The Postmistress (25 page)

You must be pretty tough, the doctor had said down there in the dark. She shuddered, remembering how nervous and cross he’d made her when he was asking about Billy. She unfolded the towel left by the sink and rubbed herself dry.

Sinking down on the bed with the towel around her shoulders, she pulled out a cigarette. The smoke shot deep into her lungs and she closed her eyes, exhaling it. She lay back and smoked the cigarette all the way down to where its fire crept close to her fingers. Then she stood and fastened her skirt around her waist and buttoned her blouse at the neck and cuffs, then pulled her jacket on. The doctor’s letter lay on the floor. She picked it up and pocketed it again, and closed the clasps on the suitcase.

Around the square the stores had reopened, and old women and housewives passed in and out, and old men sat on the benches at the center under a linden tree. There looked to be meat in the butcher shop and bread in the bakery. In every window hung a picture of the Führer, though Frankie saw no sign of the German police. At the edge of the square one shop was shuttered, and in block letters a notice had been written on the metal:
Qui achète des Juifs est un traître.
She stood in front of the store and wondered if the family inside had made it out of this town, had gotten onto a train and somewhere they’d be safe. She wanted to think of them arriving. Not stopped. The tiny boy’s face on the platform below her in the crowd at the station in Kehl turned toward her. Where were Inga and Litman now? The old woman? Werner Buchman? Frankie shut her eyes. Thomas appeared, and sank to his knees, shot in front of her. Shaking, she turned away from the blank shuttered shop window and made her way back to her room.

Get in, get the story, get out,
Murrow had said. Follow a family, he’d said. Christ. You couldn’t follow anyone over here. There was no way to know for certain whether anyone would make it from start to finish.

The bottle of wine and yesterday’s cheese stood on the table. She pulled the cork and poured a glass and drank it standing up, staring at the portable recorder in its case. She poured another glass of wine, popped open the case, and turned the knob.

The disk moved slowly around, and there came the faint susurrus of the needle on the metal record. She set the glass down, flicked the button that stopped the turntable, and set it going backward, watching it hum. Then she flicked it and Thomas’s voice sprang out of the machine. She listened to him all the way through until the record went silent again, around and around with nothing on it. There. There they were. In his voice lay the train and the night, his eyes on her as he told her his story, the narrow ridge of his shoulders stretching the wool of his sweater. The brother and the sister listening. Thomas was dead. But here was his voice. Here he was, alive.

Out the open window a long range of snow-topped mountains zigzagged sharply against the morning blue. The bell in the churchyard behind her rang the quarter hour, and the sound thudded with her heart. She stood for a long while staring at those bright tops and imagined herself north. North and east into the mountains, north across several peaks, from white point to white point, through the Jurals, into Switzerland, across the wide shoulders of the Swiss Alps into Austria, to Thomas’s house—where his mother and father were waking and waiting for news. Where was he? Where was their son? They would never know. If she were a bird, she could cross the silence to tell his mother—he almost made it. But what she knew had neither tongue nor voice to carry it. Surely God ought to look down and see that one part of the story had been separated from the other, and find a way, somehow, to put them side by side. How could He stand these gaps, these enormous valleys of silence? And Europe was full of people vanishing into this quiet.

The memory of Harriet Mendelsohn standing in the kitchen on Argyll Road shaking a fork at Dowell, playfully, hit Frankie with such force, she had to grab the windowsill.
Jens Steinbach, are you here?
The pitiful scraps of paper Harriet had collected and brought home to stick above her bed testified to the windy silence sweeping across European towns.

And what had Frankie thought? That she’d get over here and find the single story that would make the world sit up and listen? These are the Jews of Europe. Here is what is happening.
Pay attention.
But there was no story. Or rather, she turned from the window and considered the portable recorder. There was no story over here that she could tell from beginning until the end. The story of the Jews lay in the edges around what could be told. She sucked in her breath, the doctor’s words ghosting her thoughts. The parts that whisper off into the dark, the boy and the girl listening, the woman in the corner, the mother’s distracted face looking up into the moonlight, her hand in her boy’s curls as he slept. The sound of that little boy’s laughter caught for one impossible second, caught and held. There, in the wisps, was the truth of what was happening.

The following morning, Frankie got on the first train south from Besançon and negotiated her way into the corner seat in a third-class compartment. She had sixteen days left on her
permis de séjour
and ninety minutes of blank disks and no plan other than to record as many people talking as she could. She was not going to travel forward in a straight line to Lisbon—one thing after the other, stations on a journey with a beginning, a middle, and an end—she was riding trains with people. And she would get those people down until she ran out of time. She opened the case of the disk recorder and plugged in the microphone. A young couple traveling with their baby watched her preparations closely. When she was ready, she looked up.
“S’il vous plaît?”
The woman looked at her husband and nodded. Frankie turned the knob.

“Eleanor.” The woman smiled.

“Où allez-vous?”
Frankie held the microphone toward her.

“À Toulouse,”
the woman answered, pulling the tiny sweater snug over the baby’s stomach.

“Juifs?”
Frankie asked.

The husband frowned at the machine on Frankie’s lap and shook his head when she turned to him. Frankie turned the knob and the arm lifted from the disk. France passed by through the train window. Poligny, Bours—towns picked up like stitches on a needle, the names looped over and held. And Frankie rode through them, asking as many people as would answer
, What is your name? Where are you going? Where have you come from?

