and vehicles piled with junk. She sighed in exasperation. Her suitcase was heavy and she was weary. “You’re wise to travel light,” she said, nodding at Kolya’s parcel.

  Lisa poured out her woe over their stolen suitcase. They had nothing. “Well, try not to worry,” the young woman said. “I heard a rumour they’re going to send the luggage on separately and divide it up in equal shares when we reach Palestine.”

  Rumours—there had been nothing but rumours since Kolya and Pavel had dashed in yesterday shouting that there was a notice up on the fence and crowds of people were gathered round it. Lisa and Liuba, who had been doing some sewing together, had run out and pushed their way through the excited crowd to read the notice. As usual it was on cheap grey wrapping paper, and printed in Russian, Ukrainian and German. The order said that all Yids living in the city of Kiev and its vicinity were to report by eight o’clock on the morning of Monday, 29 September 1941, at the corner of Melnikovsky and Dokhturov Streets (near the cemetery). They were to take with them documents, money, valuables, as well as warm clothes, underwear, etc. Any Yid not carrying out the instruction and who was found elsewhere would be shot.

  The homely, commonplace words (warm clothes, underwear, etc.) were strangely more chilling than the cold and contemptuous word “Yid.” People were whispering the decree aloud, as if not understanding it. “A ghetto, a ghetto,” someone whispered; and an old woman started to moan. “They’re blaming us for the fires,” said a white-bearded old man. The people near him instinctively glanced towards the centre of the city, where the air was still scorched from the fires that went on burning.

  The Germans had entered the city a week ago as triumphant deliverers from the Russian yoke, and had been welcomed with bread and salt. Ukrainian and Jewish barbers clipped the hair of affable German officers. No one mourned the fact that German generals—rather than Communist Party bosses and privileged actors and musicians—occupied the luxurious flats of the Kreshchatik. Then, when the new occupants had nicely settled in with the paintings and grand pianos, the Kreshchatik was turned into an inferno. Germans and Ukrainians alike were blown to bits. Lisa, like everybody else, had gone to look at the immense fire burning the historic city centre, where she had once lived.

  Clearly the Red Army—who were blaming the Nazi barbarians, as though they would have been likely to blow themselves up!—were responsible for the explosions. A few soldiers had stayed behind to detonate the bombs. But then the rumour went about that the Jews were to blame. That was why this decree had been posted: the Germans were blaming the Jews, and were sending them to a ghetto, probably in Poland. Yet, even if the Jews were responsible, why punish everybody for the work of a few?

  It was while the two women stood in front of the grey wrapping paper that Liuba Shchadenko had made a saintly offer. She led Lisa out of the crowd and whispered, “You don’t have to go. You’re not a Jew. I can look after Kolya for you. I’ll hardly notice one more.” Lisa flared in anger: that Liuba could imagine she would send her son off to a ghetto without her! But immediately she was overcome by the grandeur of her friend’s generosity. Tears sprang to her eyes. How much she owed to this woman already. When Victor had been taken, and she and Kolya had to leave their apartment, Liuba Shchadenko, a poor widow who did sewing for the company, stepped in to offer her a room in her tiny tumbledown house. A woman she hardly knew! She said it was because Victor had given her work, when she was left without a breadwinner, carrying Nadia, and she was only repaying a debt. But her repayment had not stopped at the rent-free room. She had kept putting bits of sewing in Lisa’s way, to keep them from starving. And now this offer! She was more than a saint—an angel. Lisa pressed her hands, and said, “No, but thank you! We’ll all go together.”

  Mercifully, better news was arriving. There was no question of their being sent to a ghetto. Were not the Germans a decent, civilized race? Lisa knew that well, having lived half her life among friendly German voices. Even the Communists had had nothing but good to say about the Germans, in the last couple of years before the war. Why, when the Kreshchatik had blown up, the Germans had risked their own lives, sending squads of men around the city, warning people to leave their homes! They had rescued old people, children, invalids—the very people whom they were now supposed to be sending to a ghetto! No, they were being evacuated further behind the lines, to safety. But why, somebody asked, evacuate the Jews first? The answer came swiftly, confidently: “Because the Jews are related to the Germans.”

