The Postmistress (22 page)

As they drew nearer to Berlin, the train emptied of ordinary people. Few were traveling so far east. By the time they reached the city the following morning, Frankie was alone in her compartment. She sat a minute before getting off. The air was lovely outside and, as in Paris, she could just see the broad flank of the avenues stretched away from the train station and the slight green against the marble buildings, all of which dislocated the present. She stood and pulled her bag down from the rack above her head, grabbed the recorder, and emerged onto the platform where what looked like hundreds of people were waiting. She turned around. The only train she could see was the one she had just left. It wasn’t so much a line of people as a wave, held in check by the shut doors of the cars. In these exhausted, fearful groupings the present returned. Some faces stared at her as she passed, and she nodded hello. They dropped their eyes as though she were dangerous.

The few other passengers had gotten off as well, and at the end of the platform the line for passport control began to thicken. She’d be glad of a bath and a drink, she thought, getting into the line that snaked toward her. A bath, a drink, and then a long, long walk into the city. The safe-transit pass had been read and refolded at each of the border checkpoints, and her passport stamped. She set down her bag and the recorder and kept them between her legs, handing over the letter.

“How long?”

“Overnight.” Frankie smiled at the officer. He was tidy and round. He looked up at her with startlingly black eyes.

He took her papers, looked at them, and spread them out on the table. His fingernails were bitten to the quick. “No, Fräulein.” He shook his head.

She frowned and leaned over the table. “What do you mean?”

He looked up at her, pleasantly. “If you plan to leave Berlin tomorrow, you must stay here and take the next train.”

“Why is that?”

“There is no room,” he answered blandly, handing her papers back to her.

“I’m a reporter,” she said as evenly as she could.

“Ah?” He looked her up and down, his eyes without light and letting none in.

“And what is it you are reporting?”

“On the trains out of Berlin.”

“For what purpose?”

“To give my country a feel for the wartime conditions.”

“Conditions have never been better.”

“Exactly.” She looked at him.

“No, Fräulein.” And he gestured to the man in uniform behind him.

“I’m American.”

“We have plenty of Americans already.” He shrugged. The second man came to stand beside her.

“May I cable my office?”

His lip curled. “Your office? Fräulein, if you wish to ride the trains, this will be the last one out for a very long time.”

“Why’s that?”

He shrugged and waved her papers. She took them. His raisin eyes swung slowly up to hers. “Good journey, Fräulein.”

She bent and picked up her two cases, and turned back into the crowd.

The heavy smell of fear hung in the close air of the waiting room. Several people looked up when Frankie entered, but their attention was on the officer beside her. He might make an announcement. With every hour stalled, not moving, the exit visas—clearly stamped with the date by which they had to leave the country—went closer to expiring and they had not yet even begun the journey. Each person held hard-won transit papers as well, allowing them to pass through on their way to the boats. A problem with either meant that at any point they could be turned away, refused entry, sent back. So they had to get on the train. The train Frankie had just left stood idle on the track behind her. Through the glass right in front of them stood the voyage out. It sat there, guarded by two soldiers, guns slung over their shoulders.

The washroom door was surrounded by women; Frankie went to join them.

“How long have you been waiting here?” Frankie asked in German.

One of the women turned around. “Since morning. The train was supposed to leave at ten.”

It was nearly two o’clock. The journey had begun, Frankie realized, half-writing the script.
The journey begins on an empty platform with no train in sight.
The door of the washroom opened in front of her, and a tiny curly blond-headed woman clutching a child by the hand emerged. Her blouse strained over her pregnant belly; she had the scattered, wide-eyed look of someone waiting for the next blow. She kept tight hold of her boy, though, and steered him through the women. Frankie turned and followed her to see what the husband looked like. But the woman sank down into a spot on one of the benches, evidently held for her by a matronly older woman in a black cotton dress. No husband. Frankie turned back. Hers might be the story to follow. A military band had begun to play in the cavernous center of the station, and Frankie felt the drums in her bones.

