The Last Train to London

by Meg Waite Clayton

  Klara looked doubtful. “We don’t have papers for the children?”

  “We do, but it would be better if fewer questions were asked.”

  The Dutch entry visas were real, thanks to Mr. Tenkink. The German exit visas might or might not be. Truus preferred to believe they were.

  “As I said, you are going to be quite good at this,” Truus assured her, “but it will be easier this first time to do it in your own language.”

  This first time, which might well be the last; Tenkink had somehow managed these entrance visas, but with the new law—the border now closed—there would be no more. Perhaps Joop was right. Perhaps the thing to do now was to take in some of the children, to provide them a home.

  She said to Klara, “Fear does funny things even to the best of minds.”

  After a time, a station agent approached. The man stopped before them, an older man with a disconcerting face, round and pasty white and lumpy. Klara’s fear was palpable in her perfect stillness, an animal instinct to blend in, but that was all right. Everyone in Germany was afraid these days.

  “You are awaiting a package?” the attendant asked.

  Truus answered softly, “A delivery, yes.”

  “The train is delayed for perhaps an hour,” the attendant said.

  Truus thanked him for letting them know, and promised to wait.

  Klara whispered as the man left, with the smallest of smiles, “Mr. Snowman.”

  Truus blinked back the image of her parents back in Duivendrecht, her mother’s face in the window as the splat of the refugee boy’s snowball slid down the glass, her mother laughing at the children laughing out by the snowman Truus had helped them build. Mr. Snowman. The attendant did look rather snowmanly, and the nickname seemed to bode well. It said a lot, too, about Klara van Lange. She was scared enough, but not so scared as to be unable to use humor to cope.

  “Perhaps you’d like to shake off the collywobbles by answering the attendant the next time he comes, Klara?” Truus asked. “He’ll ask if we’re awaiting a package, and we are to respond, ‘A delivery, yes.’”

  “A delivery, yes,” Klara repeated.

  After a time, an agent approached again. Truus waited for him to be close enough that she could make out his face under the cap. Not Mr. Snowman.

  “You are awaiting a package?” he asked.

  Truus, with a brief, unconscious touch to the ruby underneath her glove, nodded to Klara.

  “A package, yes,” Klara answered.

  Truus said, “A delivery, yes.”

  The man’s gaze darted nervously about the station, but his posture remained unchanged. It would be hard for anyone who might be observing from a distance to detect his alarm.

  “A delivery, yes,” Truus repeated.

  Truus might have said a silent prayer, but she couldn’t afford the distraction.

  The bells of Hamburg began to ring six.

  “I’m afraid the chaos in Austria has made the delivery of packages impossible this morning,” the attendant said finally, into the ringing.

  “Impossible. I see,” Truus said.

  Was he calling the transport off on account of Klara’s blunder with the code, or was he telling the truth?

  Truus waited patiently as he looked again at Klara, who smiled prettily. His face lightened slightly.

  “We’ll come back tomorrow then,” Truus said, not quite a question—she didn’t want to invite a direct no—but with a small uptick of her voice at the end, admission that she understood his predicament, that a fumbled code ought to leave him as uncertain as he was. “My friend here has never been to Hamburg,” she said. “I can show her the city, and return tomorrow.”

  AS TRUUS AND Klara approached the steps to exit the station, someone took Klara’s bag, saying, “Let me help you with that,” startling them both. He took Truus’s bag as well, whispering, “The man to the right at the top of the stairs followed you from the inn. You’d best go left out of the station and around the block.” He handed their bags back at the top of the stairs and hurried off to the right. Truus watched him pass a man who did seem familiar, a man from the inn who’d approached her about smuggling gold coins to the Netherlands—a Gestapo trap she knew to avoid. Still, she checked her pockets, remembering Dr. Brisker, who’d given her his “lucky rock.” He too had claimed to be helping her.

