The Postmistress (24 page)

The lights of this station were blinding and numerous, and everyone was ordered off the train. Frankie stood.

“Except Americans.”

Frankie looked up in surprise, but the German officer had passed down the compartment.

“Auf Wiedersehen.”
Litman waved to Frankie. She nodded, confused. Were they going to get back on this same train? What was happening? Litman and Inga were the first out of the compartment, followed by Werner Buchman, the tradesman who carried the young mother’s bag, while she carried the sleeping Franz. Slowly, the old woman, whose name Frankie had never gotten, got to her feet, stiff after so many hours of sitting. She turned around and looked at Thomas as if to take his image to heart. He bobbed his head at her, and reached up for his case on the rack as though he were following shortly after
.
The compartment door slid shut after the old woman, and Frankie stood to take the seat she had left by the window. It was slightly warm and Frankie reached and opened the window, letting the night air into the compartment.

“Now I must ask you to hide me,” Thomas said, very low.

Frankie didn’t move.

“I have the transit papers,” he went on quickly, “but no exit visa.” She stared back.

“You understand?”

She nodded. Her heart was banging against her ribs. He looked at her briefly once more, and then he swung himself up onto the luggage rack and slid himself behind the suitcase. Frankie forced herself to look away from him and out the window at the people below, suddenly anonymous again, her companions from the compartment dispersed into the crowd. After a few minutes, she caught sight of the curly head of the mother and her little boy, and was comforted.

Frankie kept her eye on them, loosely following their progress in the dim light. It was too early to know whether to be afraid. The stop might be, even now, even after all that had happened, just routine. Some of the people had turned expectantly toward the station, facing it as though some kind of answer might come from it, some promise of order; but the mess of people on the platform below didn’t move, and some simply sat down in place to wait. Above her on the luggage rack, Thomas lay still. Frankie closed her eyes and dozed a little and when she woke from time to time, she’d look down into the crowd to mark the progress of the woman and the little boy. After an hour or so, three black cars pulled up alongside the train and the border guards on the platform began shouting for people to get up and move down toward the end. Frankie saw the mother struggling up to her feet, then drop as though she had tripped or been pushed. When she rose again at the height of the crowd, she was looking frantically around, and Frankie saw that little Franz was gone. The crowd surged forward, shoving toward a gap at the end of the platform. Frankie scrambled to her feet and onto her seat, trying to see down into the crowd and catch sight of the child, but all she could see was the mother trying to stand against the push of the crowd. The man behind her shouted,
MOVE, we’re moving!
and there were whistles, and two guards shouted at the mother and one grabbed her arm to come away. And then Frankie saw the boy—twenty impossible, unreachable feet from his mother.

“There!” Frankie cried out. “There he is!”

At the same time as Frankie shouted, his mother had caught the sound of his crying and started pushing against the human tide to get at him. People roared at her and shoved back and the boy, hearing her cries, cried back,
Mama! Mama!

“There!” Frankie shouted again, frantic. The mother could not get at her child
. “
There he is!”

Mama,
Franz was wailing
. Mama, Mama!

“Shut up, Fräulein,” Thomas hissed at her. “They’re going to shoot. For God’s sake, shut up!”

“There!” Frankie pounded against the window. And one of the German officers, disgusted by the commotion, turned around and shot.

The crowd went silent. Hands that had been waving dropped. Truly frightened people did not scream, Frankie saw—they went quiet, they went watchful. Had he shot into the crowd? Had someone been hit? It was too hard to tell. There were too many. Where was the mother? Frankie stood at the open window, her mouth still in the shape of her cry. And then the officer who was a few feet from her window looked up at where the sound of her banging had come from and slowly leveled his revolver on her. She stared back at him, both hands on the glass, unable to breathe. And then she was yanked down off the seat by Thomas and pulled away from the window onto the floor. Outside the train, the quiet continued and the two of them lay there, Frankie sobbing into her hands, too frightened to look up. She couldn’t bear the quiet. What had she done? Her heart was pounding so fast, she thought she was going to be sick. Someone shouted. Frankie looked over at Thomas who was sitting up, his ear against the compartment wall. Perhaps the soldier hadn’t seen Thomas, perhaps from the outside it had merely looked like she had fallen backward off her seat.

