The Postmistress (26 page)

“Jesus, you cut that close.”

“Humming the Fifth?”

He nodded. “It spooked him.”

“Good,” she chuckled. “Those people were humming resistance,
humming
it.” She smiled and sipped her drink, then leaned back against the wall with a satisfied smile.

“How long you been over here?” She shook out a cigarette.

“Couple of months.”

“Here in France?” She leaned into his lighter.

He nodded.

“Seen much?”

“Seen enough.” He looked over at her, his eyes lingering on the neck of her blouse. It didn’t matter that she was one of Ed Murrow’s, nor that that broadcast had been brave, even well-written; he didn’t give a damn. She had as fine a pair of legs below the sweetest narrow hips he’d seen in a long while. And she’d come from London, where the big boys were. He asked her questions he didn’t care about the answers to and nodded while she answered, though after a while she didn’t answer much, and thought about the moment that would come at the end when he’d pull her toward him, his hands on those hips. Pull her against him. He smiled at her.

The hairs on her arms lifted under his gaze and she crossed them over her chest. He slid his attention back onto the crowd in the bar.

“Listen,” she said, “let me play you something.”

“What is it?”

She was woozy from the drink. “I want you to hear someone.” And she reached down for the recorder she had put by her feet, looking around the bar for a quiet spot. Jim stood and carried their drinks over to a table in the corner by the telephones, under the stairs and out of the chatter of the crowd, and Frankie followed him there. He sat down and lit a cigarette, watching her open the case again, slide the disk from the sleeve in the lid, and then, looking at him, switch it on.

He had to lean toward the disks turning to catch Thomas’s voice, and he stayed that way all the way through until the silence turning at the end. He looked back up at her.

“He was dead within an hour of this,” Frankie said.

Jim raised his eyebrow.

“I’m starting to think that none of it matters,” she said, and snapped the machine off, “except this. Nothing we can report can do better than that. A man speaking. Just his voice. Just him talking before he is killed.” She snapped the lid of the case back down around the recorder.

Holland shook his head. “That’s not reporting. You need a frame. People need to know where to look. They need us to point.”

“We get in the way, don’t you see?”

“You can’t just go around and wave your wand and expect people to talk and then to expect that’s enough. You’ve got to have a story around them. Otherwise it’s just sound.”

“But what if the sounds you record are enough?”

“You’re a reporter, Miss Bard”—Holland pushed back—“not a collector. You report.”

“I don’t know.” Frankie was exhausted. “Maybe people talking, just being there, alive for the minutes you can hear them, is the only way to tell something true about what’s happening over here. Maybe that’s the story,” she finished, “because there’s no way to put a frame around this one, no plot.”

He seemed to think about it for a minute.

“Listen”—he leaned over the few feet between them—“what’s the point in having such a nice body if you’re not going to use it?”

She blinked.

“I
am
using it,” she answered, and closed the lid on the recorder, stood, and pulled it off the table. She walked out of the bar without another look and found the street that led back to the station. Within an hour, she was back on a train, this time traveling west.

17.

F
OR THE NEXT ten days, Frankie got on and off trains, headed west as far as one train would go, and then turned around and headed in the opposite direction, toward the boats at Lisbon, toward the ports in Bordeaux, the microphone held out to catch the answers to her questions:
What is your name? Where are you going? Where have you come from? How long have you traveled? How much do you have? Will anyone meet you?
Through the bulge of France, across the central plain, heading south and west, there were men and women crossing who spoke every language Frankie had ever heard
—Jmenuji se Peter Kryczk. À nevem Magyar Susannah. Je m’appelle Charlotte Maret. Regina Hannemann. Ich heiße Hans Jakobsohn. Je viens de Brancis. Je vais à Lisbon. Mein Name ist Josef. À Lisbon. In Lisbon. Oui, juif. Oui, je suis juive. Und das ist meine Frau, Rachel.

