The Time Between

by Bryna Hellmann-Gillson

  The train went slowly, stopping sometimes for no reason alongside empty fields, and gradually it grew darker. Lights came on over their heads, dimmed and went out. When the children fell asleep, their parents did too, but Hannah stayed awake, watching Conrad leaning against the window, shifting from one tired leg to the other. She would have given him her seat, but she couldn’t get up without waking the others, and he didn’t look around at her.

  Twice during the night they heard the thunder of airplane motors, Allied planes headed for Germany. Conrad had said they were bombing cities, but perhaps the rail tracks would be safe. They hadn’t been told where their train was headed. She pictured them traveling in a straight line that would take her to Berlin, back to Mutti and Vati. That was stupid, she knew it the minute she thought it. They wouldn’t be there, they wouldn’t be anywhere she could find them, why did she want so desperately to go back?

  She hadn’t let Vera know she was leaving, she hoped the baby would be well and that she wouldn't be punished for marrying a traitor. What would the Dutch do to those girls who’d fallen in love with German soldiers, even had babies? What would they have done to her? ‘Why did I do it for you?’ she thought, but she knew. She’d balanced Adrian and Pam’s lives against her own, and she had won. She’d do it again if she had to.

  Sunlight woke her. Through a window streaked with dust and the traces of a recent rain, she saw a pale orange disc hanging over empty pastures. The farms they passed looked deserted, there was no smoke from their chimneys, barn doors hung crooked on their hinges, rows of trees had been cut down to stumps, and there were no cars or tractors. Farmers were supposed to be up early, surely she would see somebody. Were they in Germany? If she saw the name of a station, she’d know, though why did it matter? They were traveling through a no-man’s land from which everybody had fled. Her neck and shoulders hurt, her hands and feet were cold, she had to go to the toilet, and she was thirsty and hungry. She was not safe yet, but she was alive.

  Pushing herself slowly to the edge of her seat, she stood up, stepped over the legs of the other passengers and on somebody’s foot, and slid the door open. The corridor was crowded with people sleeping, stretched out or hunched down against the wall. Conrad had made himself as small and private as he could, his bent knees held against his chest by both arms, and his face turned toward the wall. He hated being so close to other people, he hated their smell, their ugly faces and the stupid things they said. He was a terrible snob, she knew that, but he had a right to be.

  The train stopped so abruptly that she would have fallen if she had not been holding the doorframe. Conrad’s head jerked up, and he looked at her as though he didn’t recognize her. Then he licked his lips and smiled. ‘Sit down,’ he whispered, ‘here, near me. Warm me.’

  He held out his hands, and she rubbed them with her thumbs until his fingers relaxed. When she stopped, he leaned forward and kissed her with closed lips. ‘I’m so thirsty,’ she said, and he reached awkwardly into his coat pocket for the bottle of water he’d brought along. The train was traveling northwards now, so that the whole length of the corridor was bright with sunlight. People sat up, stretched, yawned and looked around as though they had forgotten where they were. Conrad closed his eyes again. When she asked, ‘Do you want my seat?’ he shook his head and, after a few minutes, she stood up and began to inch her way to the end of the car.

  By the time she closed the door to the toilet behind her, she felt so sick that she had to throw up. The floor was wet, the smell told her it was urine, the toilet had run out of water, and paper and feces were piling up in it. It was impossible to sit down and painful to straddle the bowl, but she managed somehow and used her handkerchief to dry herself. She would have to keep her hands away from Conrad, he would be disgusted. Why was this happening to her? Why were so many people allowed onto one train? There ought to have been enough seats for everybody and more trains, and people should have waited until there were. This was criminal, inhuman.

  Standing near the door, she watched the abandoned landscape drifting past. The train went very slowly, stopping sometimes at crossroads, though there were no cars. They’d been traveling more than half a day and had passed through several towns during the night. The track would go on and on. The sun would go down and come up again and again, the train would start and stop for no reason, and they would travel through a country empty of people and never get off. She would sit close to Conrad and, with those other sleeping bodies around them, they would close their eyes and just go on and on. Maybe this was what death was like.

