The Girl From the Train

by Irma Joubert

  “How did the fire start?”

  “Mutti wanted to cook me some food. The Primus stove exploded.”

  His heart went out to the girl in the bed. He laid his hand on her cheek. “It’s the fire of your dream, isn’t it, Grietjie?”

  “Yes. I know it now. It’s my fire.”

  They sat in silence for a long time. The soft light of the oil lamp on the dressing table reached every corner of the room.

  Grietjie lay back with her head against the pillow and closed her eyes. “I can’t believe I didn’t remember it, Jakób.”

  “You erased it from your memory, in order to survive,” he said.

  “I remember everything about the ghetto as well,” she said. “I didn’t want to remember it before.”

  “Tell me, Grietjie.”

  When Kate and Bernard came in to say good night, Grietjie’s eyes were closed and she didn’t seem to realize they were there. Jakób motioned for them to be quiet and sit. They sat down on the bench on the other side of the bed.

  “We lived in one room, all of us. We cooked and washed and slept there. The rest of the house was also full of people. There were always children crying and screaming.”

  She lay against the white pillow, pale as wax.

  “Keep talking, Grietjie.”

  “We were always hungry. Oma and I stood in long lines for our food rations. The streets were filthy.”

  She didn’t know that they were present in the room. With an enormous effort she was traveling back in time, like someone walking through thick sand. She kept clinging to his hand, as if she wanted to take him with her. Anxiety etched her parents’ faces.

  “Speak Afrikaans,” he said.

  Immediately she switched to Afrikaans. “In winter it was bitterly cold, and we had nothing to warm ourselves with. When a windowpane broke, Oma stuffed a rag in the hole to keep out the wind. But our bathroom no longer worked, so we were forced to go outside.

  “The streets were filthy. There were piles of garbage everywhere.”

  She stopped for a moment, then carried on. Her voice was dull and revealed no emotion. “I remember the smell. Oma gave us a handkerchief to hold to our noses. It didn’t help, Jakób. The smell came through the hanky; it came through the rag in the window, into our room.

  “Sometimes we didn’t have water to drink. It was hard, because Jurgen was small. Have I told you about the explosion?”

  “Tell me again, Grietjie.”

  He listened again to the incident, imagining it through the eyes of a five-year-old. She told him about the stove exploding, destroying the rickety table on which it had stood, and the bed and all their earthly possessions, including her coat. He saw Kate huddle against Bernard’s chest; he saw him draw her closer.

  “Then we no longer had a stove to cook on,” said Grietjie. “And Jurgen burned to death, I know.”

  “Tell me more about the ghetto,” he said.

  Across the bed he saw the confusion on her parents’ faces.

  “There was barbed wire on top of the walls. We had to wait in line for food. But I’ve told you that, haven’t I, Jakób?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Tell me everything again.”

  “We had green ration cards, different groups had different colors. The people stole each other’s cards. Or took dead people’s if their families weren’t quick enough. Once a woman who had been standing in line behind Oma and me collapsed and died. The people stepped over her and stayed in line, because if you lost your place, you had to wait hours longer in the snow or rain for your food. Oma told me not to look.”

  He squeezed her thin hand and felt himself shrivel inside. When he had taken her to his parents’ home in Częstochowa, he had paid her little heed, had hardly been aware of her existence. The realization gnawed at his insides.

  “Oma shaved our heads so that we could see the lice more easily. But then we lost the blade, and we couldn’t do that anymore.”

  Jakób looked up and saw the pain in Bernard’s and Kate’s eyes as well.

  “At night the sirens went off, then the bombs came. But the sirens weren’t as bad as the loudspeakers during the day: ‘Achtung! Achtung! Tomorrow at eight o’clock sharp all Jews in Group 12 must report at gate five for deportation to volunteer labor camps! Arbeit macht frei!’

  “Jakób, I think the people knew they were going to be burned in those ovens like the ones they had at Auschwitz, remember?”

  “Yes, Grietjie, I remember,” he answered calmly.

  From the corner of his eye he saw Bernard drop his head and crumple like a man shot through the heart.

  “People died in the ghetto every day. Most of them died of hunger or disease or injuries, or of cold. The people left the bodies in the streets, and a cart came to remove them. The legs of the dead stuck out in every direction. When Uncle Janusz and Stan brought you home in the cart, I thought—”

  “Don’t worry, Grietjie, I’m fine.” To this day he remembered her face when he opened his eyes.

  “Sometimes the cart only came in the afternoon, when Oma and I were standing in line for our food rations. One day my friend who lived lower down the street . . .” Her eyes flew open.

  “I’m here, Grietjie,” he comforted her, stroking her hair. “Tell me about your friend.”

  She began to cry softly. “Jakób, the rats had begun to . . .”

  Grietjie held out her arms to him. He bent over the bed and wrapped his arms around her. “Keep talking, Grietjie,” he said.

  She clung to him. “The loudspeakers said, ’Achtung! Alle Juden Achtung! From this moment all green ration cards are invalid!’ Then we knew we had no more food. So Oma packed our things, and we went on the train that would take us to the labor camp.”