In her notebook, for each voice, she wrote a paragraph. How the man answered, saying each word so slowly it was as if he pulled the language down from air.
Und.
She copied his intonation into her book.
Das. Ist. Meine. Frau.
When he was done he looked at her, smiling, looked away. There. How a piece of wood in a child’s hands was worn smooth on one side to show a penciled face. How one mother’s rings slid down the long line of her fourth finger, and how she’d push them together again, staring out the window.
Merci, Mademoiselle,
a man had said quietly, after she’d asked the questions, after he’d said his name into the microphone, carefully and slowly.
De rien,
she’d mutter, her throat closing over. Jim Holland had been right. She was collecting them; she knew it. She was gathering their voices without any clear idea yet of what she thought she was bringing back to Murrow, but she had to stuff something in the mouth of that quiet. She wanted to get as many voices as she could, and send them soaring, somehow outward, upward, free. The days and the nights slipped past like beads on a wire. One day there was suddenly a burst of women, all of them set loose from the detention camp at Gurs.
Gurs,
Frankie had asked to be sure.
Gurs?
The name of the camp that had stood for so long in her head as the center of the story she meant to get to sounded a clear sharp note, like a bell struck from a time she could hardly recall.

She had been riding trains that stopped and started in the middle of nights so often that she had lost the ordinary markers of nights spent in specific beds, in particular places. Some nights she’d close her eyes and the train and the whistles and the sleepers all around would cast her backward, and when she’d wake, for a minute it was Thomas sitting there, still alive, in front of her. Sometimes she lost track of which direction she was facing, she lost track of everything except the faces and the voices and the start and stop of the knobs in her hand; and she kept asking, kept recording as if she’d lose them all if she didn’t get them down.

She knew she was running out of time. And yesterday, she had run out of disks. At the end of the second side of the last empty disk, the woman sitting in the corner of the train had waited as Frankie lifted the arm of the recorder, waited, watching as Frankie stared down at the disk. There was no more room.
Mademoiselle?
The woman asked. And Frankie heard the woman’s question, heard the sighing of the man asleep at last in the opposite corner, heard the summer rain dashing against the side of the car, the scores of people left on the platform, wet, waiting—and couldn’t stop recording. She flipped the disk over, set the recording needle down, and simply started recording over again on top of what was already there.
Vas-y,
she nodded at the woman, holding the microphone toward her.
Je suis seule,
the woman answered Frankie’s earlier question. Frankie could be ruining the disk, erasing the earlier voices, or not recording anything at all. But it didn’t matter to Frankie now. If it worked, there would be voices on top of voices. Chords of people.

“Mademoiselle?” The hand shook her.

“Mademoiselle?” The hand shook her awake. Frankie pulled herself up against the hard bench, trying to crawl back up from the well of sleep. She focused on the man in front of her.
“Oui?”

“Le train.”
He pointed. Frankie stood up. The platform writhed with people under the glaring station lights suddenly turned back on. She reached for the recorder and her suitcase.
“Merci, monsieur.”
She smiled tiredly.
“Et le train, où va-t’il?”

The crowd had already massed around the shut doors of the several compartments and stood waiting, looking up at the metal sides of the train with the mix of resignation and worry that Frankie had seen over and over in the last two weeks. Babies in baskets. Women looking over their shoulders at the stationmasters, wanting to be first to see motion, first to see the sign that the train was leaving, that the doors would open.

She judged the crowd. Many of them must be bound for the boats moored along the coast west of Bordeaux. Some might be traveling as far as Périgueux and then would turn south to Bayonne and through the Pyrenees toward Lisbon. A calendar hanging beside the cash register in the station tearoom said June the fifth. Summer. She stared at the date, trying to call up Broadway in Manhattan and the sound of motorcars and street barkers selling bottles of Coca-Cola and double-or-nothing Jujubes to bet on along the way. If it was June the fifth, she had four days left on her
permis de séjour
.

