Hunger Journeys (18 page)

Lena sipped her watery drink and gazed at the others. Clearly they were happy about the delay. The tracks were mended already; the train would leave again as soon as night fell. She watched Albert as he talked and laughed with Uli and Sofie.
She looked at his face, the bones that structured his rounded and stubbled jaw, his broad forehead. She wanted to reach out and smooth his unruly hair back behind his ears. He looked at her and she snatched her eyes away, cheeks burning.

It was a long day.

“Will you walk with me again?” Albert said, the moment she put down her empty cup. “A stroll in the forest?”

Sofie and Uli were already gone, only they knew where. Lena had the feeling that if she walked with Albert, if she went with him anywhere, there would be no resisting him. “No,” she said. “No, I want to be alone.”

Hurt wrinkled his brow, and he lowered his eyes to the ground.

“I’m sorry, Albert,” she said. “I’m not like Sofie. I can’t.”

He looked up, brow cleared, hope shining from his eyes. “I’m not asking you to be like Sofie,” he said. “Just walk with me.”

“No,” she said again. “I can’t.”

“All right,” he said at last, and walked away.

Lena sat hunched over by the fire, shivering. She lowered her head to her knees, smelling smoke and listening to the voices of the men gathered around their own nearby fires, the squeak of their boots in the snow. She heard birds too, and tree branches brushing each other in the wind.

Eventually, an idea came to her. Salvation of a sort. In the bottom of her small suitcase, the first act of her packing, were two tattered paperbacks. It was quick work fetching them both, though first she had to ask a soldier for a boost up. She had to move the tiny flowers to get into her bag, so she placed them, thoroughly wilted now, between the pages of one of the books. She wrapped a blanket around herself and jumped back down onto the snow.

Lena climbed the bank back up to the fires and made for a large tree at the edge of the wood. Looking back, she saw Albert standing two cars away, watching her. She hunkered down and swept away the snow at the foot of the tree, clearing a spot for herself. There, she would wait. She would wait and read.

She knew both books by heart, and it was a good thing, because few words found purchase that day. She turned the pages regularly and resisted too many visits to the flowers pressed in the back. And in this way, the hours passed. Sofie brought her food at one point, but Lena barely spoke to her, though she did eat the food—wolfed it down, in fact. Lena was conscious of morning turning to afternoon, of the shadows lengthening. It may be that she dozed at one point later on, because she didn’t see Albert approach.

He knelt beside her and held out his hand. “Come,” he said. “We will eat and then we will go.”

Blinking, she allowed him to grasp her hand in his. He rose and pulled her gently to her feet. But he did not lead her toward the train. Instead, he stood over her, his body shielding her from others’ view. With his free hand he held her chin softly, so softly, and tilted her face upward. She saw him bend toward her, and instinct made her close her eyes and soften her lips.

It was the briefest of kisses, just his lips against hers—against her upper lip, really—a gentle pressure, which she returned, her own lips kissing his lower one. And then it was done. The warmth receded. She opened her eyes, and he was smiling down at her.

“You kissed me back,” he said.

And Lena could not deny it. She nodded, smiling.

The gathering together, the warmth of another fire, the food, the talk—all of it happened in a blur for Lena. Albert sat
close to her, but he didn’t try to put his arm around her. He hardly spoke through the meal.

As soon as they were done eating, Sofie and Uli disappeared into the car. Apparently they weren’t going to be bothered with the great outdoors this evening. Lena watched them go and then met Albert’s eyes.

“I know,” he said under his breath. “You’re not going to do that. But the train is going to leave soon, and we have to get inside.” He rose and got to work putting out the fire.

Lena got up and gathered her blanket and her books. She let Albert boost her into the car, ignoring Sofie and Uli’s rustlings. Perhaps a goodnight kiss would be all right, she thought. Just one. Just one on her last night.

At the back of the car, she knelt to put the books into her bag. If she was going to kiss him, she had to make sure it stopped there. Gathering her inner strength, she leaned her forehead against the wall for a moment and let her weight fall back onto her haunches. She was about to turn back to Albert when her gaze fell on a patch of wood right at eye level. Even in the dim light, she could see that something was written there. She bent closer.

Letters and numbers were carved into the wood. Lena reached out and touched them with her fingers. They spelled out a name:
Rachel.
And a life:
June 12–Sept 17, 1943. RIP.

Something let go inside Lena as what she was seeing sank in. Nausea swept up her throat. The trains had been used for a terrible purpose. She knew that, or at least she had heard. But on this journey, she had not given it a moment’s thought. Not for one second had it occurred to her that what was for her an adventure was for thousands of others a death march, that this very car might have held such passengers. Now she knew. Right
here, where she knelt contemplating a kiss, a baby had died. And her mother had scratched her short life into the wall.

“Lena,” Albert said from behind her, “what are you doing?”

She turned, fierce all of sudden, protective of a dead baby she had never met. “Look,” she said. “Look at that.”

Albert knelt beside her and looked. He looked for a long, long time.

“I’m sorry,” he breathed. If his mouth had not been next to her ear, she would not have heard. His next words were even quieter. “I worked on those trains.” He paused. “This train.”

She thought she must have heard wrong. Or she tried to think so.

For many moments, both of them stayed where they were and said nothing. Then Lena pushed into the straw beside her and emerged holding the three snowdrops that Albert had given her, flattened by their hours between pages. She did not look at him as she placed them on the floor beneath Rachel’s epitaph.

The man and the girl knelt side by side some more. He put his hand on her arm at one point, but she drew back. He took his hand away.

