Broken Angels

by Gemma Liviero

  “Why aren’t you sleeping?”

  “I will sleep later,” she says.

  “What is your name?”

  “It doesn’t matter what my name is.”

  She gets up to switch off the lamp above my bed and then walks back to her desk. She goes back to not looking at me.

  I turn and face the wall beside my bed, tracing my finger along the floral pattern of the blue-and-gold wallpaper. I am feeling very sleepy since I was unable to sleep on the long train ride. With the tip of my finger I write words in German on the wall: drache, hexe, dämon . . . dragon, witch, demon. I think of Theo then. He would think of even better words.

  “My daughter is nine, the same age as you.” The woman’s voice has pierced the silence, bursting through the yellow air. “I have not seen her in a year now. Not since I was hired by the Germans to care for other girls who aren’t my daughter. She lives with my brother and his family.”

  I do not know how to respond. I cannot find any words that would be suitable. I don’t know whether to feel sorry for her. But suddenly I am thinking of the daughter and wondering if she is missing her mother. Wondering if we are feeling the same. I wish the woman had brought her daughter with her so there was someone else for company.

  “Will you see her when we get to Germany?”

  “No. I have to return straight away.”

  We are on another train at daybreak and will soon be at my new home, says Square-Face. I ask her what it is like. She says she doesn’t know, but that it is an excellent German center for Aryan children, and these “excellent centers” are being built across Europe. She tells me the place she used to take the children to was a nice house beside a lake, but that this center is somewhere else: just inside Germany, near a small town that does not have any creeks. Already it is sounding dull, but I think that it might not be so far away from my family, and they might bring me back sometimes. When I say this, she looks out the window and pretends not to hear me.

  Now, in daylight, I can see that there are lots of houses, farms, and trucks outside. It is much busier here than in the town near my house. I hate the sound of the train.

  It was dark for most of the first train journey and is raining for this one. It is not long before the train slows to a stop, but we are not at a station. Then it begins to go backward. And then it stops again. The soldier sitting across the aisle informs us that the driver has left the train to check something ahead on the tracks. He thinks there might be something blocking the train.

  As the minutes pass, there are murmurings within the train. Someone is lying on the track up ahead, planning to kill themselves, though no one knows for certain.

  Some small children stand beside the track below my window. They have appeared out of thin air, like fairies. They wave and I wave back. They are still in their nightgowns, and their feet are filthy from running through fresh mud. I wish I were outside running in mud, feeling it squeeze between my toes and feeling the rain on my face, away from the smells of strangers and their strange perfumes.

  My watcher is no longer with me. She is at the end of the aisle, speaking to the ticket man to find out more information. “We can’t be late,” she tells him. The soldier is suddenly missing, also; perhaps he has gone to see what can be done. I open the window.

  “Hello,” I call down to the children.

  “Hello,” says the smallest one, the one with the dirtiest face. “Are you a princess?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I have had to leave my castle because an evil witch has stolen me.” I run my hand down my new dress: a dirty-green pinafore with a bright-white shirt underneath. It is an alien fabric, stiff and uncomfortably tight.

  The children look at one another, their mouths open. They were not expecting to meet a princess, much less one who had been stolen from a castle.

  I turn to see if Square-Face is coming, but she is now out of view. I am alone. There is no one watching me, and I think this is a sign. It takes me only four steps to get to the door of the train carriage, and I jump from the doorway onto the track. The children beside me stare in awe. They were not expecting the princess to escape.

  “Can you help me?” I ask. “Can you take me to your house so that your parents can return me to the castle?”

  “Yes,” says the oldest of the three, who is still younger than me. “This way.”

  I follow him away from the train. His younger siblings are behind me. Beyond them I can see what has stopped the train. A man lies in several pieces across the track. The small children have seen this, too, but they are not surprised.

  “What has happened?”

  “People come here to kill themselves. They have no food. Quickly! This way!”

  We run from the train, through long grasses toward a clump of tress. “Our village is behind there.”

  “Stop!” yells a man from behind us, and I can hear Square-Face calling my name.

  I do not slow down, but the older boy turns and stops, and I am then forced to do the same.

  One of the train guards stands halfway in the space between the train and me. I cannot believe how far we got. In one arm he holds the smallest girl, who is no longer smiling. In his other hand he holds a gun.

  My feet are suddenly frozen to the ground.

  “Come here!”

  It is several seconds before I find my voice.

  “What if I don’t?”

  “I will kill her.” I hear a click from the gun, and he puts the tip against her temple. The little girl has no expression on her face; her eyes are unblinking, fixed on mine.

  Behind him stands Square-Face, her face the same color as the light-gray sky.

  I walk slowly back toward the guard. When I reach him, he puts the girl down and grabs my arm, his fingers digging deep into my flesh as he drags me back to the train. I squeeze my lips together so as not to cry out. So that he doesn’t know he is hurting me. I see that there are two men with shovels scraping the remains of the victim from the track. And before I realize what I am about to do, I vomit on the officer’s shiny shoes. There is the taste of sugared apple in my mouth, but tarnished now with stomach juice.

