by Peter Quinn
“Nobody can accuse the Germans of not being thorough.” Van Hull turned right onto a lane with four modest cottages, the first three charred hulks, the fourth intact.
“If it was the Germans. It could have been the Hlinka Guard punishing the partisans, or perhaps the partisans teaching Monsignor Tiso’s loyalists a lesson. Everyone, it seems, has his motive.”
Van Hull kicked open the door of the last cottage. He summoned Dunne and Niskolczi with a wave of his hand. Past the small vestibule, to the right, was a bedroom only large enough to hold a double bed and a bureau. The bed was stripped bare. Van Hull looked inside the bureau drawers: empty except for a homey, warm camphor smell, reminder of a time when moths were deemed the prime menace to domestic order.
They left the bedroom and went into the parlor. A richly colored Oriental rug covered the floor. Opposite a red horsehair sofa was an upright piano. Atop it was a lace runner and framed photographs: old woman with an infant in her lap; ebullient bride and tight-lipped bridegroom; the same couple—the man noticeably stouter—in summer clothes, a snow-tipped mountain behind; in front, three children in descending sizes.
Niskolczi, Van Hull, and Dunne stood mute in the middle of the room, as if they’d stepped into a museum exhibit featuring a re-creation of a vanished planet and the comforts, obligations, duties it once orbited around. Niskolczi picked up the porcelain figurine of a ballerina from the table next to the couch. Poised tiptoe, she had one hand extended, the other raised above her head.
He turned it over. “I thought so.” He pointed at the letter D above a crown. “Made in Dresden. A beautiful piece.” As he carefully replaced it, his shoulders began to shake and heave with sobs. He wiped eyes and nose with his sleeve. “I wasn’t sure a place like this still existed.”
Lowering himself onto the piano bench, he caressed the polished ebony surface, the gold phoenix logo and the letters of the manufacturer’s name: Schwimmer. He tapped a key with forefinger, spread long, elegant fingers, and began to play a slow, mournful tune. He lowered his head and sang—almost chanted—in a high, tremulous voice:
Lacrimosa dies illa
Qua resurget ex favilla
Judicandus homo reus.
He stopped and wiped his eyes again. Van Hull put his hand on his shoulder. “The ‘Lacrimosa’ from Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor. It’s among my favorite pieces of music:
‘Mournful that day / When from the ashes shall rise / A guilty man to be judged.’
“You play beautifully, Doctor. Please, continue.”
“Maybe another day, in some other place.”
As Dunne turned to leave the room, the bottom of his crutch caught on the rug. He stumbled and knocked into the table. The figurine tumbled to the floor and smashed. “Christ Almighty, I’m sorry.”
“Forget it, Fin. We’ve got more important business to attend to.” Van Hull left the parlor and entered the dining room.
Amid the destruction in the surrounding village, itself an insignificant fragment of the ruin that had engulfed countries, peoples, and continents and that had reached some terrible—almost incomprehensible—climax in the process of mass murder outlined by Niskolczi, Dunne knew how preposterous it was to get upset by this inadvertent breakage. But he couldn’t stop gazing at the broken figurine, imagining he might find a way to fix it.
Niskolczi pushed the pieces under the sofa with his shoe. “It is a thing, a beautiful thing, but only a thing. It can be remade. A human soul cannot. History masks that truth. History is what happens to us collectively, as peoples, states, nations. Tragedy is what happens to us individually as human beings.”
“It was an accident.”
“Of course. Your intent was not to destroy. But regrets are useless. The only way to repair what is broken is to go on living, to look to the future and see to it that the individual victims are remembered, their tragedies honored, their murderers judged.”
In the next room, Van Hull noisily piled plates, cups, and silverware from the sideboard on the dining room table. “We’ll come back for these. Let’s hope we can find something to use them for.” Niskolczi and Dunne trailed him into the kitchen. They searched the cabinets and pantry, but the shelves were bare. Beside the back door, above the broom closet, was a padlocked half-cabinet.
“Fin, hand me the forty-five, will you?” Van Hull blew off the lock with a single shot. “Well, what’d you know? The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.” He handed four large cans of beans and three tins of biscuits to Niskolczi, who put them in his sack.