  She talked and talked. After a while he gently laid her back against the pillows and sat down on the chair. He kept stroking her hair, holding her hand, pressing it to his face at times.

  At one point he feared that he was drowning and he rested his head on the bed. He simply couldn’t bear to listen anymore. Then he felt Bernard’s hand on his shoulder. Comforting, strong. The hand stayed there.

  In midsentence, Grietjie fell asleep.

  Kate climbed into bed with her daughter and cradled her in her arms.

  Jakób fled outside.

  The veld lay wide and open around him. The moon was his lantern. He walked and walked. He stood at the stone wall and looked at the silent humps of the cattle inside the kraal. He walked down the road and looked at the white sand in the dry riverbed. He walked along the newly graded road and looked at the hundreds of pigs in their neat sties. He rubbed the trunk of a rough thorn tree, broke off pieces of sticky resin, rolled them between his fingers.

  He didn’t think.

  Fragments of her story came back to him. He tried to chew and digest it. Bits and pieces surfaced in the road ahead of him, rose up among the cattle, stood written in the white sand. Harsh details. He brooded and tried to understand.

  It was too much. And she had borne it alone for more than thirteen years.

  He knelt on the hard surface of the road.

  Mother of God, carry her, carry all of us. Carry me.

  Eventually his agitation subsided.

  When he returned to the homestead much later, Bernard was waiting on the veranda. “Jakób?” he asked.

  “I’ll be fine,” Jakób replied.

  “I don’t think any of us will be fine for a long time to come,” said Bernard. “Kate has made coffee, if you want some.”

  “Yes
, thank you,” said Jakób. Coffee and people around me—ordinary people who spoke to each other and engaged in family devotions and worried about the drought; people who, despite everything, drank coffee and would be getting up early tomorrow morning to milk the cows.

  “Is she asleep?” he asked when they entered the house.

  “Yes, she’s fast asleep.”

  The comforting smell of fresh coffee drew Jakób to the kitchen. They sat at the table. Kate opened a tin of rusks. He dipped the long, narrow biscuit deep into his coffee. It melted in his mouth. He couldn’t imagine a time when the taste had been unfamiliar to him.

  “What’s the time?” he asked.

  “Almost two.”

  “Jakób, why do you think she never told us?” Kate asked.

  “She didn’t tell anyone these things. I believe she had well and truly forgotten them.”

  “You didn’t know either?”

  “I knew she was Jewish, or partly Jewish,” he explained. “I should have known about the ghetto, but I . . .” He shrugged his shoulders. “I just didn’t think.”

  “I think she tried to talk to me,” said Bernard, “specifically about the Jews. But I trod all over her with my muddy paws.”

  His wife looked at him earnestly. “We never suspected anything, Bernard. You couldn’t have known.” She turned to Jakób. “How long did she live in Poland with you?”

  He looked at her and answered, “Four years—from 1944 to 1948.”

  “Four years? Wasn’t she in a German orphanage then?”

  He sighed deeply and pushed his fingers through his black hair. “Let me tell you everything,” he said. “I believe Grietjie will understand.”

  Jakób slept until after twelve, took a shower, shaved, and changed his clothes.

  “You look brand-new.” Kate smiled at him through her own tired eyes.

  He nodded. “How’s Grietjie?”

  “She’s awake. She’s talking to her dad. She’s talking, Jakób, for the first time she’s talking.” She pressed her fingers against her temples. “Heavens, if only we . . .”

  “Don’t, Kate,” Jakób said seriously. “You offered her a safe, happy home. It’s something she never had. You couldn’t have known about all those things.”

  She sighed. “She won our hearts from the very first moment,” she said.

  “I know,” he said. “I know exactly what you mean.”

  Her cheeks were still pale and she looked different with the shorter haircut, but by Thursday Grietjie was up and about.

  “I want to show you the whole farm today, Jakób,” she said at the breakfast table.

  “Too late, sis,” Kobus said. “He helped at the pigsties yesterday. And he gave me a brilliant idea.”

  “What?” she asked inquisitively.

  “Wait and see,” said her brother secretively.

  She pouted. “Jakób will tell me, won’t you, Jakób?”

  “Men’s affairs are men’s affairs, Grietjie,” he said, putting on a serious face.

  She turned to her grandfather. “Grandpa John, tell Kobus—”

  “Fight your own battles!” Her grandfather laughed and held up his hands. “I’m enjoying my stay.”

  “You might as well stay till Christmas, Daddy,” said Kate.

  Grandpa John smiled and shook his head. “Thank you, but I have to go back before the beginning of November.”

  Bernard got up. “I’m going to town. Does anyone need anything?”

  “I think I should go along,” said Jakób and got up as well. “I want to buy my train ticket. Thanks, Kate, breakfast was lovely.”

  “Buy your ticket for Tuesday,” said Grietjie, “then you can go back with Nico and me.”

  But Jakób shook his head. “I’ve haven’t been in my job long. I can’t take any more leave.”