  “Get her away from me!” says the guard to my caretaker. “Take her back to the seat and keep your eye on her. I will report you for your carelessness.”

  Square-Face escorts me back to the same seat. I am thinking of the man who killed himself, wondering if he has any children or a wife or a mother. I look out the window. The small children, my would-be rescuers, are nowhere to be seen, but they are hiding somewhere, watching me. I sense this and wave at the empty field.

  “You foolish girl,” says Square-Face. This is not said in anger but in disbelief, with a shaking of the head.

  “Will you get in trouble?”

  “I might be killed,” she says uncaringly, like Catarina, and I think of Square-Face’s daughter. Another one, like me, without a mother. “But more than likely they will demote me temporarily and suspend my pay. You will have to learn to run faster if you want to escape.”

  I look at her, but she is not looking back. She is looking at something outside the window. Perhaps she can see the children hiding. Did she know that I might try to escape? I wonder. Could it be that she turned her back on purpose?

  I think about the man on the tracks—or what’s left of him, because he is no longer a man.

  “Do they know who he is?”

  “He was no one, like everyone else in this godforsaken place. It was his way to escape.”

  Later, during the journey, we pass foreign towns filled with beautiful buildings that look like castles. There are lots of steeples and archways.

  When we finally leave the train, my caretaker and the soldier walk on either side of me to a car that is waiting. When I climb in, Square-Face shuts the door behind me. I am disappointed that I have to travel alone with the man.

  “Good luck,” says Square-Face, faintly, through the glass between us. She turns back toward the station in her dowdy gray skirt an
d jacket, her face full of dung.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WILLEM

  The woman sitting in front of me asks for a drink of water. She is dying, slowly, of uterine cancer, and there is little I can do for her beyond what I have already done: injecting morphine to help with the pain.

  Her children sit patiently and quietly beside her while she sips at the water I have brought. She hands back the glass, and I see that the simple act of holding up her arm is nearly too great. I offer the two small boys a piece of chocolate, which they eagerly take. I offer the woman some, also, but she shakes her head. She is too ill to care for her children anymore. Her husband died of diphtheria six months earlier. Without the influence of her husband, a former member of the Judenrat, she was forced to leave her house—which has utilities better than most—and live in a run-down apartment on the other side of the ghetto. After today, she will no longer have access to my services, as I make preparations to leave the ghetto. I have been treating her without Hermann Manz’s knowledge. Not that this treatment would continue for much longer anyway. She has perhaps weeks left to live and now requires full-time care.

  “Frau Markstein, as soon as you take your boys home, you will have to admit yourself to the medical center,” I say. “I have written a note to the doctor there. I will make sure they give you a clean bed and something for the pain.”

  I hold out the piece of paper, but she does not lift her eyes or extend her hand to take it. I fold and place it in the top pocket of her coat. Her spirit is already dead.

  “Do you have anyone you can leave the children with . . . while in the hospital?”

  She shakes her head.

  “The boys . . .” she says but doesn’t finish. She doesn’t need to.

  It is a situation I have seen before. Twice I have made inquiries, on behalf of those single mothers who are no longer able to care for their children. But I have learned something about human nature here: survival outweighs charity. The boys will be left to their own devices. Though there are fewer children in the ghetto since the mass deportation, more keep arriving, many of them orphaned. These two boys were once protected from deportation by their father’s position. As I have witnessed over the time here, deportation, for even those with station, is merely delayed.

  I retrieve two boiled eggs from my medical bag and place these in the woman’s hand, which rests as a deadweight on her knee. Lena often gives me extra food to bring in to work, though she knows that I am not the one in need. Anna Markstein surveys the eggs as if they are something foreign or unrecognizable. When she finally looks up with weary, vacant eyes, I see that the idea of food is little comfort.

  “I will get you some food coupons for the children,” I say. “I will have them sent down to you. The boys will have extra rations for several weeks. By that time someone will likely have taken them in to raise.”

  She is still looking at me. The gaze between us is heavy, weighed down by the false hope I have just offered. What I have said is unlikely. The apartment will be given to someone else, and the boys evicted to live on the street.

  “Doctor, I want you to know that everything I had before . . . it is as if it didn’t exist. And when I am gone it will be as if I didn’t exist either. But the strange thing is that I no longer care. The pain is all I think about now, and to have it gone means more than anything.”

  It is a curious thing that chronic and acute pain can produce one of life’s greatest anomalies. The sufferer comes to appreciate death.

  “The pain can be addressed. I have made sure that enough medicine is available to you.”

  Her eyes wander around the office before resting on a photograph on my desk, of Lena and me, our closeness and contentment evident in our smiles. I usually keep it in a drawer, and I silently scold myself for this mistake. It does not help to remind patients that life is normal for some.

  “Will you be all right to walk home from here?” I ask, to distract her quickly. “I can call a guard to help you.”