When Frankie walked off the train in Lyon five days later, she pushed through the doors and climbed the four flights up to the studio. A man about her age, dressed in a tan linen suit, took one look at her and dropped his chair back to upright.

“Hello, Beauty,” he said.

After days of riding the trains, speaking only in French or her cribbed German, the broad, wise-cracking son of the Midwest made her nearly want to weep. “Hello,” she said uncertainly.

“Jim Holland.” He stood up and held out his hand. “I’ve been on the lookout for you. Big boys are worried as all hell.”

“Frankie Bard.” She shook it.

“Looks like you could do with a hot bath and a drink.”

“I could do with a place to change, if that’s what you mean.”

He reached for his hat and his coat and piloted her back to his rooms, where he sat outside the single bathroom of the boardinghouse, in a chair tipped against the door, his long Nebraska legs stretched across the hall while she bathed. Then he shepherded her back to the studio into the familiar business of setting up for a broadcast, typing out her script for the censor, waiting to get London on the line, sitting at the mark in front of the mike.

“Jesus, Frankie.” Murrow came through the line.

“Hello.” She nodded, smiling at the taut, familiar voice.

“What the hell happened at Strasbourg?”

“Never made it.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, her eyes on the German censor who had come in and sat down in the chair by the door. “Doing fine.”

“Getting anything?”

She paused. “The whole deal, Boss.”

“Good girl,” he said. “What’s the story going to be?”

The hands on the clock said eight-twenty. The technician held up one finger, and Frankie nodded at him. “So long,” she said quietly. “I’m on.”

“Good luck.” Murrow signed off.

The censor placed both hands on either side of her script on the table. The three of them waited in silence as the hands of the clock clicked past. When the technician looked at her, Frankie leaned forward and pulled the mike close. “
This is Frankie Bard of the Columbia Broadcast System coming to you from Lyon, France. Good evening
.”

Frankie composed her face amiably for the censor, but he was reading the script. He wasn’t paying attention to her lips or the tone she had injected into her voice.

“Many years ago, the noted reporter Miss Martha Gellhorn came to speak at my alma mater, Smith College. She was speaking then about the condition some people lived in during the first terrible years of the Depression. She gave as heart-wrenching, as riveting, and as specific an account of the pain and the suffering of these people as anything I ever heard. After she finished, one of the head girls raised her hand and asked, ‘What are we to do about all that, Miss Gellhorn?’ There was a little quiet around the answer as Miss Gellhorn took her time. And it made some of the girls nervous.
‘
Pay attention,’ Miss Gellhorn retorted at last. ‘For God’s sake, pay attention.’ ”

In Franklin, in the post office, despite herself, Iris James turned around. “
For nearly three weeks, I’ve been traveling the trains, with the scores of mainly Jewish men, women, and children standing in lines to get out, get away. I’ve shoved into compartments, I’ve asked countless questions, I’ve heard story after simple story of flight. In station after station, I’ve seen lines of people waiting for too few seats on too few trains, and I’d like to get those haunted faces out of my head, but I can’t
.

Iris stared at the wireless.

What American doctor? Iris had turned all the way around from the window and was standing in front of the radio with her hands on either side of it as if it could be shaken into an answer.

“
Yesterday afternoon, in an ordinary market in Bayonne, I began to believe it myself. I had gone into the market because it is the start of summer and I was hungry, and I had seen a man carrying a tiny carton of strawberries in his hands. I went into the market in search of strawberries. It was very hot, and the market was beginning to close. Besides myself, there were a handful of German officers, also, it seemed, in search of fruit. They moved quietly through the crowd, in the direction of the strawberry vendor.

Frankie glanced at the censor sitting in front of her, one long finger resting easily on the switch of the microphone, like a pianist waiting for the downbeat of the conductor’s arm. He looked up. She smiled at him and switched gears.

“If you have Beethoven’s Fifth—surely a triumph of German passion and heart—go and put it on. Go and listen and you will hear the Europe—under Germany”
—she kept speaking into the microphone, her eyes on the man across from her, whose fingers had closed on the button. And she started to hum—
Da da da Dum—”

He pulled the microphone away and switched her off. She sat back, exhausted, giddy with skating the edge like that, and looked straight at him, daring him. She had just sung out the Morse code for the letter V.

Jim Holland pushed through the studio door.

“What are you doing, Fräulein?” The censor was studying her.

She smiled back at him, guileless. “I love Beethoven. I wanted to hum a little of it.”

The man before her was graying and precise. He may have been a professor at one time, a linguist. She couldn’t tell whether he knew where she had been headed in the broadcast, or because with an instinct for trouble, the minute she had strayed from what she had promised to say, he’d shut her down. She could see him considering. Was she a greater danger? Ought she to be questioned?

“How about that drink?” Jim Holland broke in.

She raised her eyebrows at the censor, like a schoolgirl asking permission.

The man paused for another moment and then finally, with an expression of disgust, waved them both out of the studio.

Jim shepherded her down the stairs and out onto the street, one hand on her elbow. She held on to the recorder and let herself be taken along the street, around the corner, and into the tiny bar where he found them a table and two drinks and an ashtray. She sank down.