Nick could feel the train starting to slow down. Danuta rose in alarm, but he pushed her back into her seat. ‘Keep talking,’ he warned.
‘We did not know that members of the Sicherheitsdienst were living among us. One day the newly appointed security officers announced that the town was to be closed for reasons of racial impurity. For too long there had been much mixing of blood. It was our great strength, and it was to become our curse. A work camp had been opened at Lubicza, and although we did not know then, our people were to fill it.
‘My town had many blacksmiths and factory workers, men used to tempering metal. In 1940 we were instructed to build a train, a special express under the sole command of the Sicherheitsdienst commandants. It was to be a great honour for our town. They asked our families to choose the most well-loved man on the council to become the conductor in charge of the train. He would be privileged to oversee every level of its daily operation. That man was my grandfather.’
‘The Arkangel was used to deliver your townsfolk to the work camp,’ said Nick. Suddenly he understood the meaning of the symbol: the crowned Polish eagle restrained by a mighty serpent, the symbol of a new German empire being tested out here for the first time, a dry run for the entire world.
‘Each time the train left Chelmsk, a few of the town’s finest families were taken along with the commandants. There was no panic, only deception. They were told there was a spa resort, that they would return in a few days. When the train reached Ordzandzin, they were ordered to surrender all their valuables, their personal property. Money, watches, even the deeds to their houses, everything they had been advised to bring on the journey. It was collected and thrown out into the leather bags at the depot. Sometimes people made a run for it when the train stopped. They would push their children out on the platform, only to see them shot dead before their eyes.’
‘How long was it before the townspeople realised what was happening?’
‘The commandants insisted that those families who left had elected to stay on the coast in places of greater safety. Sometimes they returned keepsakes that had been collected at the Ordzandzin Depot as proof of their wellbeing. When people ask how could the Nazis do this under the very noses of the people, this is how; by keeping any whisper of truth carefully hidden. People can be very naïve when they want to believe. My grandfather knew, because he stayed on the train until it had been emptied at Lubicza. But he could not live with the terrible burden of his work. One night, he called a secret meeting at the town council, and told them about the true purpose of the Arkangel. But among the people he told was a junior member of the Sicherheitsdienst. They took him to the siding where the train waited, and slowly drove it over his legs. They wanted the names of those he told. He took three days to die.’ She looked to the window, but might have been seeing the world from a million miles away. ‘Before the war there were nearly three and a half million Jews living in Poland. By the time it ended, less than three hundred thousand were still alive.’
‘What are you saying, that this is a ghost train?’
‘No, I said you would never understand. There is no secret to this story. I told you, people remember the past. They know what happened. It’s said that after the war, the train was left in the sheds at Chelmsk. The engine was broken up for spare parts, and finally the carriages were sold to Polrail for use on the passenger line. But there were stories, things seen and heard that could not be possible. So the Arkangel really did become a ghost train—in the sense that it was shunned by the living.’
The train was leaving the larch forest, heading out into the open plain that stood before the terminus. ‘Believe what you like. The train is real. It runs when it has to. It cannot take me back to Chelmsk. I must alight at the Terminus.’
‘You must tell me everything, Danuta. What will happen to us?’
She was trying not to cry. ‘After the war the town was almost deserted. Those with any so-called impurity had been removed. Every remaining resident became precious to us. The town could not lose any more of its inhabitants. This is why the train exists. To keep the families of those who survived from leaving, and to remove those who are tainted, or who would lead them away. This is all my fault. I never saw the Arkangel before it appeared tonight.’ She pressed the back of her hand against the cold metal door. It felt as solid and real as any national Polrail train she had ever caught. ‘I am so sorry.’
The Arkangel’s brakes screeched and they were thrown forward. Out in the corridor, they could see the dark mass of the Lubicza Terminus thrown into relief against the night sky.
The convex roof of the train shed was backed by a large brick building topped with a square tower at either end. In a stroke of architectural arrogance, the crematorium chimneys had been built into the very fabric of the terminus. The building’s crenellated gables reminded Nick of those on London’s own railway cathedral, St Pancras station. Between the chimneys, beneath the mocking spiked spires that rose along the edge of the steep roof, the eagle symbol was repeated in iron—but here it had changed form. The eagle had been crushed entirely by the triumphant snake that entwined its body.
There was only one railway track into the terminus. The platform extended on either side of the train. Here, grey linen sacks stood in metal frames, ready to receive the clothes of the passengers. They would panic now, of course, sensing their fate just as cattle led to the slaughterhouse would fear the smell of death. But everything about the station was designed to do one thing, and one thing only: to herd the passengers forwards towards the building’s interior, through its great iron gates.
—
When the officers demanded that they strip their children and then themselves, a raw terror set in. From the windows they could see the passengers in the carriage ahead of them stumbling onto the platform. Their bare white nudity was profoundly shocking. The children were screaming and sobbing now, their naked mothers pawed and prodded by the guards, the men sometimes punched in the low spine with the butts of rifles if they questioned what was happening. Some of the older ones fell, and were trampled underfoot. An old woman with bloody dentures hanging from her mouth lay screaming and clutching at the passing legs until one of the officers of the Sicherheitsdienst stuck a bayonet into her soft lower belly and dragged it upward, eviscerating her. After that, it was decided that no-one should ever be killed on the concourse; the terrified crowd became too difficult to control. Lessons were quickly learned in the management of the damned.