  Typing Between the Lines

  Stephan spread Mutti’s blanket over her on the chaise by the fireplace as Aunt Lisl, who’d joined them early that morning without Uncle Michael, again adjusted the volume on the radio. The drapes were drawn, leaving a dim cast to the shelves of books that stretched up to the high ceiling of the third story, interrupted by little other than the railing circling the library’s upper level, the ladders and the brass rails that Stephan had loved to climb even before he could read. He supposed it was the closed drapes that were so unsettling, as if there were something sinister about listening to the radio with all of Vienna on a bright winter morning.

  He tried to read “Incident on Lake Geneva” again, a Stefan Zweig story about a Russian soldier found naked on a raft by an Italian fisherman, a story Papa said was about the extinction of human values under men like Hitler. It was hard to concentrate with the radio on, though, the news of the plebiscite for an “Independent Christian Austria” scheduled for two days later but Hitler already calling it a fraud Germany wouldn’t recognize. “Lügenpresse,” Hitler called the Austrian press who reported anything else. Lying press.

  “As if that madman isn’t the liar himself,” Papa said to the radio as Helga, just entering with breakfast, caught a foot on Mutti’s empty wheelchair and nearly dumped the silver tray. “How has Hitler convinced all of Germany that his lies are the truth and the truth is a lie?”

  “Here, sir, on the desk?” Helga asked Papa uncertainly.

  “Peter,” Walter whispered to his rabbit, “we get to have breakfast in the library!”

  Breakfast in the library, more unsettling even than the closed drapes. His mother often had a tray brought to her bedroom on her bad days, but all of them being served here? And only black bread and jam and boiled eggs, with no sausages or goose liver or even a choice of kornspitz or semmel bread, much less a proper morning pastry.

  Stephan took a piece of bread and slathered it with butter and jam to hide the rye taste. When he’d stomached all he could, to make Mutti happy, he said, “Well, I might take my typewriter to—”

  “You can type here in the library,” Papa said.

  “But the desk is crowded with the breakfast—”

  “You can use the rolltop in the alcove.”

  It was impossible to write except when he was alone even under normal circumstances, and eating in the library to the tune of Hitler threatening their country was nothing close to normal. In Germany, Goebbels was claiming that all of Austria was rioting and the Austrians were calling for the Germans to intervene, to restore order. But the streets outside their drawn drapes in the middle of Vienna were quiet. A quiet riot, Stephan thought. Žofie-Helene would have some clever paradox label for that.

  He was supposed to meet her outside the Burgtheater that evening; she had a surprise for him. Surely by then he would be released. Even his father said there was no rioting anywhere in Vienna, that that was a lie Hitler made up to justify sending soldiers into a country in which they didn’t belong.

  Breakfast gave way to luncheon, again a tray in the library. Everyone but Walter leaned toward the radio as if that might stem the deluge of bad news. Walter, expressing the boredom Stephan shared, spun their father’s globe faster and faster. No one reprimanded him.

  Stephan opened the rolltop in the alcove and set his typewriter on it. He fed a blank piece of paper into the carriage, imagining a scene like the one reflected in the mirror above the desk: a roaring fire in a two-level library, with books and railings and ladders, but with open drapes. He put a young girl with smudged glasses at the top of one of the ladders, searching for a book by She
rlock Holmes. He began to type a title page—THE LIAR’S—

  “Not now, sweetheart,” Mutti said. “We can’t hear.”

  He continued, typing PARADOX, hoping the reprimand was for Walter and the globe.

  “Stephan,” Papa said. “You too, Walter.”

  Stephan reluctantly abandoned the typewriter and selected a book from the children’s shelf, then pulled Walter into his lap. He read The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm in a low voice, the funny misadventures of an absentminded professor who invents burglar catchers and pancake-making machines. But Walter was squirming and Stephan quickly tired of reading in English. That was why Aunt Lisl had brought this book from her last trip to London, because Papa wanted Walter and him to improve their English.

  “I could take Walter to the park,” he offered, but Papa shushed him.