  And yet—how to explain the callous, brutal tone of the proclamation? “All Yids…Any Yids…” But that only sounded brutal to the Jews themselves; for the Germans, it was just a neutral description, like “warm clothes, underwear, etc.” And look—a young woman pointed out—they had written Melnikovsky Street and Dokhturov Street, which did not exist; they meant Melnikov and Degtyarev; so the order had gone through the hands of a bad translator. He or she had given it the unpleasant tone.

  Lisa knew the German version carried exactly the same tone; but kept quiet about it. She did not know what to think. Her gift of intuition had vanished like the flesh on her bones. She could only hope and pray that the prophets of doom were wrong. Then, only an hour later, when they had begun to pack, the good news had spread like lightning through the Podol: they were being sent to Palestine.

  Hours dragged past, and still the end was not in sight. The bottleneck ahead of them, whatever it was, refused to ease, yet they were being pushed forward by the mass of people beh
ind them. It was quite frightening for the mothers with small children, and Lisa started to worry about how Liuba Shchadenko would manage. She and Kolya ought to have waited for them and helped; she felt guilty. Yet at the time it had seemed sensible to set off and claim seats. She helped a harassed woman close to her, who had four children to cope with, the oldest no more than ten or eleven, and the youngest about eighteen months. Lisa took this child, a little girl, from the mother, to give her arms a rest. The baby was screaming, and Lisa tried talking baby-talk to her, which had no effect, and then hummed a melody, which turned screams to whimpers. She was rather an ugly baby, disfigured by a hare lip, and she smelled. She needed changing. But how could you change a baby in this crowd? Probably the mother hadn’t even noticed, because the people of the Podol were used to smells, and vermin of all description. Lisa had never felt at home among them, and she had mixed with few of them other than Liuba. Now the baby she was holding began screaming again, and her mother wanted her back. Lisa gave her up with relief. But how angry she felt that poor little children and old people were being made to suffer like this, no doubt through someone’s inefficiency.

  Kolya was bored and irritable—and who could blame him? She tried to think of word games to play with him, but he wasn’t interested. When they had been standing in one place for at least twenty minutes she persuaded him to show Sonia his card tricks, and reluctantly he agreed: using the young woman’s suitcase as a table. Sonia smiled pleasantly at the tricks, while her eyes darted over the heads of the people in front.

  She told Lisa how unhappy she was at having to leave her father’s cello behind. It had been her one friend in dark days. Lisa avoided her eyes. She wanted to say she was sorry, but could not find the words.

  They were inching forward for two minutes, then stopping for five. By the time they reached the long wall of the Jewish cemetery, the sun was high overhead and fierce. Lisa was stifling in her moth-eaten winter coat, but was afraid someone would snatch it if she took it off. She let Kolya remove his, telling him to hold on to it tightly; and promised him a drink of water when they were settled in the train. The Lukyanovka goods yard was quite close to the cemetery, so they did not have far to go. Surely the crowds would move forward soon? They should have organized it better than this.

  Sure enough, they surged forward a little way. Now they could actually see a barbed-wire barrier, and ranks of German soldiers and Ukrainian police, each side of the street. As at all railway stations, the noise and confusion were extreme; for, apart from the travellers, there were a great many people, Russians and Ukrainians, who had come to see relatives, friends or neighbours off, and to help with the luggage and the invalids. Some of these were trying to push their way back through the crowds, others were as determinedly pushing forward, to see their loved ones safely aboard. There were even husbands and wives saying goodbye to each other: no wonder it was taking an age to move a few yards.

  Kolya breathed a huge sigh of exasperation, and his mother roughed his hair consolingly. She would not be able to do that much longer, for he was already almost as tall as she and still growing like a fern. The cellist’s daughter, Sonia, passed on a message from up front that a train had just pulled out, full, and another was about to come from a siding. The people in the train, it was said, were crushed shoulder to shoulder in the corridors. For them, it would be a most unpleasant journey.

  They found themselves having to press back against the cemetery wall in order to let a cab get past. The driver waved his whip furiously to clear a passage. Having delivered his load at the station barrier, he was eager to collect some more passengers. Through the gap momentarily opened up, they could see all the baggage being put into a pile on the left. It looked as if Sonia was right: their luggage was going to be sent on separately, in another train, then divided equally when they reached their destination. Unless they were supposed to have attached name tags? That problem no longer concerned Lisa, but many around her were panicking, and some were making impromptu labels out of bits of string and torn-off paper from their parcels.

