The Girl From the Train

by Irma Joubert

The nights were hard. What if she screamed and woke the other girls when her nightmares came? What would they think?

  Her longing for Jakób returned every night. She would take out her little cross and press it to her heart. One morning one of the ladies found the cross in her bed.

  “What’s this?” she asked, frowning.

  “It was a gift,” said Gretl. If they took her cross and threw it into the sea, like Horst’s ball, she would jump overboard.

  “Get rid of it,” said the lady. “Wearing a cross is a sin.”

  All day Gretl was troubled—how could wearing a cross be a sin? The nuns loved God so much that they did everything He said. They wore big crosses around their necks every day. But there was no one she could ask.

  And there was another thing she was worried about—what if the people the doctor chose for her didn’t want her? What if they took her only because they had to and they didn’t like her at all? What if she was too old, too pale, too thin?

  “They’ll like you,” Tante Irmgard said. “You’ll see. Everyone likes you.”

  But Gretl knew it wasn’t true. Monicka hadn’t liked her at all. Neither had Aunt Anastarja, or she wouldn’t have said there was no room for her in the house.

  These thoughts gave way to other worries. I must remember I’m not Catholic, Gretl thought. I am German-Lutheran. The people in South Africa must never know I once lived in southern Poland, because they will want to know how I got there. And no one must ever ever know I have Jewish blood, that I’m not pure Aryan. And I mustn’t say I learned Russian at school, because the Afrikaners hate the Russians, just as the Poles hate the Germans and the Germans hate the English.

  The lump was back in her tummy, and it was hard as a stone.

  Jakób loved her, though he had never said so. He wanted what was best for her. That was why she was on her way to South Africa now. She wished she had stayed with Jakób instead.

  On September 8 the Winchester Castle docked in Cape Town at last.

  Early in the morning they had to put all their belongings on their berths. Gretl pushed the cross deep into the pocket of her red coat, where no one would find it. The helper ladies wrapped their things in brown paper parcels and tied them up with string.

  Their hair had been washed and they were all wearing clean clothes. The girls wore ribbons and looked very pretty. When they disembarked, more journalists would be waiting for them.

  Onkel Schalk spoke to them one last time. “You are Afrikaners now, no longer Germans. The Afrikaners are a proud nation. Be proud of your new nation. Behave like true Afrikaners!”

  But when they came on deck, there was no sunshine, only clouds and a light drizzle. The Union of South Africa looked gray and cold and wet. There were no lions or elephants, only people with umbrellas gazing up at the ship. Even the mountain Onkel Schalk had told them about was hidden behind thick clouds.

  One of the older boys came running, shouting that he had seen a black man. “Onkel Botha, ich habe einen Schwarzen gesehen!”

  Gretl got off the ship with the other children and stepped onto the soil of her new home.

  7

  SOUTH AFRICA, SEPTEMBER 1948

  Gretl listened to the clickety-clack of the wheels on the track. The train was heading deeper and deeper into Africa. She lay facedown in the middle bunk, the little wooden cross in her clenched fist. Lying on her tummy stopped it from aching so much. She looked through the train window. The full moon lit up the bare landscape. It was wide and open and dry and empty.

  She was exhausted, yet she couldn’t sleep. Something bigger than herself seemed to be growing inside her. Not fear, but a great uncertainty.

  Tomorrow was the tenth of September, her birthday, but no one knew. She would be eleven, but she wouldn’t tell anyone. On her eleventh birthday she would get off at the last station, meet her new parents, and go to bed in a new home. It was more than three months since she and Jakób had left the station at Częstochowa.

  Jakób. He would know it was her birthday. He would think of her tomorrow, even if clouds hid the moon.

  Yesterday many of the children had met their new parents. The rest of them were on their way to a place called Pretoria. All over South Africa people were interested in the German orphans. Even the country’s leader had taken a child, four-year-old Hermine Sönnichsen. Gretl thought the man looked more like a grandpa than a daddy.