The doors slapped open. She found an empty compartment and settled herself in the corner seat, placing the recorder on the banquette beside her. The sixteen disks rested snug in their sleeves, holding close to seventy people, she guessed. And inside her suitcase lay the notebooks, with paragraphs of all the extra details on the people whose voices she had. The day before yesterday, her German failing in the wake of an old man’s torrent of words, she had simply handed him the pen and the notebook and pointed for him to write down what he was saying. Fuck Jim Holland, she thought. It wasn’t nothing, what she had done.

The short, harsh blast of a whistle nearby made her jump. A man shouted. She looked up and saw the single spire of a village church in the near distance. The train bunched forward and then stopped at a tiny station. Below her on the platform stood a mother and her son. She held his hand though he looked to be about ten.

The train door slammed open and the conductor put out the step stool. Mother and son stepped up into the train. There was a whispered discussion out in the corridor, and then the compartment door slid open. Frankie glanced up at them as they pushed inside, the mother carrying one suitcase, which she placed on the rack above their heads. They sat. He looked out the window, excited.

The train hissed up and started away. The mother closed her eyes briefly, as though she were praying. After a minute she opened them, looked sharply across at Frankie, and then, turning away, rested her attention on the boy. Out the window the sunbaked fields ran backward under the blue stretched sky.
Maman!
he shouted, pointing, when a man on horseback galloped alongside the train. She looked where her boy pointed, but the smile she had hung on her lips dropped as soon as he looked away from her, back outside. He slipped his hand out of hers to pull closer to the window and, emptied of his hand, the mother rested hers on the boy’s knee.

“Where are you going?” Frankie asked companionably after a while.

“En Espagne,”
the boy answered, glancing at his mother who nodded, not looking at Frankie. There was something in the quiet between them that prevented Frankie from asking them any more.

They traveled for over two hours in silence. The mother’s hand never lifted from her son. It was the local train and made many stops at stations like the one where the mother and son had boarded. The air was balmy outside the window, and the sun winked in and out through the day.

As it approached Toulouse, the train slowed. Everyone was to get off and either board trains for the north or the south, or stay on this train and carry on across the border into Spain. The boy’s hand crept back into his mother’s. The outlying houses of the city pulled slowly enough past now, that one could see the curtains in the windows and crockery on the shelves. The mother pulled her boy around to look at her, her hands holding each of his arms. He stared into her face.

And then Frankie understood that the boy was going on alone. Perhaps there had been only one set of papers issued. Perhaps there was only one sponsor in another country for the child. There were many perhaps. But it was clear now that the mother was sending her son onward. Her despair spread through the compartment, thick and silent as a fog. She checked inside his jacket for his papers. She stood and pulled his bag down from above and checked again that he had the food she had packed. He sat very still, watching her hands in among the things she had packed when they left home. Then she sat again next to him and pulled his hands onto her chest, turning him to face her. He was trembling. She drew him to her and kissed him on one cheek and then on the other cheek, so slowly, looking at every bit of his face, and then she reached and folded him to her. The train stopped with a jerk and went quiet.

Up and down the corridor the compartment doors slammed open. Outside a whistle blew. There was shouting back and forth along the station platform below the window. Finally, the mother let go of her boy and stood. The boy grabbed her hand. She gently pried his fingers loose. Neither of them said a word. She turned to open the compartment door and he followed right behind her, his hand touching her back. But she turned to him with such a smile on her face, with such calm, wide love, that the boy stopped and dropped his hand.

She pulled open the door and stepped through. He stood in the middle of the compartment. In the passageway, she turned and held her finger to her mouth, as if to say
shh
, and then kissed her fingers to him and was gone. For a single, long moment, the boy stood where his mother had left him, stood staring at the compartment door through which his mother had vanished.

The recording needle would have cut this silent line of heartbreak into the disk. And what it had cost the mother, that last smile she gave, that last comfort so that her boy could pass through the final moment, no one would ever know. Frankie looked down at her hands, away from the boy who was now pressed against the window glass, watching his mother disappearing into the coats and dresses of the others, plunging into and then lost in the thicket of the crowd.