They continued their search. They took the thick coverlets from the beds in the two adjoining bedrooms and piled them by the door along with some pots and pans from the kitchen. “We’ll come back for these, too,” Van Hull said.
The remainder of their rummaging through the village turned up half a sack of potatoes, three loaves of stale bread, a bag of salt, and a jar of apple jam. Van Hull found two sets of workmen’s overalls and jackets in an abandoned woodshop. They stopped in the church on the way back. The altar was stripped, the tabernacle empty, and the benches pushed against the wall, as though the space had been used as a barracks. Van Hull found a box of votive candles in the basement and a half-dozen linen hand towels.
It took two trips to return all they’d scavenged to the station. The gray day grew bitingly cold. Van Hull rebuilt the fire. The rich, comforting smell of cooking summoned Dunne from his nap. Van Hull had softened potatoes in a pot of boiling water, sliced them into pieces, and dropped them into the pan in which he was frying beans. Working expertly on the small surface atop the stove, he transferred the beans and potatoes back to the pot. He wet the stale bread and fried it in the pan. The windows drooled with moisture.
Except for two women and a man stricken with typhus, who moaned in a semidelirious sleep, even the sickest and most lethargic sat up ready to eat. It turned out that the curled figure closest to the door, head covered by a red-and-white kerchief, belonged not to an old woman, as Dunne had thought, but to a frightfully thin yet exceedingly pretty girl of about sixteen. Her green eyes were alert and purposeful. She took off the kerchief. A crop of tight honey-colored curls had already sprouted on her once-shaved head.
Niskolczi nodded toward her. “Frieda Schwimmer,” he whispered to Dunne. “Her family is the famous piano manufacturer. At fifteen she was regarded as a musical prodigy, a female cellist who’d one day play in all the great concert halls of Europe. Her mother, father, and two older sisters perished in Auschwitz. How much music do you think she has left in her now?”
He turned his attention back to the room, sternly warning them all not to eat too much and to eat slowly. When everyone had finished, Dunne washed out the pot. He filled it with water and put it on the stove to boil. He tied up a mound of coffee in a linen hand towel and dipped it in and out repeatedly, like a tea bag, until the brew was dark. He scooped out a cupful to taste.
Van Hull stood ready with a cup of his own. “How is it?”
“It’s not Maxwell House, but it’s coffee.”
A line of people formed, each with a china cup to use as a scooper. They helped themselves to the crackers and apple jam. The coverlets were spread across the floor, around the stove. Before long most of those in the room were asleep.
Niskolczi put his coat on and in a hushed voice asked Dunne and Van Hull to step outside. The frigid night, windless and starless, was momentarily refreshing.
“What is your plan from here?” Niskolczi pulled his coat close around him.
“To get back home,” Van Hull said.
“That’s an aspiration, not a plan.”
“For now, it’s both.”
“Those inside are too weak to walk anywhere.” Niskolczi glanced at the station. Votive candles flickered in the windows, a substitute starlight. “But you’ve done all you can, and I’m deeply grateful. I’m sure the partisans or Russians will come. It’s only a question of when. Your duty as soldiers is to get back to your own lines, is it not?”
Dunne shrugged. “I’m not sure all the services see it that way, but the OSS does.”
“The more who survive, the less chance the world can deny or ignore what happened.”
“We’ll figure out a plan as we go along. That’s how we got this far.”
“Your ankle will make it all the harder, no?”
“He’s been doing fine with the crutch.” Van Hull folded his arms and hugged himself, an instinctive but ineffective protection against the cold.
“I can help you get a good start.” Niskolczi led them back to the station and handed them each a votive candle. “Follow me.” They went out the rear door, to a shack atop the siding beside the main track. He stepped in and held up his candle. “It’s an old piece of machinery but still in good working order. It should be most useful.”
Candles aloft, Dunne and Van Hull stood on either side of the four-wheeled wooden handcar. Dunne sat on the flatbed. “One time, at the Catholic Protectory in the Bronx, two of my dorm mates jumped the wall, stole one of these in the Tremont train yards, and rode it all the way to Penn Station. They made a clean getaway.”