  She had overheard someone who had come to see if he wanted a German orphan telling another man, “I want to be quite certain the child isn’t Polish or Jewish or Russian. I won’t allow a bad seed in my household.”

  Gretl smelled the acrid smoke of the train. It burned the back of her throat, burned paths into her memory, burned until her head ached.

  The younger children immediately found homes. They were taken away in the arms of men and ladies. On Gretl’s third day in Pretoria, Dr. Bührmann told her that the people who might take her would come in the afternoon.

  Might take her.

  Just before teatime one of the helper ladies told Gretl to go to the office. After lunch she had washed and not gone back out to play, in case she soiled her dress or the ribbon in her hair came undone.

  For a long time she sat on a hard chair in front of the office, her feet swinging above the floor. The door remained shut. Inside, Dr. Bührmann and a gentleman were talking to a mommy and daddy who . . . Gretl told herself to think about other things.

  The door finally opened. “Come inside, Gretl,” said Dr. Bührmann in German. “Meet your new parents.”

  She saw her new daddy first. He was very, very big. She looked up into his blue eyes.

  “This is your daddy, Oom Bernard Neethling,” said Dr. Bührmann in Afrikaans, “and this is young Gretl Schmidt.”

  She looked him in the eye and held out her hand. She greeted him in Afrikaans. “Good afternoon, Father.”

  He bent down low. Her hand disappeared completely in his. His hands were hard, but his eyes were gentle and shining. “Good afternoon, Gretl.” He said something else that she didn’t understand, so she just smiled.

  “And here’s your mommy, Tannie Kate Neethling.”

  “Guten Mittag, Gretl.”

  The lady spoke German. Gretl felt happiness engulf her like a warm wave.

  She looked up at the most beautiful lady she had ever seen, much more beautiful than any of the other new mommies. She had dark hair and her eyes were dark too, but not black like Jakób’s. Her hands were soft. “Good afternoon, Mother,” Gretl said, the way she had been taught.

  The lady stroked Gretl’s hair and said, “Thank you, Dr. Bührmann. She’s perfect.”

  They walked along the path to the car, Gretl and her big new daddy and her pretty new mommy. Her entire body felt as if it were twisted up in her tummy. She couldn’t think of anything to say, not even in German, so she just clutched the brown-paper parcel with her possessions to her chest, the little cross hidden in the pocket of her red coat.

  They drove and drove in a big car. She sat in the backseat, alone. The man’s big hands were on the steering wheel, and the hair on his fingers glinted gold in the sunlight. His hair was blond, like hers, and he had blue eyes, like her own. Maybe people would think she was his real daughter. When he looked at her in the rearview mirror and smiled, his teeth were shiny and white.

  The lady’s gleaming black hair was fixed in a bun. She wore pretty white beads around her neck. She turned to look at Gretl and said in German, “We’re on our way to Johannesburg. We’ll be spending two nights there before going home.” She struggled a bit, as if she hadn’t spoken the language for a long time. “We’re going to see my father, Grandpa
John. He’s English.”

  Gretl nodded. “I don’t understand English,” she said.

  The lady smiled. “You’ll soon learn. Dr. Bührmann told us you’re very clever. But let’s just deal with Afrikaans first.”

  They drove along a road with very few houses. The land was flat and bare. The trees were few and far between. The sun blazed down on everything.

  “Did you live in Germany before?” Gretl asked.

  The lady turned again. “Only for a year. I was in a kind of school, not actually in Germany, in Switzerland,” she said.

  “In Switzerland?” Gretl asked, surprised. Onkel Hans lived in Switzerland, but she couldn’t mention Onkel Hans, because he was Oma’s brother and he was Jewish.

  “Yes, what do you know about Switzerland?”

  “Heidi and Peter live there, with the goats,” Gretl said.

  The lady smiled. “You’re right. And Alm U. He was strict, wasn’t he?”

  Gretl nodded. “But later he became kind.”

