The Postmistress

  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.

  For the fourth night in a row, Frankie settled herself in the thick dark between sleepers and, like her companions, tried to doze. But as soon as she shut her eyes, the doctor’s big body flipped effortlessly off his feet into the air before her. She shuddered and opened her eyes. The old woman in the corner was crying without sound, tears streaking down her cheeks. Her hands still held on to the bag in her lap, resting like a stone. The boy and girl beside her had fallen asleep on each other. The young man who had offered his seat slept with his arms across his chest, his head down as though he was considering a question.

  She fingered the clasp on the black case beneath her. She ought to take it out and start asking questions in her simple German: Where are you going? Where have you come from? What happened? She ought to focus her attention on the mother, get the beginnings of the story, get her voice on the disk at the outset of the journey. Although the brother and sister might be equally good to concentrate the story on. Frankie watched the older man watching out the window. She wondered whom he had left behind. And for the first time in her career, she wondered whether she had the guts to ask him. Seek Truth and Report It, the journalist’s code instructed. Seek Truth. Report It. And Minimize Harm. Every one of the sleepers around her must have left someone behind. And she thought of the desperate faces of the people who hadn’t made it onto this train. Minimize Harm? She shuddered. Let the sleepers sleep. Tomorrow would be soon enough to begin.

  Two hours later, the train slowed and then pulled into a tiny blacked-out village, whose station was no more than a wooden sign pounded into a short field of flattened grass and a bench facing the tracks. Frankie saw the single light of a watchman’s lantern glowing from the bench like a yellow eye. Everyone in the compartment sat up and pulled their papers out, readying for the scrutiny. Their compartment was in the middle of the train, and it took over an hour for the inspector to reach it. The fear was infectious, heavy as a blanket. The progress was agonizing. Why was it so slow? In the car next door, they could hear raised voices followed by abrupt silence. Their door swung open and an old man with a torch stood in the opening, his jaw slack. Just an old man doing a job, thought Frankie, handing her papers up to him without any visible interest or ire.

  “American?” He squinted. She nodded. He didn’t look at Murrow’s letter; he took her passport, turned it over to see the insignia, then handed it back. He lifted his torch and looked at the boy whose eyes flared enormous in the light, then at the mother, and the old man snapped his fingers for papers, though once in his hands he hardly looked at them. The door closed after him and left them all in an uncertain silence. That was it? They sat together in the dark listening to the opening and closing of the rest of the compartments in their carriage.

  “You are good luck,” the older man said slowly in the quiet after the train resumed. The dawn was breaking in the near fields and a low spring morning arose, the slanted red coloring the stubble outside. They had crossed the first hurdle, but they were still in Germany.

  “I beg your pardon?” Frankie was aware that the old woman in the corner had opened her eyes and was listening to them.

  But the man only shrugged. The brother and sister had fallen back asleep, and the boy’s lips had fallen open in a soft round.

  “Where are you heading?” she asked the man in German.

  “Lisbon.” He nodded. He had been lucky, he said. He had not made it onto the previous two trains. His exit visa expired in one week. The fingers on the hand he held up were stubby and well-worn. Not a teacher—Frankie changed her mind—a shopkeeper, a butcher. Someone with a trade.

  She smiled. “What is your name?”

  “Werner Buchman,” he replied. The woman across from him closed her eyes, as though releasing hold.

  By the afternoon, the train had slowed and stopped in three isolated towns. Each time, the police boarded the train and made their way through the thick clot of people, one by one. No one could leave the stations, and during one stop, Frankie made her way along the platform, all the way to the barrier, and looked through it into a village market day. Out here, far from the city, there were potatoes and new onions. A woman held three potatoes in her gloved hand and looked up at Frankie across the way. The May sun glinted off the metal buttons of her coat. Behind her, the poplars were greened on the top, a light girlish green.