  STEPHAN GLANCED AT the clock as Helga brought a light supper into the library. He ought to call Žofie-Helene to say he wasn’t going to be able to meet her, but there was still a little time. He wolfed down a few bites—to news that Hitler was demanding Chancellor Schuschnigg hand over all power to the Austrian Nazis or face invasion—then sat at his typewriter again. He could write as they were eating. He could capture the scene: a girl with smudged glasses now collecting a plate of food from the dishes on the desk and settling in by the fire, like Aunt Lisl was; his father gathering a plate for his mother before serving himself. He would have the drapes in the room closed, after all.

  Tap, tap, tap. He tried to type quietly—by Stephan Neuman—but the little bell of the carriage return dinged into the voices from the radio.

  “Stephan,” Mutti said.

  “Just let him take the damned thing to another room, Ruchele!” his father said, startling Stephan, who was sure he’d never heard Papa speak sternly to Mutti in his whole life.

  “Herman!” Aunt Lisl said.

  Mutti said gently, “I believe you have been the one insisting the boys stay in the library, Herman.”

  When had those jowls appeared on his father’s face? And the lines at his eyes and mouth, the deep gouges on his brow? Mutti had been unwell for as long as Stephan could remember, but the deterioration in his father was new, and alarming.

  Papa said, “Stephan, you can use my study. But stay in the house. Save your mother from adding worry about you to the rest. And take Walter with you.”

  “Peter and I want to stay with Mutti,” Walter whined.

  “Hell,” Papa said, another shock; Papa was a gentleman, and gentlemen didn’t talk like that.

  Walter climbed up onto the chaise and snuggled with Mutti.

  Papa said, “Go ahead, Stephan. Go ahead.”

  Stephan picked up his heavy typewriter and hurried past his mother’s wheelchair before Papa could change his mind. He set the typewriter up in his father’s study beside the library and set to work again, realizing only as he pulled out the title page that he hadn’t brought more paper. He looked out the French windows for a minute, the same view as from his bedroom on the floor above, through the tree to the street. He rolled the sheet back into the carriage and typed on the back side. He didn’t want to risk being stuck in the library again.

  When he reached the bottom of the page, he rolled it back up and began typing in the spaces between the lines, listening now to the voices in the library. Yes, his parents and Aunt Lisl were caught up in earnest conversation.

  He quietly opened the window, slipped out onto the balcony, pulled the window closed behind him, and climbed out onto a tree branch. Instead of scaling up the tree to the roof as he usually did—late at night, for the view of Vienna in moonlight—he scaled down, dropping from a bottom branch to the ground, near the guardhouse and the front doors. He paused. Where was Rolf? Was no one minding the door? But it didn’t matter. There would be no visitors tonight.

  Still, he stopped to peer into the window of the little room in the gatehouse that was Rolf’s. It was too dark to see if anyone was home. The street was eerily quiet too, his own shadow in the golden glow from the cast-iron streetlights oddly unsettling as he hurried down the block.

  Chaos Theory

  Stephan watched nervously as Žofie-Helene unlocked the Burgtheater’s side door with the key she’d pinched from her grandfather’s coat pocket.

  “We shouldn’t be here,” Dieter said.

  “Stephan will get to see scenes from his own play performed on a real stage,” Žofie-Helene insisted, leading them down the hall and into the theater itself. “Just like his hero Stefan Zweig.”

  “We’ll be in so much trouble if we’re caught,” Dieter insisted.

  Žofie-Helene said, “I thought you liked trouble, Dieter.”

  She tossed her coat and scarf on a seat in the theater’s back row, then disappeared out into the lobby without explanation.

  Stephan whispered to his friend, “‘I thought you liked trouble, Dieter.’”

  “Only trouble with girls.”

  “You haven’t gotten into any trouble with girls, Dieterrotzni.”

  “Haven’t I? If you want to kiss a girl, you just do it, Stephan. And you’re the snot nose.”

  A stage light blinked on, startling Stephan. He lowered his voice further, saying, “You can’t just kiss a girl.”

  “They want you to. They want a man who is in charge. They want you to compliment them and kiss them.”

  Žofie-Helene appeared on the stage. How had she gotten there?

  “‘The question now is about hemoglobin,’” she said, reciting a line from his new play. “‘No doubt you see the significance of this discovery of mine?’”