The light faded entirely. At last, Albert spoke. “I must tell you a story,” he said. “I have no right to, but I think I must.”

Lena remained as she was, head bowed.

“I had to force people into the cars,” he said.

Lena flinched.

“No, I’m not going to tell … I’m not …” He paused. “And one time, a man stopped in front of me. Others flowed around him, but he stopped. He was old. He wore a grey wool cap, and he was clean-shaven. His skin hung loose on his face. He was too close to me for the rifle butt to be of any use. I would have had
to use my hands or my voice to get him moving. I did neither. I couldn’t. I found myself staring straight into his eyes.

“‘What you are doing is wrong,’ the man said. ‘You are a person. I am too. And so are they.’ He gestured with his arm, all around to the hundreds of men, women and children already on the train and still on the ground. ‘Every one.’ And he touched my arm. Then he turned away and disappeared into the car. I never saw him after that.

“And that was the last train.”

Silence.

In her imagination, Lena stood next to Albert, a crowd in front of them, a crowd of desperate people, and in the midst of that crowd, she saw Sarah. Sarah was looking right at her, reaching for her. And Lena did nothing, nothing at all.

She started, eyes wide open in the dark. Albert was finished, she realized. His story was over. She had heard it, and she would think about it. Right now, though, the man next to her had turned into the enemy. And she was her own enemy too.

“Please, Albert, leave me,” she said. She still didn’t look at him. She did not want to see his face, even its pale shape in the dark, nor did she want to feel the tears on her own. Once he was gone, she reached down and felt along the ground until she found the tiny flowers. She pulled them toward her, stood, bent over and positioned them carefully. Then she spent long moments grinding them under her heel.

Sometime later, the train creaked and groaned and roared into motion. Later still, Sofie giggled and Lena started back into herself.
She listened to whispers, words she could not hear, rustling in the straw. Had Uli also sent people to their deaths?

Almost bodily, Lena shoved Albert’s story out of her mind and the feelings it stirred in her out of her heart. She had practical things to think about now.

She and Sofie could not arrive in this unknown town seeking the assistance of strangers with two German soldiers as escorts. It was easy to predict their reception. And what she had seen and heard meant she could no longer have anything to do with Albert anyway. These men had done bad things. They were part of something evil.

Now Albert’s sweet words to her, his lips pressed against hers, seemed more sinister than romantic. She had received her first kiss from a murderer. Received it and thrilled to it. No, Albert could not be part of her future. And she could not be part of his.

Sofie’s voice rose, loud and desperate in the quiet. “I will miss you so, Uli,” she cried. “How long will you stay, do you think?”

“Just two days,” Uli said. “But we must make the most of them!”

Sofie had had no trouble at all with her German accent or vocabulary since she met Uli. The language flowed from her as if it were her birthright. Lena’s bruised heart sank. “Sofie, you can’t see each other in Almelo,” she said in Dutch, sending her voice crashing through the car, breaking into their conversation. “What will your relatives think? You know what they’ll say. ‘Lover of Germans,’ they’ll call you. ‘Mof lover.’ They’ll run us out of town.”

Sofie scrambled out of the straw, brushing up against Lena. She heard Uli breathing behind Sofie in the darkness. “Well, I
don’t exactly have relatives there. Just this family, these friends of my uncle’s—at least I think that was it. We were passing through once, and they said we should let them know if we were ever back this way.”

Lena sank back against the wall. She never should have placed all her faith in Sofie’s vague assertions, in Sofie’s shoddy fake papers, in Sofie’s on-again, off-again courage—or in a German soldier, come to that. But why hadn’t she pressed her friend for details? Sofie would have told her the truth long ago if she had just asked.

“I suppose the last time you saw them was before the war,” Lena said.

“The only time. Well, yes. Not much, though. Maybe in ‘38.”

“Seven years and a war. Five years, almost, of occupation. And you think these people will welcome us with open arms?”

“Well, it’s better than what we left behind,” Sofie said fiercely. “Even on this train, even in the freezing cold, with our own Allies firing at us, I’ve been happier and better fed than at home with my nearest and dearest and soup made from potato peels and sugar beets. And so have you.”

Lena knew that her glare was lost on Sofie in the dark, but she had no words. And Uli moved in then, because next thing, Sofie was gone from the conversation and giggling once again in his arms.

Soon, Sofie and Uli retreated into the straw. The muffled sounds they made grated on Lena. She tensed at each moan and rustle, pulling a blanket tight around herself. She cringed when longing washed through her body, battling with her pain, her annoyance and her new knowledge. It made her feel ill, all of it.

She reached her hand out and placed it against the cold wooden wall, trying to imagine a mother crouched right there
and cradling a dead baby. She tried to imagine Albert outside the car brandishing a rifle. She imagined the gun sinking to his side as he watched that brave man climb aboard the train that would carry him to his death. She imagined Sarah, huddled with the rest of her family, or worse, without them, in that same car. Tears of frustration and anger squeezed from her eyes. She couldn’t understand any of it. Not one bit. She could not change Albert into the man who had done what he had done. But he
was
that man. By forcing them onto the trains, he had helped kill innocent people—hundreds and hundreds of them, probably.

And she could not free herself of her own guilt. She had abandoned Sarah to the very fate that Piet and Albert had described to her.

She could not grasp Albert’s guilt, but she could feel sick at the memory of her longing for his touch, and of the touch itself. She wished that she had a basin of water, scalding hot, so she could scrub her skin raw. Tomorrow she would take the tiny bottle of cologne and throw it far, far away. She would cleanse herself.