  It was too late, because there was a sudden surge forward. The man in charge of the difficult operation of stacking the luggage swiftly and efficiently was a tall, handsome Cossack with a long black moustache. It was hard not to admire his striking looks and air of authority; and equally hard not to feel, now, a grain of sympathy for the soldiers and police who were having to control the swearing, bad-tempered crowd. Lisa and her son were through the barrier at last. The expected train was nowhere in sight: simply, the same crowds waiting around, in a slightly different place, but, nevertheless, giving the impression of knowing they were a stage nearer the goal. Like waiting in a cinema queue, in the old days, moving at last from the street into the crowded foyer. As if to confirm the comparison, people were having their “warm clothes” taken from them. A soldier came up and, politely, peeled Lisa’s coat from her back, and took also the coat Kolya was carrying over his arm.

  No one had done that for her since the days when she had arrived at a theatre for gala performances.

  She shivered; not at all because she was cold. Even without her coat she felt stifled still. What was odd was the occasional sound of machine-gun fire near by. It could not be anything to worry about, but the sound was troubling, all the same, and there was an undercurrent of panic around that expressed itself in a concentration upon trivial tasks. Sonia, for example, was reapplying her lipstick. It could not be that people were being shot—perhaps people who had tried to evade the deportation order and had been rounded up. Children were crying, which was a relief, for it was a human, understandable sound. It was a clear day, of course, when sounds would carry from the Germans’ firing practise, or even the front lines. Lisa put her arm around Kolya and asked him if he would like a drink. He looked pale and unwell. He nodded.

  She unwrapped their parcel and gave him a cup and the bottle of water. She exchanged with Sonia some onions and potatoes for some of her mouldy bread and two small pieces of cheese. Others too, sitting on bundles, were eating. The scene had somehow split in two: heightened alarm and even panic; yet also the postures of picnic parties on a country excursion. A plane was circling low overhead; the machine-gun fire could still be heard at intervals, but the people either did not hear it, or put it out of their minds while they ate their food.

  The soldiers were moving people through a few at a time. They counted out a group, sent them off, waited, sent off another group. When Lisa tried to swallow a small piece of cheese but found it would not go down her throat, her mind accepted what she had known ever since they came through the barrier—that they were to be shot. She sprang to her feet, like a young woman of twenty, pulled Kolya up too, and rushed back to the barrier with him. Many were still struggling to get out, as the mass of people continued to press in. Dragging her son by the hand, she pushed through to where the tall Cossack was giving orders. “Excuse me, I’m not Jewish,” she said, panting.

  He asked to see her identity card. She fumbled in her bag and by God’s grace came out with an out-of-date identity card, one she had been issued with on her arrival in Russia, saying that her name was Erdman and her nationality Ukrainian. He told her she could go. “What about him?” he demanded, pointing at the boy.

  “He’s my son. He’s Ukrainian too!”

  But he insisted on seeing his papers, and when she pretended they were lost he seized her handbag and found a ration card. “Berenstein!” he exclaimed. “Jew-boy! Get back in!” He pushed Kolya away, and he was lost in the struggling throng. Lisa tried to push past the Cossack, but he barred her way with his arm. “You’re not a Yid, you don’t have to go through, old lady,” he said. “But I must!” she told him in a choking voice. “Please!” The Cossack shook his head. “Yids only.”

  “I am a Yid!” she cried, struggling to get past his arm. “I am! My father was a Yid. Please believe me!” He smiled grimly, still barring her way.

  “Mayim rabbim lo yukhelu lekhabbot et-ha-ahavah u-n
eharot lo yishtefuha!” she screamed. The Cossack shrugged contemptuously, dropped his arm and nodded her through. She glimpsed Kolya’s white face and tore her way through to him. He flung himself into her arms. “What’s happening, Mama?” he said.

  “I don’t know, dear.” She stood rocking him in her arms. An enormous soldier came up to a girl standing near them and said, “Come and sleep with me and I’ll let you out.” The girl’s face did not change its dazed expression, and after a moment the soldier wandered away. Lisa rushed after him and tugged his sleeve. He turned. “I heard what you asked that girl,” she said. “I’ll do it. Only let me and my son out.” He looked down expressionlessly at the crazy old woman, and turned away again.