The floor beneath them shuddered and bucked, and very slowly the train began to move again with the two of them inside. Frankie caught Thomas’s eye, but he shook his head. What had happened? The roof of the station slid past in the window above her head. The train was going to leave the boy and his mother behind.
Halt! Halt!
Shouting broke out along the platform, but Frankie couldn’t tell if it came from the people or from one of the soldiers. The train kept going, moving along almost to the end of the station. Where it stopped.

Frankie’s heart heaved and dropped and she looked at Thomas sitting across from her on the floor in the dark compartment. For a moment there wasn’t a sound, and she thought they might start off again, but then a whistle blew nearby and the carriage door was thrown open. Someone came up the steps and along the corridor; the compartment door slid back. She looked up at an officer of the Gestapo. Behind him, another man waited.

The officer bowed to her and asked her to get up on her feet. Very politely, she and Thomas were asked to come down off the train. Polite, and their guns were not drawn. There was something wrong with the engine. There was a bus waiting. Could they come, please. Numbly, Frankie reached for her suitcase and the disk recorder and passed down the corridor, aware of the three men behind her. The train had evidently been halted in the field just past the station. She climbed down the steps of the train onto the grass by the side of the train tracks. There was, in fact, a bus waiting; inside it, Frankie made out the heads of three others. First, there was the issue of papers.

“Is something wrong?” She faced the Germans.

“No, no,” the first officer answered mildly, “nothing.” But Frankie saw him change his grip on the gun in his hand, and a sick dread rose up in her chest. She turned to Thomas, beside her. He had closed his eyes. “No,” she whispered, and put her hand on Thomas’s arm and felt how thin he was beneath the cloth.

“Step away, Fräulein.” The officer was genial.

Frankie turned her back on the officer and spoke into Thomas’s closed eyes. “Thomas”—her grip tightened on his arm—“Thomas?”

“Go on.” He shook his head.

“Thomas,” she whispered, “please. Let me—”

“Fräulein!”

Thomas opened his eyes and looked at her at the same time as Frankie felt herself roughly pushed aside and the officer took his shot. Thomas fell at Frankie’s feet with a sigh.

Frankie blinked. The officer behind her stepped away. She stared ahead at the empty spot in the air where Thomas had just stood. Slowly she turned around.

The officer’s eyes slid from him to Frankie. She stared back at him.

“I could detain you.”

Distantly, as if from another lifetime, from inside the station, the telephone rang.

Across the field it rang twice, three times, four. Someone answered it. The officer looked up and, with an expression of disgust, he waved Frankie toward the bus. Shaking, she bent to pick up her suitcase and the recorder, looking one last time at Thomas. Blood streamed from his ear and across his neck into the ground. She whimpered.

“Go.”

She turned around, and she walked away from Thomas, from the boy and from his mother somewhere back there on the station platform. She walked ten feet down the tracks away from the police before she started weeping. She walked a few more feet, waiting to hear a shot, waiting to hear a shout, anything at all. She lifted her arm and wiped the tears off on her sleeve. Between the train behind her and the bus ahead on the country lane there was nothing but the sound of her own breathing and her feet clipping stones and then the cool metal of the rail that she grabbed as she climbed on.

16.

T
HIS
IS
FRANKIE BARD, CBS news, from Mulhouse, France, just west of the Franco/German border.