Suddenly, the scene through the window burst into life. Several soldiers ran down the platform, signaling the two already there to move to the front. A fuel car backed down the parallel track, its engineer a great blond man calling jokes down to his comrades; everyone burst into laughter. The drums stopped and the steady thrum of the diesel filled the station with life. The mood around Frankie lightened, too; perhaps
now
they were leaving. People began to stand up, holding their possessions to their chest, watching the one train couple with the other, giving it fuel.

From down the avenue came the sound of whistles and the motors of several engines. Frankie counted six trucks, pulling right into the station alongside the tracks. Out of them jumped men in uniform, boys mostly. Within minutes, the platform in front of her was crowded with them, standing awkwardly around waiting, as were the people in flight, watching through the glass. Despite, or perhaps because of, the audience in the waiting room, the young men seemed to Frankie to play at being soldiers, in the manner of schoolboys, strutting and smoking, clearly anxious to set off, to be sent into the thick of things. The opinion in the room where Frankie waited was that the soldiers were headed for the Russian border. There had been three call-ups in the last two weeks from central Berlin. Soldiers and tea and all the tinned meat left in the city, a woman with a thick lip and quiet watchful eyes commented to Frankie. Everything to Russia, she said regretfully. And the trains, a man put in beside her. All the trains, too.

Frankie glanced back at the bench where the mother and her little boy still sat, the boy asleep against his mother’s arm. The woman was clearly on her own.

A sleek Daimler crept along the platform, leaving order behind as it passed. The boys became real soldiers, their shoulders back and their legs snapped together. An officer stepped out of the car and shouted some kind of encouragement, and then the line slackened and the boys stepped on the train. Within an hour, the waiting room stared again at an empty track. Frankie went to find some dinner and sat herself in the station café, watching the same blank track as those in the waiting room who would not leave their spots by the door. The boy was up on his feet in front of his mother now, slapping his hands together, trying for her gaze. Every so often, she’d look down at him, away from the train track. Sometimes she’d smile. Frankie decided against approaching her now, all of her attention strained toward the hoped-for train.

Around three a.m., a siren went off and a new train pulled into the station, much smaller than the one Frankie had ridden from Paris, this one only six cars, and everyone in the waiting room rose up and surged forward. There was no hanging back, no chance to let others take spots before her. The crowd moved in one panic-stricken wave toward the door of the waiting room, which someone had opened, and then gushed through onto the platform to halt at the gun-metal exterior of the cars. The doors were pulled shut and none of the lights were lit; it seemed unmanned at first to Frankie, and eerie in the dark. A man shouted something from the front of the train, and the family beside Frankie looked at her. Did you hear? She shook her head.

Then suddenly, like Aladdin’s cave, the doors were thrown open. Again, the human wave gathered and Frankie felt herself lifted off her feet briefly. Someone cried out behind her, and over her shoulder she glimpsed the tiny mother and her toddler pressed against a man’s back. Frankie shoved her overnight bag under her arm, freeing her to reach back and grab the boy’s hand, pulling him up and against her out of the crush.
All right
, she said to him,
it’s all right. Franz!
His mother shrieked.
I’ve got him! Je le tiens!
Frankie cried back. The mother grabbed Frankie’s waist from behind, and all three of them were pushed forward and up the stairs into the train.

Frankie opened the first compartment, saw that there was a half-spot, and pushed her way in, putting the boy down between two men.
Here
, she pointed to the mother, who was panting, her breath coming in fast panicky claps, and the younger of the two men leapt up to give her his seat. She sank down onto the compartment seat; her little boy stood frozen, his eyes fixed on his mother’s face. Her breathing was rapid and ragged. Frankie wished desperately she had water. “Put your head down,” the older man suggested softly in German. He was heavyset but shaven. He was used to giving directions. Perhaps a teacher, thought Frankie. Why was he traveling alone? The mother didn’t hear. “Head down.” He stood up to grab her by the shoulders and force her head down. The train gave a lurch, knocking everyone in the compartment off balance. The man stumbled against Frankie, but then righted himself and spoke more gently to the young mother who looked up at him finally, nodded, and bent over.