  When Stephan and Dieter just stood in the aisle, looking up at her, she said, “Come on, Deet. Haven’t you memorized your lines?”

  Dieter hesitated, but shrugged off his coat, headed down the aisle, and climbed onto the stage. He recited, “‘It’s interesting no doubt, but—’”

  “‘It’s interesting, chemically, no doubt,’ Deet,” Stephan corrected. “Can’t you remember a simple line?” His nervousness was leaking out at Dieter, although he might really be mad at Žofie. But how could he be mad at a girl who wanted to give him the gift of seeing his work performed on the Burgtheater stage?

  Dieter said, “It means the same thing.”

  “It’s an homage to Sherlock Holmes, Deet,” Žofie-Helene told him. “It doesn’t work as an homage if you don’t say the words exactly.”

  Stephan came down the aisle, supposing he ought to take a seat near the stage. Wasn’t that what directors did?

  “Sherlock Holmes is a man,” Dieter said. “I still don’t understand how a girl sleuth honors him.”

  Žofie-Helene said, “It’s more interesting with a female sleuth because it’s unexpected. And anyway, I’ve read all the Sherlock Holmes stories, and you haven’t read even one.”

  Dieter reached out and touched her cheek. “That’s because you’re so much smarter than Stephan and me, and prettier too, my little mausebär,” he said, using the nickname from Stephan’s own first act.

  Stephan expected Žofie-Helene to laugh at Dieter, but she only blushed and looked to Stephan, then down at the stage boards. He ought not to have given Dieter the Selig role to Žofie-Helene’s Zelda, but Dieter was the only one with the arrogance to pull it off. Stephan had tried to mix a Sherlock Holmes–type sleuth, the female Zelda, with a character sort of like the doctor in Zweig’s Amok, a boy obsessed with a girl who wasn’t interested in him. He didn’t exactly understand Amok, though, and when he’d asked Papa why the woman thought the doctor could help her with the baby she didn’t want, his father answered gruffly, “You’re a man of character, Stephan. You won’t ever be in the position of having a baby you ought not to have.”

  Dieter tipped Žofie’s chin up and kissed her lips. She received the kiss awkwardly, but then she sort of melted into Dieter.

  Stephan turned his back to them, pretending to care which seat he chose and muttering, “This is a mystery, not a love story, you clo
d.”

  He took a seat and looked up at them. Mercifully they were no longer kissing, although Žofie’s cheeks were flushed. “Žofe,” he said, “start with the line about what a dolt Dieter is.”

  “What a dolt Selig is?” Žofie asked.

  “Isn’t that what I just said? If everyone is going to repeat everything I say, we’ll never get through the script.”

  THEY HAD BEEN rehearsing for two scenes and the clocks of Vienna had just struck seven when Žofie heard something. Car horns? Cheering outside the theater? That’s what it sounded like: the muffled sounds of crowds cheering, horns honking. She looked from the stage down to Stephan. Yes, he heard it too.

  The three of them grabbed their coats and hurried to the theater’s front doors, the ruckus growing ever louder. When they pushed the doors open from inside, the noise overwhelmed. Vienna swarmed with weapon-carrying brownshirts, men in swastika armbands, young men hanging off trucks painted with swastikas rushing down the Ringstrasse, past the university and city hall, right past them there at the theater. No one was rioting, though. They were joyous. Everywhere they shouted “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer!” and “Heil Hitler, Sieg Heil!” and “Juden verrecken!” Death to the Jews.

  Žofie scanned the crowd for Mama as the three of them slipped back into the shadowed darkness of the theater entrance. This must be why Grandpapa had come to stay with Jojo and her tonight while Mama went out, but what was it? Where could this all have come from? The painted trucks. The swastikas being plastered on lampposts. The armbands. The crowds. They couldn’t have materialized out of nowhere. Zero plus zero plus zero out into infinity was still zero.

  Some boys down the street began painting a shop window with swastikas, skull and crossbones, and “Juden.”

  “Look, Stephan,” Dieter said, “it’s Helmut and Frank from school! Let’s go!”

  Stephan said, “We should get Žofie-Helene home, Deet.”