Dry Bones (15 page)

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 spread 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.

As if hearing a sudden summons, Van Hull snapped to. He retrieved their possessions and presented Dunne the still-intact hawthorn cane. Neither spoke. It began to sleet. They found shelter in a culvert and burrowed beneath their blankets.

Dunne slept fitfully. He woke in the dark. His head throbbed. When day broke, they left the culvert. The morning was bright and dry. The sunlight made his eyes ache. He went back inside, lay down, and draped his forearm over his face.

Van Hull felt his head. “You have a fever.” He rolled Dunne on his back and lifted his shirt, exposing the dull red rash that covered his chest.

“It’s typhus, isn’t it?”

Van Hull wrapped him in both blankets. “Get some sleep.”

Dunne didn’t bother in indulging in the useless exercise of telling him to go on by himself. “I did something stupid. I let Dr. Niskolczi have Victor, yours and mine.”

“You won’t need it. We got this far, and we’re going to get the rest of the way.”

“Unless you get sick, too.”

“I won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“I won’t let myself. Now close your eyes and get some rest.”

Voices drone in his ear, Bassante’s, Roberta’s, General Donovan’s, jabbering together, cacophony of competing words, tones, disjointed syllables.
Brother Andre wants to know: Why is the tailbone shaped like a cuckoo? Or is it the cuckoo that’s shaped like the tailbone?
A steeple clock strikes three. They join together in chorus and sing:
Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo.
He shouts, shakes his fist, hears himself spout a Latin phrase (“
ad utilitatem quoque nostrum
”), asks in a loud voice, “Providence? Are we near Providence?”

Van Hull’s hand rested on his shoulder, reassuring. “Fin, it’s all right. You need to eat something.” It was dark again. There was a small fire at the mouth of the culvert. Using a tin can as a pot, Van Hull boiled eggs that he had foraged.

Night twitched into day. Figures flitted past, vague shapes filtered through a stop-and-go reel of shadow and light. Dunne lay, sat, stood, aware of Van Hull’s voice, reassuring thread that ran through feverish jumble, knock and rock of boxcar wheels on rails, baritone of tires over concrete, bump and creak of horse-drawn cart, tones plaintive, insistent, wheedling—Czech? Polish? Russian?—Van Hull’s fluent and consistent German.

He watched through feverish, red-rimmed eyes: Sodden wooden roof. Cracked plaster ceiling. Single electric bulb dangling lonely and bright. Night sky and its vast spool of stars. Figures in and out of focus. He burned with inner, furnace-like heat; throat so parched dry, he couldn’t speak. Van Hull raised his head, poured water in his mouth. He trembled with arctic cold. Van Hull covered him with a woolen blanket.

Van Hull varied their movements, often traveling by day when anyone clearly ill was likely to go unbothered by soldiers or the police. At night, they slipped into the shadowy ring around a
bonfire. The ragged circle of several dozen people—civilians, soldiers, women, children—was silent. There was no interaction beyond the sporadic hurling of logs and broken furniture on the blaze. When dawn came and the fire was expired, everyone dispersed.

They stumbled into a half-derelict farmhouse that they thought was deserted but discovered an aged couple living in a back room. Their faces, parched and trenched with wrinkles, reflected their fear. Van Hull did his best to calm them. Although it turned out they were deaf mutes, somehow he got through.

The couple hid them in a potato cellar. Each day, the old woman brought them watery soup made from cabbage and potatoes. When she stopped coming, Van Hull went to the farmhouse. The couple lay in the backyard. The woman had been raped, the old man stripped of his boots. They’d both been shot in the back of the head.

How long did they travel? And where? Dunne had no idea.

The chaos that swelled across the fast-disintegrating eastern frontier of the Third Reich was the fog shrouding them by day, cloud sheltering them by night. On they went through gray-brown, wind-ridden, barren interval between blur of snow and sprout of spring. Gray roads. Gray sky. Gray faces. Gray uniforms. Brown earth. Brown coats, dresses, caps, teeth, boots. Same tired, resigned expression stamped on every face, no matter age or sex or nationality.

Long columns of prisoners from the east straggled along the roadside. SS guards in black greatcoats hovered around them like crows, pushed and kicked them, shot the ones who wouldn’t or couldn’t get up. People scattered at their approach, frightened as much by the contagion of fever and typhus that traveled with the prisoners as by the SS.

German settlers—some recent, others descendants of
volksdeutsch
rooted in the same spot for hundreds of years—fled west. Their carts were top-heavy with cradles and clocks and bedding.
Foreign laborers and POWs, some of the millions conscripted into the Nazi war effort, deserted camps and factories, hiding by day, scrounging by night, doing their best to stay alive until the Germans were gone.

A woman lay propped against a fence post. Her blouse was open to suckle the child in her lap. They were both dead. The stench of putrefaction hovered around them.

Military units shuffled by, heads down, seemingly indifferent to direction or destination. Their worn, ragged uniforms and cloth caps sometimes made it hard to tell what force or faction they represented. Deserters and partisans hung limp and lifeless from freshly blossomed branches, placards around their necks headlined:
ACHTUNG!
Staff cars roared by. Corpses littered the roadside.

Newly risen blades of grass turned the brown earth green. Heavy rains churned roads into swamps. They took refuge in an abandoned hayloft. In the late afternoon, a column of sodden, slump-shouldered troopers trudged on the road beneath. When they’d passed, Van Hull left without a word.

Dawn sun woke him. Van Hull hadn’t returned. Maybe he’d finally decided to go it alone—a thought Dunne entertained, though he knew it wasn’t true. Van Hull had either been captured, in which case there was nothing left for Dunne to do but await whatever came, or he’d be back, prodding and coaxing, perhaps attempting another Boy Scout trick, insisting they stay on the move another day.

Head resting on a pillow of hay, Dunne rehearsed his answer. He’d been exhausted before. But this went deeper than muscle or bone, beyond the physical toll required to endure and survive a siege of typhus. This weariness was in his soul. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—get up. He’d had enough, endured enough. Heroes like Van Hull always seemed to have more to give. But sometimes, instead of death or surrender, the old guard simply wanted to be left alone, to lie undisturbed, to sink unnoticed into abiding sleep.

Victor or no Victor, he was through. Enough. For good. Once and for all.
Au revoir, la guerre.

Two figures in civilian clothes zigzagged across the yard, rusted hinges groaning a metal complaint as the door was pushed open. They scampered up the ladder, one behind the other, skittish teenagers who couldn’t hide their fear. They rushed Dunne to his feet, down the ladder, to a horse-drawn wagon half filled with empty crates. They indicated to Dunne to crawl between the crates. They covered the pile with a tarp and tied it to the sides of the wagon.

The wagon jostled over cobblestones and made several sharp turns before speeding along a smooth road. It came to a halt. The boys who’d put Dunne in the wagon carried him out. The wagon was parked in a capacious brick hall with vaulted ceilings. Barrels were stacked high on either side. The odor of sour hops—similar to stale beer—filled the space. They put him down on a cot hidden behind the barrels.