Emma turned around from her mailbox, a letter in her hand. The clipped female tones emerged into the post office from the green Bakelite box behind Miss James’s head.
There is a great deal of speculation about who is trying to leave Germany where—we are told—conditions have never been better, where the war is being won on all fronts, and where peace and bread are plentiful.
The voice paused.
There are, it is true, plenty of crackers to be had here.
Emma looked at Iris. That last was a joke, wasn’t it? The woman on the radio sounded like she was smiling, though she also sounded exhausted.
Still, people are leaving, are trying to leave, by the dozens. You have to imagine walking out of your house or apartment and closing the door and never going back. In your hands are a suitcase and maybe a shopping bag filled with a piece of sausage, some cheese perhaps, whatever you were allotted in the store, something to tide you over, you hope, until you reach the border. In the suitcase, if you are a Jew, are two changes of clothes and your papers
—her voice snapped off, and then came back on—
You have a window of escape you are shooting for. If you are one of the very lucky few, you have an American visa. More likely, you have a visa for Cuba, or Argentina, or Brazil. You have ninety days to reach your destination or the visas expire. But you have to get on a train. And cross Europe to get to the boats at Lisbon or Bordeaux. You have ninety days, and the trains are few and full. Everywhere. So the windows from here look to be closing.
Now the voice was shaking. Emma closed her box and locked it and walked closer to the voice
. You must imagine a Europe no longer made up of houses in villages where generations remain. Imagine people without houses, without the frame and mortar and brick around them, floating out here, trying to swim as hard as they can to get away. You have to imagine that there is right now, in Europe, a sea of people moving. If one of you were to write them a letter, you have to understand, there is nowhere a letter would find them—
Iris turned around and switched it off.

“We don’t have to imagine a goddamned thing,” she said evenly to Emma. “It’s a mess over there, and that gal should get control of herself.”

Emma was staring at the wireless as though it might spring back into voice.

“He’s okay,” Miss James said to her gently. “It’s okay. You know where he is. You have a letter in your hand.”

Emma looked down at it. “Yes.”

“So. There you are.”

There you are.
That’s what Will always said. Lord.

THE EYE of the evening train moved slowly forward into Mulhouse station and stopped. Some of the faces on board turned to look down on Frankie standing there on the platform waiting. Some of the faces stared, and she couldn’t look at them too closely and bent to pick up her baggage and walked, under their gaze, to the single open door. She was the only passenger, and the train jolted forward and started sliding away from Mulhouse even before she had found her way down the corridor to a seat. It followed the main railway corridor west, through Belfort into Besançon, where she stopped for her first sleep in a bed in five nights. Too tired to do anything but point at a bottle and a loaf of bread and some cheese, she carried everything up to her room and sat down on the cot to undo her laces, and woke up the next morning lying across the bed, her feet on the floor, still in her shoes. Only half-awake, she slid out of her shoes, got under the covers, and fell back asleep staring up at the plaster ceiling.

Frankie woke again far into the afternoon to the sound of church bells. She lay in the middle of a bed, in the tiny upstairs room of the Burghorst Pension, at the edge of a French provincial town and listened to the world going on outside her door, outside the window without her.
Clap.
A man shouted at schoolchildren running by, and their fast footsteps and laughter carried up through the open window.
Clap.
She frowned, trying to make sense of this steady clap, the sound of wood on wood and then, when it came again, she understood that someone’s shutter was banging. Someone’s window needed to be pulled closed. She lay there, floating like a child. No one knew her. No one called for her. She felt relieved of duty. There had been a change in plan.

She snorted. Change of goddamned plan. Try to get all the way to Lisbon, Murrow had said. Stop and broadcast in Strasbourg, Lyons, and Lisbon. She was pretty sure it was the twenty-third of May, and by now the patched-in report from Mulhouse would make it clear she was going to miss Strasbourg. She wondered if it had even gone out on the air, let alone made it to the States. She ought to cable Murrow.

She sat up at last and stood to step out of her skirt. The rim of an envelope poked out of the pocket when the skirt fell to the floor. Frankie looked at the envelope, uneasily. The doctor’s letter was beginning to hold the faint power of a relic. She ought to mail it, oughtn’t she? Get it on its way. Kicking the skirt to the side, she went to run the water in the sink and put the plug in, watching the sink fill. She tried to put the days in order. When had he died? Five days ago? Six? Frankie sniffed and turned off the water, reaching for the sponge and some hand soap
.
She pulled off her blouse and brassiere, and stood naked on the rug, giving herself a baby’s sponge bath. In the mirror, her hand guided the sponge across her breasts and down the long shine of her stomach, where it disappeared from the glass. For a moment she stared at the torso in the glass, the sponge dripping soapy water down her leg, and she crossed her arms over her breasts.