Someone banged on the train window and Frankie looked up and saw the frantic face of a woman outside pressed against the glass, shouting at her. The train shifted and sighed and crept forward. The woman on the platform dropped her arm, but there was a relentless banging still on the car below the window. It became clear that the train was going to leave everyone on the platform behind and Frankie stared down into all those faces upturned to hers and knew she was looking at ghosts. They were not going to get out. A different train, on a different night perhaps. But this one was full, though everyone out there held a ticket, and a large enough train had been promised. They were drowning there right in front of her, within sight of the lifeboats, within sight of shore, and here she was, taking up a spot.

She whirled around to get out of the compartment, to get out of the train, to give someone, anyone else, her place.

“Let me pass,” she cried to the older man sitting next to the compartment door, but as she reached for the handle, he closed his hand over hers.

She frowned. “Let me go.”

He pointed at the door, and through it she looked into the backs of a handful of people pressed against the glass, and against them, in another row, stood more. The corridor outside was jammed with men and women. There was no getting out of the carriage. Oh God, she thought, turning around to face those outside, a sob rising in her chest. And the train started off, gathered speed, and pulled faster away from the people on the platform below, and its whistle blew.

Frankie sank down onto the case of the disk recorder, her suitcase on her lap in the dirty spot of open carpet between the two benches, and she leaned her head against the door. There were seven of them and the child jammed into the compartment. And none of them spoke. The mother’s breathing had quieted and slowed. Her little boy pressed against her and watched the others. There was no room for him on her lap, but he would not squeeze onto the bench beside her. For a while the train’s motion and patches of moonlight along the blackened city outskirts held everyone quiet, the journey started at last.

Get on a refugee train, Murrow had instructed; and though it was obscene, absurd of her at this point in time, having seen so much, she had harbored the impossible illusion that “refugee train” meant people who were saved. These people might as well have leapt. No one was safe, none was saved. Until they got to the end, they were simply on the run.

“Fräulein?” The younger of the two men was the first to break the silence in the car. Frankie looked up. He was pointing to her and then to his seat. He wore an ill-fitting hand-knit sweater pulled over a knotted tie, and the hand he held out was smudged with ink. “No, thanks,” she said, shaking her head. He lifted his hand and smiled at her, as if to say, well perhaps later then, and she smiled back at him. He nodded and crossed his arms over his chest, leaning back against the compartment wall, evidently satisfied. He had offered. The knot in Frankie’s stomach relaxed just slightly in the wake of that familiar gesture. All of them, there in the dark, heading away from Berlin, traveling out, could offer each other a seat, could still offer something, and still refuse.

Across from him, nearest the window, a round-faced woman somewhere in her middle age released her attention on the rest of them and pressed into the corner. She rested her head against the window frame and closed her eyes, her chin settling in her several collars. A blue jersey strained across the pointed tips of a brown wool suit jacket, and on top of that a darker blue, also wool, shirt and sweater. Even with her eyes closed, she gripped the handles of the battered leather case on her lap. Beside her sat a very pretty young woman, whom Frankie at first took to be the older woman’s daughter, but it was clear soon enough that she was traveling with the boy beside her. They were both dark-eyed and fair-skinned, and the sister’s curls flashed out from her tight cap, dancing with the motion of the train. No more than twelve, he had watched Frankie refuse the man’s seat with curious attention.

“American?” He looked down at her eagerly.

She nodded.

“We are going there,” he pronounced.

His sister put her hand on his knee to stop it jiggling.

He turned to her, frowning. She put her fingers to her lips. Frankie smiled at him and caught the imperceptible shift of the older woman in the corner, drawing herself farther away from the girl. The moonlight caught her full in the face and her eyes blinked open once, then firmly shut. The sister took her brother’s hand quietly in hers and leaned her head back against the compartment wall. In the frightened, exhausted silence, the tiny boy across from them had fallen asleep on his feet, clamped between his mother’s legs and resting his head on the enormous swell of her pregnant belly. This close, Frankie saw how dirty his hair was and matted, the backs of his legs grayed with soot. The mother was no more than a child herself, and Frankie watched as she turned to look into the blank black of the night train windows, the sleeping face of her boy turned up to her like a little skyless moon.