  More railroad tracks ran parallel to theirs, a row of low sheds appeared, and then several big barn-like buildings, a street of small houses behind hedges, and a roofless platform that ran along a low brick building with boarded-up windows. It was important to watch carefully for the sign that named the town, see if it was German. But there was no sign, there was nobody on the platform, and the train didn’t stop. Everyone who had once lived there was dead. The town was its own cemetery.

  She began to shiver. She wasn’t cold, she was frightened, and she went back as fast as she could. How could she tell him what she’d seen, she hadn’t seen anything. He’d say, ‘Just because they didn’t come out and gawk at a train going by?’ He’d say ‘You’re being fanciful,’ his polite way of telling her she was silly. She knew it sounded silly, but she knew she was right. Everyone in Germany was dead. She was. Conrad was. Sitting there cold, hungry, thirsty and homeless, the train was full of people congratulating themselves on being alive, but she knew better.

  Conrad made room for her at the window. ‘We’re almost there. The conductor came by and told us we stop in Münster in about twenty minutes, so you must be ready to get out. Somebody has taken your seat, but that’s all right, we will get our things and move to the door now. No, stay here, I’ll do it.’ He slid open the door to the compartment and reached up to get her coat. ‘Here, put it on,’ he said, then leaned back inside and pulled the suitcases down. The other passengers watched him, nobody stood up to help or said goodbye, and Conrad left the door open and led her away.

  When they entered the outskirts of the city, even he was shocked. Not one building was whole. Front walls had been blown away, and they could look into rooms littered with broken furniture, where strips of wallpaper fluttered against crumbling walls. Lampposts and trees had been uprooted, streets and gardens had disappeared under hills of brick and cement. On top of one heap, a dog stood wide-legged and still, like a wild animal claiming its territory.

  ‘There’s the cathedral over there,’ he said. ‘What’s left of it. Ah, here we are.’

  The train slowed, jerked and stopped. On either side, train cars and locomotives were parked, and men were wandering around between them as if they were waiting for someone to tell them what to do. The air smelled of ashes and coal dust.

  Hannah closed her eyes and thought of her little room in the hospital, how clean it was, how quiet, how private and safe. She shouldn’t have come with him. No matter how much she loved him and trusted him, she shouldn’t have come.

  After ten minutes, the train started again, pulled up to a platform and stopped. Somebody outside opened the door and helped first Hannah, then Conrad and then a few other passengers down. A man behind her asked, ‘Where are we?’ in Dutch and then in German, and the conductor told him, ‘It used to be Münster,’ and Conrad laughed.

  ‘Hannah, come here,’ he said, drawing her aside. He took her suitcase and set it at her feet, then pressed something into her hand. ‘Put this away quickly, before somebody sees.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Half of what I have. It’s not much, but it will start you off.’ When she put the thick envelope deep into a pocket of her coat, he said, ‘That's good. Don't carry it in your purse. Somebody could take it from you too easily.’ He put his hands on either side of her face and, with his eyes still open, he bent his head down to hers and kissed her. ‘Take care of yourself, Hannah. Goodbye, my
love. Good luck.’

  She watched him jump back up the steps just as the train started to roll away. The door was still open, his suitcases were inside, and he was waving at her and smiling. The last car went by and disappeared slowly behind some sheds, and she stood on the platform alone.

  She had stopped thinking when he kissed her, and she stood there waiting for the train to come back and Conrad to leap down the stairs and embrace her. It was so quiet, it was as if the world had stopped turning and time had stopped. If she stood still and waited, it would start spinning the other way and so would time. Conrad’s train would appear, glide silently backwards toward the platform, she would see him in the open doorway smiling down at her, waving and calling, ‘Here I am, my darling.’

  Parallel lines of railway tracks ran side by side and then met and separated again before vanishing in the distance. In the sun they were like necklaces of silver and gold lifting and settling gently, as if somebody were shaking them. She was too warm in her fur coat, and she would have liked to sit down in the shade somewhere, but the wavering lines of light were too pretty to ignore.