  By the third stop at Leipzig, the group in Frankie’s car had noticeably relaxed, and Frankie suspected that Werner had been right, that because she was in the car, the others were passed over lightly. The tiny mother was smiling at her boy who had crawled over to the young man in the sweater, now on the floor in Frankie’s spot, and taken the piece of string he had tied to a sweet, pulling it back and forward as though teasing a kitten. The boy sucked on the sweet and leaned against his mother. The brother and sister played cards, and the sister hummed to herself as she held hers. The little boy had wet himself, but the window was pulled down and the smell of mown grass from outside made it unexpectedly barnlike in the car. They crossed into the Black Forest as the sun set. With luck they’d make it to Strasbourg and the French border by ten or eleven. Then Lyon, Toulouse, and the day after tomorrow, to the Spanish border at Bayonne. From there one could count on two solid days across Spain and into Portugal to arrive at the sea and the boats at Lisbon. Four days from here, if all went as hoped.

  Frankie reached down and opened the lid on the recorder. The two boys stared at her. She’d start with the mother and the little boy, she decided. And she’d start slow.

  “Wie heißt du?” Frankie smiled over at the toddler, turning the switch. “What is your name?”

  He stared back at her. His mother poked him idly with her finger. He took the sweet from his mouth. “Franz.” He was very solemn.

  “Franz Hofmann,” his mother whispered.

  He started off after the name. “Franz Hof . . .”

  The brother put down his cards. “Franz Hofmann,” he said to the little boy. “Go on.”

  But Franz shook his head.

  “And you?” Frankie asked the sister, in her rudimentary German. “Speak into here,” she motioned. “Say your
name.”

  “Inga?” said the sister, shyly. “Inga Borg?” The brother laughed and took his turn, pronouncing the English words slowly, as though he beat them on a drum. “I am Litman.”

  “Where are you from?” Frankie asked.

  The boy turned to his sister. Watching, Frankie wasn’t sure whether he didn’t understand or if he was frightened by the question.

  “We have papers,” his sister said to Frankie in German.

  “Of course.” Frankie nodded to assure her. Then she leaned forward and said to the recorder in English, “This is Frankie Bard, traveling south from Berlin on the Deutsche Reichsbahn. The sound you hear is the train making good time on the tracks.” Inga watched her. “I have with me a brother and sister, Inga and Litman Borg. They look to be about seventeen and twelve years old, traveling alone. Tell me, where are you two traveling to?” She repeated the question softly in German.

  “Lisbon,” Inga answered.

  “And where to, after that?”

  “America.”

  “And where have you come from?”

  The disk recorded the silence as Inga put her hand on Litman’s arm to stop him. He looked up at her, and Frankie saw him see something in his sister’s expression—his mother, maybe, his aunt?—that was enough to shut the light off on his smile. Frankie turned the recorder off, frowning. The thing was heavy and in the way. How was she to reach them with it sitting there like a small animal on her lap?

  The mother slipped a piece of bread from her bag and handed it to her little boy. Everyone watched him eat. The woman in the corner stared fixedly out of the window. Frankie wondered whether she was deaf.

  The young man in the sweater pulled a string from his pocket and wove the string between his fingers in a game of cat’s cradle and held it up to the brother, who shook his head stiffly, clearly too old for such childishness. The young man laughed at him and Frankie saw a row of broken teeth between his lips. When he turned to her, holding his two hands woven together by the child’s game, she smiled back at him and slipped her thumbs and forefingers under his, drawing the string onto her own hand.

  “And you, Fräulein, where are you heading?” The man spoke in heavily accented but precise English, repeating Frankie’s phrase.

  “With all of you,” Frankie answered as he looped his fingers in the string and pulled. He frowned.

  “I’m riding this train to tell America who is on it.”

  He studied her. “Why?”

  “So people know.”

  “What are you?”

  “A reporter.”

  “So?” He let his fingers drop and the string went slack upon them. “And what is that box?”

  “It records you, your voices.” She sat back. “Sound.”

  “And what does America think?”

  “America doesn’t know what to think.”

  He nodded and crossed his arms, then his light, appraising gaze flicked off. The stubble on his chin was blond and sparse. “Shall I tell America what to think?”

  “Shoot.” She smiled at him.

  He paused.