  “Then I should go back with Jakób on Sunday,” said Grietjie. “It’ll be much nicer than going with that drip Nico. And I’ll have time to get my room ready before classes begin Wednesday. What do you think, Daddy?”

  “Shouldn’t you stay with us awhile longer and get a little stronger?”

  “I’ll be all right, Daddy. For the first time I think I’ll be quite all right.”

  Grietjie used their last few days to show him every corner of the farm. They talked and talked. She spoke to everyone about everything—the ghetto, her dim recollections of the synagogue, her escape from the cattle car on their way to Auschwitz, her four years at the convent school, attending mass in the cathedral. She also told them how she sometimes longed for the soft green hills around Częstochowa. And the snow, especially at Christmas time.

  “I still think of the green hills and the white Christmases of my childhood,” Grandpa John admitted. “It’s an inextricable part of who we are.”

  One evening Jakób and Bernard had a conversation that lasted well into the night about the two churches in which Grietjie had been raised. The two men tried hard to understand each other’s viewpoint but were limited by old perceptions and interpretations.

  Finally Jakób said, “Maybe we should just agree to accept and respect each other’s viewpoint. You can’t just change what you believe in.”

  “You’re right, you can’t.”

  Jakób found Kate to be a strong, mature woman who listened with a gentle ear. “I was never sure I’d made the right decision to let her go to Africa,” he said. “And there was no way to find out.”

  “How old were you when you had to make that decision, Jakób?”

  “I had just turned twenty-one when she became my responsibility. She was a pale, painfully skinny little thing of six. Nearly seven.”

  Kate smiled. “The day after she turned twelve she was nearly thirteen,” she remembered. She regarded him seriously. “You were too young to have to take on the responsibility of a child.”

  “I neglected her, I realize it today,” Jakób said. “Right from the start—the war and the Home Army’s struggle for liberation from the Germans and the Russians were more important to me.” He shook his head. “I didn’t take any real notice of her. It was only later, when I got to know her . . .”

  The time after he was wounded. When he had experienced for the first time the tender care of a woman. Even if she was only seven at the time.

  “We all made mistakes,” Kate said calmly.

  He nodded. “I still haven’t told you about my biggest mistake,” he said.

  “Maybe you should.”

  He hesitated a moment, then said, “I planted the bombs that blew up the train.”

  “The train in which her mother and grandmother died?”

  “Yes, the train that was taking her mother and grandmother to Auschwitz. It was an unscheduled train. We were supposed to blow up a German troop train on its way back to Germany.”

  “You do know that it wasn’t your fault?”

  He laughed briefly. “Even if I were exonerated by the pope, I’d still be the one who did it.”

  On Sunday morning everyone went along to the station to see them off, after which the rest of the family would be going to church.

  “Jakób, wait till you see the lovely picnic Maria has packed for us,” Grietjie said. “It makes going away so much easier.”

  “Yes, if she allows you to eat anything,” Kobus said under his breath, but loud enough for Grietjie to hear.

  “If I didn’t stop you, you would finish the food before we reached Warmbaths, with the entire Springbok Flats still ahead of us,” she defended herself.

 
“Yes, Miss,” he teased.

  “When will the two of you grow up?” Bernard asked, smiling fondly.

  “When Kobus is married,” Grietjie retorted.

  “When Grietjie stops thinking she’s the queen of England.”

  At the station Kobus helped put the suitcases and cake tins on the luggage rack. “All of a sudden I miss Pretoria,” he said.

  Bernard embraced Grietjie and held her tightly. “Let us know if there’s anything you need,” he said again. “I wish you would stay just a little longer.”

  Just before they got into the train, Kate drew Jakób aside. “Jakób, please call if there’s the slightest reason for worry.”

  “I will, Kate.”

  “Promise me you’ll look after her?”

  He smiled. “I’ll look after her.”

  “As if she was your own little girl?” asked Kate.

  He understood exactly how she felt. “I promise, Kate, I’ll look after her as if she was my own little girl.”

  15

  “The month of October isn’t the most beautiful month after all,” Grietjie complained as she took off her wet shoes.

  “Who said it was?” Karin asked.

  “Leipoldt.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “C. Louis Leipoldt.”

  “Don’t know him,” said Karin. “Is he your partner for the year-end ball?”

  “Karin! Leipoldt is an Afrikaans poet.”

  Karin gave her a puzzled look. “Roomie, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about the stupid rain that’s been falling for four straight days and the exam that starts in two weeks’ time.”

  “Oh.” Karin frowned uncomprehendingly and shook her head. “Who’s your partner for the ball, then?”

  Grietjie sighed. That too. “I wasn’t speaking about the ball.”

  “Who?”

  “Pieter.”

  “Pieter Leipoldt?”

  “Oh, Karin, you never listen to a word I say. Leipoldt is the poet. Pieter Rossouw is a guy in my class. And before you ask, no, there’s nothing between us. But I can’t wear the brand-new ball gown that’s been hanging in my closet all term without a man by my side.”