  A plume of white smoke suddenly escaped one of the locomotives, a green one with a gold nose. Like an enormous prehistoric creature, it began to move toward her and, when it bellowed at her, she thought of course, it was angry with her. It was going to eat her, that’s what it did, it ate people like her. She took a step forward to meet it.

  ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ someone shouted, and she was pulled backwards by strong arms wrapped around her from behind. She closed her eyes and leaned back against him, and he took her whole weight and held her. When the locomotive was gone, he released her and turned her around to look at him. His mouth opened and his lips moved, but all she heard was a kind of barking. When he stopped and she didn’t answer, he began barking again and shaking her and, when that didn’t help, he smacked her cheek with an open palm.

  ‘Wake up!’ he muttered. ‘Heavenly Father, what’s the matter with you?’

  This time Hannah heard words. ‘I’m all right!’ she answered. She wasn’t, but she didn’t know what was wrong and couldn’t explain it even to herself.

  He dropped his arms and stepped away. ‘If you want to kill yourself, please go do it someplace else.’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ Hannah said. ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Well, excuse me, it certainly looked like it.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I really didn’t. The sun blinded me and,’ when she started to cry, he reached out to take her in his arms again, but she shook her head. ‘It’s nothing. I have a headache, that’s all.’

  ‘You were on that train from Holland, I saw you getting off. My God, it was crowded. I’ll bet you haven’t slept or eaten all night.’

  She knew him. He was the man who had helped her down the train steps. She’d noticed then that he wasn’t a policeman, that he wore no cap and was completely bald. Now she saw that he had no eyebrows either and that his skin shone like wax. She’d seen enough patients to know he’d been burned and was lucky to be alive. She was a nurse, this was interesting, and she forgot how hot and miserable she was.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked. Her calm voice must have surprised him, the skin where his eyebrows should have been went up in surprise. ‘They did a good job keeping you alive.’

  He grunted. ‘Don’t tell me how lucky I am. That’s what everybody says, and I don’t want to hear it again.’ He motioned toward the city behind the station, ‘One of those fires did it for me. Most of Münster burned down in one night.’

  She looked where he pointed, past the part of the station still standing and down onto a large square where army trucks were parked. The main streets had been cleared of rubble and, some distance away, a few buildings stood intact among the ruins. Around the square, people were collecting jagged pieces of concrete, blackened wooden beams and broken bricks, loading them onto wheelbarrows and unloading them onto the trucks. They were all women, some of them old, and the soldiers watching them were just boys. Every man who could drive a tank and shoot a gun had long since gone off to fight. The man standing next to her had managed to stay home, but the war had come to him.

  When he started to walk away, she called out, ‘Wait, please, I need,’ and, when he half-turned to look at her, ‘I don’t know anybody.’

  ‘Why’d you come here then?’

  ‘I didn’t. I mean, I didn’t intend to. It was just,’

  ‘That man dumped you here, did he? Had no use for you anymore?’ As soon as he said it, he realized how cruel it was, and he walked back to her. ‘Sorry, sorry. Don’t cry, for heaven’s sake! You don’t know anybody here? Well, even if you did, they’re probably dead. Come on, walk with me.’ He picked up her suitcase and started toward a path that led down to the square.

  ‘Can’t I wait for the next train?’

  ‘What next train? Tomorrow? Next week? Who knows when the next train will come through.’ He put the suitcase down and walked back to her. ‘Look, gnädige Frau, everything’s uncertain, nothing’s normal. If you wanted to be in Germany, at least you’ve done that.’

  ‘I wanted,’ she began, intending to tell him she needed to stay at the station until the next train came through. Then she understood what he’d told her, that there might not be a train, not today, maybe not this week. ‘All right,’ she said.

  He took her hand and helped her down the path. Standing with him on the pavement in front of the station, Hannah said, ‘I don’t suppose there’s a hotel?’