  “Yes,” the lady said, “later he became kind.”

  She faced forward again. Occasionally she and the man talked, but Gretl didn’t understand much. The lady did most of the talking. The man mostly said, “Mm.” The painful lump was still in Gretl’s tummy.

  The lady turned once more and said, “Gretl, we’d like to give you an Afrikaans name, if it’s all right with you.”

  “Onkel Schalk hat das gesagt, auf dem Schiff, damit wir Afrikaner werden können, deshalb,” she said.

  The lady smiled and turned to the man. “She says Schalk Botha told them so, on the ship, so that they can become Afrikaners.”

  The man looked at Gretl in the mirror and smiled. “We’re going to turn you into a real little Afrikaner,” he said. “We just have to put some color in those pale cheeks and some fat on that skinny little body.”

  She understood a little of what he said. She thought carefully and said in Afrikaans, “Like the witch did with Hansel and Gretel?”

  The man and the lady both laughed. “Where we live there’s no witch,” said the man.

  “That’s good,” said Gretl. She wanted to say more, but she didn’t know how.

  “In Afrikaans their names are Hansie and Grietjie,” said the lady. “That’s what we’d like to call you: Griet. Or the smaller form: Grietjie.”

  “I like it,” said Gretl. “Grietjie Neethling.” The g and r would take a lot of practice for her to pronounce properly.

  It was almost dark by the time they stopped at a tall iron gate ornamented with scrolls and twirls. Behind the gate she saw a big stone house covered almost to the roof with green ivy.

  “It looks like Sleeping Beauty’s palace,” said Gretl.

  The lady seemed surprised. “That’s exactly what I used to think when I was a little girl,” she said.

  A tall man wearing spectacles opened the door. “Daddy, this is Gretl. We call her Griet.”

  “Grietjie,” her new father said from behind. “She’s too small to be Griet.”

  “Hello, Grietjie,” said the tall man with the thick, gray hair. “I’m Grandpa John.”

  Gretl held out her hand. “Good evening, Grandpa John,” she said. She had noticed that he also struggled to pronounce the g and the r in Grietjie.

  The house looked like a palace inside too. Gretl was introduced to Aunt Nellie, who looked after Grandpa John, and to Elias, the cook.

  They ate like kings at a table under a light dripping with diamonds. There was a lot of food, but she found it hard to swallow. Even the dessert.

  “Never mind,” the lady comforted her in German. “It’s all new to you. You’ll soon feel at home.”

  Upstairs, the lady ran her a bath. There was foam in the water and the soap smelled of flowers. The lady washed her hair and combed it. “I’ve always wanted a little girl with blonde curls and blue eyes,” she said.

  The lady was kind, but Gretl wished she would go now. She felt confused and wanted to be alone for a while.

  The bed was big and very soft, like the bed of the princess who slept on a pea. The man came in to say good night. “Good night,” said Gretl.

  The man bent down. “Good night, little princess,” he said, stroking her hair. “Sleep tight.”

  “I’ll stay until she’s asleep,” said the lady.

  The man stroked the lady’s hair too and said, “Isn’t she lovely?”

  The lady touched Gretl’s cheek. “She’s perfect.”

  When the man had left, the lady spoke in German. “If you’re afraid to sleep alone, I’ll sleep here with you. See, the bed is big enough.”

  “I’m not afraid,” said Gretl, closing her eyes, “just tired.” And lonely, and longing with all her heart for the hard, narrow bed on the porch of a farmer’s cottage in Poland.

  She closed her eyes and breathed regularly so that the lady would think she was asleep. They think I’m lovely, even though I’m pale and skinny, she told herself. No one had ever called her lovely. Jakób had told her to remember she was his beautiful Gretl Schmidt, but that was just so that she wouldn’t feel unwanted. The man and the lady had said she was lovely and perfect for no reason she could think of.