Van Hull gripped one of the handles on the cast-iron seesaw bolted to the flatbed and pulled himself up. “I’m not sure this will get us all the way to Penn Station, but if it were the Golden Chariot of Achilles, it couldn’t be more of a godsend.”
Before they retired for the night, Niskolczi produced a pint-size glass bottle. “This is what’s left of the alcohol. Here’s to your journey, gentlemen. L’chaim.” He took a swig and passed the bottle to Van Hull. “Do you know what that means?”
“To life.” Van Hull enjoyed an equally generous draft.
“I’ll drink to that.” Dunne matched them.
They finished the bottle on the next round.
The itch on Dunne’s scalp made it hard for him to sleep. He sat by the stove, picking through his hair until he felt the squiggle of a fat louse beneath his fingernail. He catapulted each one into the fire, where it made a small pop. He kept at it, tweezing lice between thumb and forefinger and tossing them into the fire. Finally, his eyes began to close. He got beneath a blanket on the floor and fell instantly asleep.
In the morning, they pored over railroad maps from the stationmaster’s desk. There weren’t a lot of choices about which route to take. In a few spots a trunk line was available. Mostly they’d have to travel west and south on the main track. The handcar wasn’t exceedingly heavy—four men could lift it off the track so it wouldn’t delay oncoming trains—but with only two, one with a bum ankle, it would be problematic.
One way or another, they’d ride the handcar as near as they could get to Bratislava—Van Hull fingered it on the map—stopping before the concentration of military traffic would make it almost certain they’d be detained and discovered. From there on, they’d revert to the roads, doing their best to blend in with the swelling flow of those uprooted by the unfolding doom of Germany’s eastern empire.
Dunne and Van Hull donned the jackets and overalls rescued from the woodshed. Niskolczi presented them with two workers’ caps he’d found in an abandoned locker, the railway metal identity badges still attached. He also pointed out that they needed to do something about the American army boots they were wearing, which would give them away immediately. They substituted string for the shoelaces and pared off the leather high-tops, which gave them a suitably derelict look. They packed a portion of fried bread, crackers, and apple jam in a burlap bag.
After Van Hull went ahead, Niskolczi handed Dunne “a final parting gift”: a knob-headed wooden cane. “This will serve you better than that homemade crutch. I took it from that cottage and saved it for this moment. It’s hawthorn, an ancient emblem of hope. The Greeks used it to decorate the altar of Hymen, the god of wedding feasts.”
“My grandfather had a cane like this. He called it a shillelagh. The Irish carried them to fights and weddings, not that there was always a difference.”
“I’ve something else as well. I took it from you last night after you fell asleep.” Niskolczi cradled two pills in his palm. “I did the same with your companion’s. I was sure what it was when it spilled from your pocket. It was terribly presumptuous of me. I realize that. You may have them back if you wish.”
“It’s always nice to have options.”
“Yes, but the best option is to survive, don’t you think?”
“There are no guarantees. You know that better than anyone.”
“I doubt such a thing as Providence exists. If it did, how could what has happened have happened? Still, I believe these people in my care—this remnant—have been entrusted to me so they might survive. The two of you, the way you appeared out of nowhere, have reinforced that belief. Until we are safe and their story told, my work is unfinished. It is necessary for us—for you—to survive this war. It is required of us. After that, who knows?”
“I’ve always thought of Providence as nothing more than a third-rate city in a third-rate state. But maybe you’re right. Maybe there’s more to it. Keep the pills.”
“What about your friend? Do you think he wants his back?”
“He’s not the type to use it. Never was.”
Niskolczi folded his hand around the pills and put them in his pocket.
Van Hull helped Dunne onto the flatbed. Niskolczi and a few others from inside the station saw them off. He reached up to shake their hands. “This world of ours, seemingly so vast, often turns out to be quite small. We’ll meet in a better place and in a better time—that is my hope.”