  “Hold on.” Frankie put her hand up. “Hold on.” She pointed to the machine. He nodded. “Start,” she said, switching the knob on the top, “slowly.”

  “I am Thomas Kleinmann—”

  She looked up and saw he was holding out his hand to her and she reached across the spinning disk and shook it. “Frankie Bard.”

  He let go her hand and leaned back. “I come from Austria, in the mountains around Kitzbühel, where I live with my mother and father.” He stopped. She nodded, go on. The disk whirled around.

  “In the months after the Anschluss, after Austria fell to the Nazis and the Jewish laws were put into place there, my mother worried more and more about my brother, who was studying in Munich. Finally one day, she sent me to bring him back home.”

  Litman had slid his hand under Inga’s beside him, quieting to listen to a story in words they did not understand.

  “I travel all night on the train, arriving in the city early in the morning. I make my way to my brother’s address, but my brother has left that same morning, according to the neighbor, to return home. We have crossed paths.

  “I sit down at my brother’s desk to write our mother and father and tell them what happened, but before I begin, there is a knock on the door. I shove the letter into my pocket and I go to answer. The police. They have come for Reinhart. Why? I ask. They do not answer. He is not here, I say. They take me instead. It does not matter to them”—Thomas shrugged—“which Jew they have.”

  The woman in the corner sucked in her breath. Frankie glanced up, realizing that the woman understood very well what was being said.

  “I walk through the streets with a group of twenty others. We go to the police station, I am put into a room. Wait, they say. So, I am waiting, I pull out of my pocket the piece of stationery for my letter to Mother. It has on it the name of my brother’s professor and the letterhead of the electrical engineering college. So, I write myself a letter of recommendation and take it to the policeman at the head of the room.”

  “Ah, says the guard, looking at it, go through there. I follow where he points and go into a tiny room where a large man, a friendly man, sits behind a pile of papers. This man looks at my letter, looks at me, and tears it in half. Go, he says, and points through another door. It is the door into the police yard. Out there, sixty or seventy men sit. No one looks at me. I walk all the way to the fence. I can see the river and the gardens behind houses.

  “By this time it is afternoon, and the sun is very hot in the square. I walk along the fence and I stand in the little shade of the roof. For two hours I stand there and then there comes the instruction to go into the center of the square for new orders. Hsst, I hear at my shoulder. I turn around and see the guard I had spoken with earlier that morning, the guard to whom I had shown the letter. Hsst, the guard says and points me along the fence to a door. I look around. Is this is a trick? Is anyone watching? But there are just many men tired getting to their feet, and I go along the fence and out the door, a miracle. The guard is holding it open.

  “ ‘Elektrotechnik?’ The guard grins. ‘Professor Peter Schmidt?’ I nod, dumbly, I don’t understand. He points me to walk through the door and points to a second door, ten meters away, where another guard sits. I look at him, but the guard nods, go on, and pushes.

  “I walk forward. I am not breathing. I reach the second guard. I can see the walk by the river beyond the police station and people returning from market. I stop and look at the guard. He doesn’t look up. He reaches over and unlocks the gate.

  “For twenty meters I walk straight ahead. Will I be shot, or shouted at, seen? Thirty meters. Now I am walking in the street. After forty meters, I know that I am free. I turn the corner at last. I am hurrying toward my brother’s apartment, and I understand—it hits me, yes—I am out because the guard studied Elektrotechnik also.”

  He looked at Frankie and shook his head, his disbelief palpable in the dark.

  “Then you are the lucky one here,” the old woman in the corner broke in.

  It was as if a shadow had spoken. “It is you,” she repeated, in English. “There was God,” she insisted. “Looking out for you, at every turn.”

  “People looked out”—he cleared his throat—“not God.”

  “The same.”

  He shook his head. “There is no God.” He turned to Frankie, his voice urgent and low. “There is only us, Fräulein.”

  The train shuddered, slowing for another stop. Frankie turned the knob and the recording arm lifted off the disk. They had reached the German border at Kehl. On the other side lay Vichy France: Strasbourg, Lyon, Toulouse. And then on past France to Portugal, to the ships at Lisbon.

  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 p
assed 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.