  After a while the lady got up quietly and tiptoed out. Gretl opened her eyes and looked around her. In the soft glow of the bedside lamp it looked even more like the room of a princess. She got out of bed and crossed to the window. The city lights glittered like hundreds of stars in the dark night.

  She saw the moon above the trees. I have a new mommy and daddy who really want me, she told Jakób. They have a car and nice clothes, so they should have enough money to send me to school.

  But Poland was very far from South Africa.

  She heard music from somewhere below. On her bare feet she went down the thickly carpeted stairs. She held on to the turned wooden banister and went down slowly, step by step, until she reached the shiny marble floor. She followed the chink of light that fell across the floor of the entrance hall. The door of the study was ajar, so she gently pushed it.

  Grandpa John was sitting on the soft leather couch, his legs stretched in front of him, his eyes closed, a slight smile on his lips. Sweat had formed on his drinking glass on the table next to him, and the sweet smell of his cigar hung in the air.

  He looked lonely.

  Then he opened his eyes and smiled at her. He didn’t look so lonely anymore.

  “Come, sit with me for a while,” he said, patting the couch beside him.

  She sat very straight. Her feet didn’t touch the floor. She sat quietly, listening to the beautiful music.

  “Did you like it?” asked Grandpa John when the last notes faded away.

  She thought she knew what he meant. She had found it beautiful, almost like the music in the cathedral, only more so. She nodded. “Sehr schön,” she said.

  Grandpa John got up and took another record off the shelf. He bent down to the turntable and carefully lowered the needle. Then he sat down again and gave Gretl a smile.

  A man began to sing “Das Zauberlied.”

  “Das ist Deutsch,” Gretl said, surprised.

  Grandpa John smiled and nodded. “Josef Schmidt,” he said.

  “Mein Nachname ist auch Schmidt,” said Gretl, “aber jetzt heisse ich Neethling.”

  Grandpa John nodded and opened his arm. Gretl nestled against him. He held her tightly. Together they sat listening to the German music.

  For the first time in months the lump in her tummy began to melt. Warmth flooded her, merging with the be
autiful music and the sweet smell of Grandpa John’s cigar and his unfamiliar arm keeping her safe and the dreamy knowledge that she was among people who cared. Later she felt him pick her up and carry her up the stairs. She didn’t open her eyes, because it was lovely; it reminded her of the times Jakób used to carry her. Grandpa John put her down on the big soft bed, tucked the blankets around her, and carefully shut the door.

  “I don’t know what to call you,” Gretl said when her new mommy came to see whether she was awake. She had already made her bed and put on a clean dress. She would have to wash the dress she had worn yesterday in order to wear it again tomorrow.

  “You may call us Oom Bernard and Tannie Kate, or Daddy and Mommy, just as you wish.”

  The lady struggled with Gretl’s hair ribbon. “I’ve never had a little girl, so I don’t really know how,” she admitted.

  “Do you have a little boy?” asked Gretl.

  “Yes, but he’s a big boy now. He’s fourteen and his name is Kobus. We live on a farm. He’s waiting there to meet you, because today is Friday. During the week he goes to boarding school.”

  Gretl hoped he would be disciplined, not like some of the boys on the ship. “You smell nice,” she said.

  “Thank you, sweetheart.” The lady stepped back and looked at Gretl in the mirror. “You look lovely, Grietjie. Come, let’s put a little perfume on you as well.”

  It sounded strange, the name Grietjie.

  In the grown-ups’ bedroom the lady selected a small bottle from the big dressing table. “Vier sieben eins eins,” Gretl read.

  “It’s the name of the perfume,” the lady explained in German. “But in English you say, ‘Four seven eleven.’ ”

  “Four seven eleven,” Gretl repeated. She was proud to say her first English words.

  While they were having breakfast, she kept breathing deeply, savoring the perfume the lady had dabbed behind her ears. She smelled like a real princess.

  After breakfast they drove into Johannesburg, she, the lady, and the man. She and the lady were going to shop for clothes. The man had work to do. He ruffled Gretl’s hair when he dropped them off.