The day was clear and crisp. Van Hull removed his jacket and draped it over the seesaw pump. “We’ll be sweating before long.” He depressed and lifted the bar on his side. Dunne held it for support, using it to take the weight off his ankle and pumped. The handcar began to move and quickly gathered speed.
Dunne glanced back. Among those with Niskolczi was the girl with the distinctive green eyes whom he’d noticed the night before—he struggled to remember her name—anonymous Jewish survivor in a place whose name he hadn’t bothered to learn, a fragment in a vast shattering of lives, families, communities. She took off her red-and-white kerchief, held it above her head, waved it, a cryptic semaphore—hello, good-bye? Farewell to tragedy and history, to accumulated, systemized hatred? Welcome to what lay ahead, justice done, a new beginning for the survivors, a wedding feast? Who could say for sure?
Dunne stopped pumping, picked up his cane/shillelagh/bridal bough, and waved back. Who knew for certain whether or not Providence existed? Her name came back to him: Frieda. Yes. Her last name the same as on that piano: Schwimmer.
They moved rapidly through tranquil, snow-dusted countryside. An occasional spire jutted in the distance. Dunne removed his jacket. Van Hull had been right about the sweat their pumping would produce. They reached a station. Carbines strung over their shoulders, a trio in the black uniforms of the Hlinka Guard patrolled the platform. As the handcar drew near, Van Hull discreetly switched the .45 from his belt to coat pocket. The guardsmen smoked and conversed, and barely noticed as they passed.
In several places, where the ground was badly cratered, the track had been hastily repaired. Along with on-the-ground sabotage by partisans, Van Hull remarked, Allied planes were undoubtedly attacking trains that moved by day, which explained the lack of traffic. It also boded well for their journey.
They pulled over on a siding and ate lunch. “Maybe we’ve stumbled on a new form of tourism.” Van Hull handed Dunne the flask of water. “After the war, we can create a franchise and rent handcars. We’ll call it Maxwell Tours—‘Enjoy the sights and stay fit at the same time.’” Van Hull laughed.
Afternoon was as uneventful as morning. They rode the empty track, making rapid progress, traveling as soldiers rather than tourists, uninterested in the sights—rivers, mountains, churches, villages—attention focused on moving fast and surviving.
At sunset, they came to another siding and pulled over. The sky was a Technicolor sp
read of blue and purple hues, wide and unbounded, a backdrop for Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth to dance against. “God, Fin, it reminds me of home, like in the song.” Dunne lay down: familiar lyrics, sentimental but moving, for spacious skies, purple mountain majesties, fruited plain. Hopeful but sad. Long ago and far away.
The second day proceeded much like the first. At noon, a German armored car pulled parallel to them on the road next to the tracks. Van Hull gave a casual wave. The driver waved back, offhandedly. They ate the last of their food for dinner.
Near evening on the third day, as they pumped to the top of a steep hill and began a long glide down the opposite slope, they heard the shriek of a train whistle. A moment later, it sounded again, closer. The handcar shot down the incline. When it neared the bottom, they resumed pumping. Behind them, the enormous black bulk of a locomotive crested the hill. The steam-spewing iron mammoth bore down on them with mounting, remorseless momentum, high-pitched cry imminent and earsplitting.
“Let’s go!” Van Hull jumped to the ground. He stumbled and fell. Dunne sat on the side of the platform, hesitating to jump and reinjure his ankle. Back on his feet, Van Hull raced to catch up. He drew next to the handcar. “Get on my back!” he yelled. The handcar shook with the vibration of the looming engine. Dunne crouched and jumped on Van Hull’s back.
Van Hull staggered but stayed on his feet. The engine plowed into the handcar, scattering the splintered carcass on either side of the tracks. A clattering procession of eight flatcars followed, each loaded with two Panzer tanks secured by iron chains. Lowering Dunne to the ground, Van Hull pulled out the .45 and fired wildly, with spontaneous, irrational fury. The train sped away, oblivious. A hollow click indicated the magazine was exhausted. He hurled the gun in the direction of the fast-receding train and plopped dejectedly by the side of the track, head in his hands.
Dunne lay where he was. Feverish, tired, he felt ready to go to sleep.