—
‘Where is Josh?’ Danuta asked, looking around. ‘He must not get off the train.’ She looked into Nick’s uncomprehending eyes. ‘He’s a Jew who seduced a daughter of the town.’
‘He didn’t seduce you, Danuta, you know what happened, it was a crazy night, we were all drunk and fooling around, we got carried away—’
‘I’m pregnant, Nick. And I don’t know whose child I’m carrying, whether it’s Josh’s or yours. What does that make me in the eyes of the dead? At best I am a whore. At worst, I’m carrying the child of a Jew who is also a murderer. Idzi is dead. He died on the street while you were reaching the station. Josh will be taken and so will I. None of us is innocent. We’re not like those who died before.’
‘Last stop,’ called the conductor from somewhere further along the carriage. ‘All those for Lubicza Terminus alight here.’
‘Have you told Josh about the baby?’
‘No, I thought if I hid the truth from him he would be able to leave, and perhaps there was even a chance for me. I should have known there was no way out.’
‘Your grandfather, can’t he do something?’
‘He is as much a prisoner here as everyone else.’
‘There.’ Nick pointed along the corridor at the figure framed in the doorway. ‘Josh, stay on the train!’
Josh was stepping out onto the platform. Behind him, the conductor, Danuta’s grandfather, stood impassive and unable to prevent any change in the fate of his passengers.
‘G
od, look at this,’ Josh called, looking up at the span of the roof as he walked further onto the concourse. Behind him a wall of sound was rising, a cry of terror so dense and discordant that it seemed like one great voice. It broke over them in waves, splintering into individual human voices, pleading, panicked, fearful, the voices of those who would do anything at all in order to draw one more breath.
Nick had no choice but to go after him. Josh was walking away. There was no time to explain. He grabbed Josh’s wrist and tried to pull him back. ‘We have to stay on board,’ he warned, tugging hard.
‘What, and go all the way back again, are you crazy? Listen to that, what the hell is that?’ The wave was growing, towering above them, ready to crash.
‘Josh, stay with me.’ The distance between them and the Arkangel was lengthening. Nick knew that the further he moved from the train, the less chance he would ever have of getting back.
Danuta stepped down and joined them on the platform, but just as she did so they were hit by the breaking force of passing bodies. It was like being caught in a sudden rush-hour; as though everyone who had ever passed through the terminus had reappeared at the exact same instant, a living wall of flesh and bone that broke them apart with great force and swept them aside.
Josh’s fingers rose and pawed the air to grasp at Danuta’s hand. For a moment the connection was made and held, but then Danuta was torn from him, dragged down by those even more desperate. Nick launched himself forwards and scrambled towards the pair of them, climbing on the backs and shoulders of the dispersing dead.
He could see the others clearly, but they were moving out of reach in the great churning sea of flesh. He was surrounded by the fearful faces of those about to die, each held in impression rather than detail. Their tormentors—men merely recruited to perform a duty, after all, replaceable faceless servants—were corporeally unrepresented in this seething nightmare. Goaded and panicked, the naked howling mass rushed forwards towards the gates. High above them, crimson sparks danced in the ash-laden smoke that belched from the glowing chimney furnaces. The entrance to the crematorium was packed with rushing bodies; everyone who had passed this way, all at once. No fires of hell had ever borne witness to such eager damnation.
Nick fought to stay afloat in the eddying mass, shouting after Josh as he was borne away towards the gates. Danuta resurfaced near him, and his fist connected with her raised wrist. He pulled hard. He would return her to the carriage and force her to ride the train back to Chelmsk. He would persuade her to surrender her unborn child, a trade that meant saving her own life. She had known the consequences of boarding the Arkangel. He owed her a debt of honour. More, he knew he loved her. He yelled at her to hold on, but the sound of his voice was lost beneath a million others.
He felt himself being carried backwards towards the open door of the train carriage, turning and tipping until he had lost all sense of balance or direction. When he managed to upright himself he saw the Arkangel’s pistons starting to pump, saw the conductor haul himself up into the train on shattered legs. Before the carriage door was slammed shut he glimpsed Danuta one last time. She had found Josh close beside her, and although they could not touch she seemed to draw comfort in his proximity. She looked around for Nick, saw him climbing to his feet in the doorway of the train, and placidly studied his face. Her eyes told him something else, that the child in her belly was his. As if she was freed by imparting this knowledge, she no longer resisted the movement of the crowd but complied with her fate, twisting towards the gates and brick chambers beyond like an exhausted swimmer drifting through an ocean of souls.
When he looked back at the scene through a caul of tears, he found that she and Josh were already lost from view.
The whistle shrieked and the train began to shunt once more. Through blasts of steam and acrid coal-smoke Nick saw the station roll back and fade like a scene fragmented by migraine.
When he was finally able to raise his head once more and look from the window, all that remained was the empty plain, the ancient meadowlands and the approaching forest of silver birches.