  She smiles weakly and shakes her head.

  “If I fall in the street, he will probably leave me there anyway.”

  I start to say that I will make sure this doesn’t happen, but she interjects.

  “I am fine to walk home. The pain is dulled. I am weary only.”

  She stands to leave, and I hurry ahead to open the door for her.

  “Good day, Anna.”

  She stops and turns to stretch out her hand, which I hold on to longer than normal, before something inside me tells me that this is not what I should do. To not show the kind of compassion that offers even the faintest hope.

  “While I see nothing good in most of the people here, there is something I see in you. Perhaps it is goodness. I am not sure . . .” She touches her forehead and closes her eyes briefly. I step back to end our meeting, but even in her feeble state she seems determined to continue. “But it is something else that the others don’t have. Perhaps it is that you somehow don’t fit in a place like this, that you remind me of what people were like before I came here.”

  I nod. There is little to say at this point that might console her. Often patients feel gratitude, and I am forced to hear words that I do not want to hear. I am what I am, and the words of my patients must be left behind in the surgery where they belong.

  I watch her leave, and her boys—with their yellow eyes and swollen bellies—follow. It is doubtful I will ever see any of them again.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  MATILDA

  It is a short, jiggling drive along cobbled streets, and then we are out of the city. I want to go back to the city where there are lots of interesting people and cars and trams. It is disappointing that we are heading through places that have only cattle and barns and a factory and fields, and the houses become too few the farther we drive until there is nothing but a small town with houses built way up hills, and lonely lanes and trucks that sit empty on the side of the road.

  The car turns toward a tall, lonely white house with a roof that points toward the dark sky, at the end of a long driveway. I wonder if we are the only living things. There are no voices, no cyclists, no people walking on the roads. My chest begins to jump through the front of my dress, which is stained after the reappearance of my dinner from the night before. The car stops at iron gates at the front that are guarded, and there is barbed wire on top of the fences that trap the house.

  We are let through because the driver has waved at the guard, and then the car stops only yards from the front door. I suddenly don’t want to leave the car. I don’t like it here. The driver, who also wears a guard’s uniform, opens the car door.

  “Out!” says the driver. But I don’t move. The guard who is standing at the front door to the house comes over to the car.

  “Out!” he says, too. But I look the other way. I feel a hand close around my wrist, and then I am being dragged from the car. I kick the arm of the driver, who lets go with a shout. He moves to hit me, but the guard from the doorway says to stop. He leans his head into the car.

  “If you don’t get out, we will feed you to the lions at the zoo.”

  “What zoo?”

  The guard says, “She is a brazen one, yes?” He laughs, but the driver I kicked is not laughing.

  “Now, don’t be a naughty little girl,” says the guard. “You do not want to get on Frau Haus’s bad side.”

  The lions didn’t scare me, but the mention of an unknown person does.

  I think about this. Something tells me he is making this up, but I am suddenly hungry since I have emptied out my dinner and had nothing more on the train.

  “Is there food here?”

  “Of course.”

  I slide out and stand up as tall as I can, but the guard is twice my height.

  No one offers to carry my case here. The doorway guard, whom I follow, does not hold the door open for me. The driver leaves in the car without saying good-bye.

  The officer who spoke to Catarina said the house was in a del
ightful location, but there is nothing nice about it. There is more dirt than grass; the forests behind it look straggly and barren. There is no lavender growing wild on the hills. The ground is patterned with car wheels, and it feels colder here than at home. Catarina said that the new winter would freeze hell.

  The long hallway to the back of the house leads off to several rooms until we are at the last room, beside a kitchen. The guard knocks on the door.

  “Enter,” says a woman from inside.

  We do, and I see a woman sitting at a desk littered with files and papers. A draft from the open door swirls the papers on the desk, and the woman has to catch them, but she can still write with one hand while she does this. She looks up briefly and then back down at her paperwork.

  “Sit down,” she says to the paperwork. “I will be with you in a minute.”

  The guard leaves, shutting the door as he goes. There is a soft couch and a wooden chair in the room. I am not sure which one to sit on, so I choose the soft couch, which is farthest from the desk.

  “On that one,” she says in German, pointing without raising her eyes. I move to the wooden chair in front of the desk.

  It is so silent that my breathing sounds very loud. I hold my breath until I can’t do it anymore.

  “Stand up!” says the woman harshly, and this makes me jump. She is watching me now, peering at my face, her eyes rolling down my plaits and then to my legs. I lean from one foot to the next, the watching making my body twitch.

  “I have been told that you tried to escape. If you attempt it here, the guards will not catch you. They will simply shoot.”

  Shoot. It is simply a threat that adults make. No one will shoot me, I do not think, otherwise they will be put in prison. Otherwise, why bring me here? The smell from the kitchen is making my mouth water. If I am good and quiet, then perhaps I will be given food soon.

  A woman in a nurse’s uniform has entered the room. She is carrying a writing pad and a pencil. A sewing measure hangs around her neck. “Is this the one from the east?”