  He laughed at that. ‘Hotel’s a fancy word for what we have. I know a place where you can sleep, it’s a woman whose house still has a roof and a front door. I can’t go with you, but you can find it. See where those buildings are still standing? We call it Miracle Row now. Her place is number five. Tell Ilse Willy sent you.’

  The suitcase felt as if somebody had put rocks in it. As she walked, she remembered something her father had told them about their grandfather. When he was a child in Poland, the Tsar sent whole families to Siberia, because they were Jews or communists or anarchists. That was before the revolution, before Lenin and Stalin. The thing was they had to walk there all the way from Poland, hundreds of miles, and they carried their belongings on their backs or in their arms, clothes, books, babies.

  Vati told her, ‘You put one foot in front of the other, that was the trick. You didn’t have to think about it, it happened naturally, one foot in front of the other. And when you were tired, you threw something away, a piece of clothing, a saucepan, a clock. You know, things you maybe could do without where you were going. You know what went last? Books. And what you didn’t ever throw away? For the men it was the violin, and for the women the candlesticks, for the Shabbat candles.’

  Hannah had thought it was crazy, candlesticks! But ‘You’re too young to understand,’ her father said. Now she put one foot in front of the other, wondering if she would have had the strength to walk to Siberia. She tried to picture what was in her suitcase that she could throw away. Conrad had said she could trade her dresses and jewelry for food and a place to sleep. Who would want the red silk or the blue velvet, the little gold mesh bag, the satin robe she wore when she stayed with him the night after a party? There weren’t going to be any parties in Münster anytime soon.

  There was money in her coat pocket. She didn’t know how much, but it felt like a lot. And she was a nurse, she would find work. When Conrad came back, she would say she didn’t need him anymore, thanks very much. Or maybe he would need her, and she would say no. Maybe.

  The windows of number five were boarded up, but the bell worked. She heard it clang and after a long wait feet approaching the door. ‘Yes?’ a voice asked.

  ‘Willy said you might have a room for me.’

  ‘Wait a minute.’ The door opened. ‘Come in. Who are you?’ The woman looked at Hannah, her eyes going up and down the fur coat and then down at the shabby suitcase. ‘A friend of Willy’s, are you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Hannah said, thinki
ng why not. ‘I’ve just come back from Holland, and I need a place to stay. I have money.’

  ‘Oh, money!’ the woman laughed. ‘I’ve got all the money I need. Still,’ and she put out a hand and stroked Hannah’s fur sleeve, ‘we can work something out. Come in, and we’ll see if I can find a bed for you. I’m Ilse, you can call me Ilse.’

  There were four rooms, two beds in each, suitcases and boxes shoved under them and towels hanging from hooks on the walls. In the smallest room Ilse said, ‘That’s free. Get settled and then come downstairs and we’ll talk business.’

  When she’d gone, Hannah took off her coat, sat down on the bed and then lay back on the thin mattress. There was only one sheet and one blanket, but everything looked clean. On the other bed there was a small knitted quilt, squares of blue and pink with white borders, a baby’s quilt, a neat pile of undershirts and blouses, and under the bed a row of three pairs of scuffed but dust-free shoes. Whoever she had to share this room with didn’t own much, but she cared about what she had. Hannah hoped she was friendly and honest.

  Before she went down, she opened the envelope and counted the money Conrad had given her. It was all new stiff German bills, straight from the bank, and the amount amazed her. This was half, he’d said, where had he gotten so much? Maybe he’d stolen it from Schmidt. She hoped so.

  She unzipped her purse and put the envelope deep down into it, then opened her suitcase, took out her bracelets and rings, the silver-backed mirror and the gold-mesh evening bag, and put them in as well. This would go everywhere with her. She couldn’t wear the fur coat all the time, certainly not if she went looking for a job, but she could carry the purse and nobody would be surprised.

  What would she give up first? Ilse didn’t want her money, but she might want the jewelry. She was too fat to fit into Hannah’s dresses, but perhaps she would take them anyway. How long would she let her stay? It was important to go to the station every day and ask about trains to Berlin. Until one came or she found a job, she had to make her things last.