The Mistake at the Monsoon Palace
‘Iska kyadaam hal?’
‘How much does this cost?’
Marion Wilson gave up trying to memorise the phrases. She looked up from her guidebook, switching her attention to the driver. ‘Sorry, what did you say?’
‘I said my cousin owns the best pashmina shop in Jaipur,’ Shere told her. ‘He will be honoured to make you a special deal because you are my valued client.’
Sure, she thought, this guy is your cousin, your brother, your uncle, anyone other than some creep you cut deals with to rob rich, gullible Americans. She impatiently tapped the guidebook with her forefinger, recalling the page about touts and conmen.
‘I assure you, you will not find finer materials in all of India.’
‘Forget it, Shere, it’s not going to happen,’ she told him. ‘Trust me, I bought enough stuff yesterday to fill an extra suitcase.’ In the three days that Shere had been appointed as her driver, they had visited jewellery stores selling silver bracelets that broke in half the first time you wore them, ‘hand-woven’ scarves produced by children in a Mumbai sweatshop and wooden statues of Ganesh that looked like they’d been speed-carved in the dark. ‘Let’s get on, it’s already ten.’
‘But, madam, this shop is of highest quality, government approved, everyone goes there, Richard Gere, everyone.’ The driver was wobbling his head amiably. ‘We stop for five minutes, no longer, and you do not have to buy if you do not wish.’
‘Well, I do not wish.’ She pulled a small plastic bottle of antiseptic wash from her trousers and poured a little of the blue liquid into her hands. She had been touching rupees so soft and brown that they looked as if they’d been used for—she dreaded to think what. She silently repeated the hygiene rule: right hand for taking money and greeting, because here the left hand was used as a substitute for toilet paper. Not that she was as pernickety as some. Iris, her companion from Ohio, had arrived in Delhi with an entire suitcase full of bottled water, which was taking things a little too far.
The little white taxi nosed its way back out of the crowded market square towards the main road, a dusty two-lane highway filled with overladen trucks, hay carts and sleeping cows. It was the end of the first week in July, and the monsoon season had yet to start, but the sky was dark with sinister cumulus. The ever-present pink mists that softened the views in every town they had visited had gone now, to be replaced by hot clear stillness. Marion wanted to open the window, to breathe something other than filtered freezing air, but could see black clouds of mosquitoes rising from ditches of dead water as the car passed.
Her attention drifted back to the guidebook, which had fallen open on a list of Indian gods. The text was accompanied by tiny pastel drawings which made them all look the same. Bhairav. Ganesha. Hanuman. Rama. Shiva. Surya. Vishnu. Arrayed in lilac and yellow, blue and pink they rode birds, bore swords, cups, fire, tridents and bows, a vast network of deities who still seemed to hold some kind of power over the lives of ordinary people…she felt her eyes closing as the car swayed, and saw for a moment a bejewelled god lit by a curved prism of rubies and sapphires, spangling and spinning from his head. Feeling faint, she blinked the colours away.
She glanced up to the scenes rolling beyond the glass. Azure, crimson and sunflower bolts of cloth were stacked on the dirty pavement like a disassembled rainbow. The traffic was detouring around a buffalo that stood in the middle of the road, patiently chewing a plastic bag. It wore a gold-trimmed dress, its horns painted blue, its pierced ears laced with bells.
An ancient, bony man in a pink turban was squatting on the hard shoulder, cooking a chicken over an upright burning tyre.
A motorized rickshaw overtook them with two children and a piebald goat wedged inside it.
An elephant driver was asleep in a faded red howdah, waiting for tourist coaches that would not arrive—the latest wave of terrorist b
ombings had seen to that.
A wedding band in yellow and silver uniforms were wearily donning the jackets they had dried on a row of thorn bushes.
A quartet of girls in identical yellow saris walked by, all listening to the same song on their mobile phones.
What do they think when they see me? Marion thought. Do they even see me? Am I as invisible to them as they are in my country?
What she first thought was a sparkling blue lake turned out to be a great ditch filled with empty plastic bottles.
‘Where you want to go now?’ the driver asked. Marion looked down at the guidebook in her lap and squinted at endless pages of forts and markets. Despite the low temperature in the vehicle, she felt overheated and fractious. She was still angry with Iris for deserting her five days into the trip. A few bouts of diarrhoea and she was calling her husband, making arrangements to return home. The secret was to keep tackling the spicy food until your stomach adjusted, Marion had been told. You’ve an iron constitution, her father had always said, you’re made of stronger stuff than your mother. You just have too much imagination.
The driver had pulled the car over to the side of the road, and was talking to two young men with old faces, nondescript Indians of the type you saw everywhere, skinny and serious to the point of appearing mournful, with side partings and brown sweaters and baggy suit trousers hiding thin legs. Most of the men seemed to do nothing but sit around drinking chai while the women wielded pick-axes in rubble-filled vacant lots.
She tried to listen in on the conversation but realised they were speaking Hindi. ‘Who are these people?’ she asked, leaning forwards between the headrests.
Red Gloves, Volumes I & II Page 37