The Woman From Saint Germain

by J. R. Lonie

  On the fresh night air, she could smell the invigorating scent of pine trees. He stopped her lighting up.

  ‘You don’t learn,’ he said to her.

  ‘We’re in the middle of nowhere,’ she protested.

  ‘Until you light a cigarette,’ he replied. ‘Then we might be somewhere.’

  He said he hoped Palestine didn’t have any trains. Once he was free of Europe, he never wanted to be on a train ever again. She said she couldn’t agree more but wondered how he’d still managed to sleep.

  ‘At least there is only you and me,’ he said lightly, but there was a sting in his tone, she noted. Experience, and not a good one.

  The night was clear. But the moon, little that it was, had set, and the light from the stars was faint. They could hardly see the winter-bare woods running alongside the track. Henk stiffened. A light had swung out from behind their boxcar and was coming towards them. The guard, who had been checking his train along the other side, had chosen to cross the track between their car and the next. Too late to push the door shut. Henk coiled, a snake ready to strike. Eleanor didn’t breathe. Her instinct to cry out was now bottled as firmly as if someone had put a stopper in her mouth. But the guard turned around and walked back to the end of the train. Neither Henk nor Eleanor said a word. What if he’d knifed the guard, she wondered? Another death but this time a Frenchman’s.

  ‘You treat everyone as an enemy,’ she said, once they were moving again. ‘We’re in France. They’re on our side.’

  ‘You know this?’ he replied.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  The train rolled on during the night, stopping frequently. In the early hours, they trundled through Narbonne, then headed west towards Toulouse, stopping briefly in the marshalling yards to take on water and coal. Both were awake. In case gendarmes were about, each kept watch through gaps in a couple of loose slats on either side, but they might have been in a cemetery for all the movement they saw. Soon, the train lurched back into its journey. Light from the signal box shone in through the gaps, briefly painting the inside of their car and their faces with stripes of light, making them look as if they were in convict uniforms.

  She had planned to cross into Spain from Perpignan, which was south of here, on the Mediterranean coast – an easy journey in a Wagons-Lits car after a comfortable night in her El Dorado hotel, and with Spanish and Portuguese visas affixed to her US passport. She wondered why she wasn’t steaming with resentment at her predicament, at the change in her circumstances from well-known author returning home in first-class comfort to criminal on the run from the Nazis. She thought of Hettie. She thought of the two German soldiers Henk killed, saving her from a German prison, probably saving her life. Yes, she was alive. She even allowed herself the heretical thought that she had never felt so alive.

  CERBÈRE, PYRÉNÉES-ORIENTALES

  Around 8am, Friday, 12th December 1941

  Bauer stood, his head in a fog of cigarette smoke, seemingly far away. Kopitcke, worried, asked him whether he was feeling well.

  ‘Sir?’ Kopitcke asked again.

  Yet another French railway station, if on the frontier. Yet another French police interlocutor, pretending to be polite and collegial.

  Passenger and freight trains had been checked. Yes, the French had discovered people with dodgy papers and plenty of people who couldn’t speak a word of French, but Bauer and Kopitcke could tell as plain as the noses on their faces that the French felt they had better things to do. What were they to do with all the people they rounded up except to lock them away in Gurs? A problem for another day but still a problem. Better to let them slip across the border for the Spanish to deal with.

  ‘If you want to catch Jews, Kommissar,’ the local inspector had said, ‘just throw out a lasso.’ This was a frontier post after all, and the easiest to cross.

  Bauer cared only about the killer of those two boys whose facial features had faded in his mind, replaced, to his horror, by the faces of his own two boys.

  Bauer had heard Kopitcke, even the concern in his voice, but still he did not reply. He drew on his cigarette. He’d made a mistake coming here. He’d too easily accepted Girard’s logic that this was the chosen route of the killer. Why? Because it was the most direct and quickest from Lyon. But they hadn’t been apprehended, not here nor at Latour-de-Carol, the other rail crossing this end of the Pyrénées, also suggested by Girard. He hadn’t thought it through himself.

  None of this mattered right now. Bauer had received a coded telegram not half an hour before from Georg’s colonel, who’d served with Bauer at Lake Naroch on the Russian front in 1916. Georg’s whole platoon had been missing for more than twenty-four hours. This could just mean they’d been cut off or had lost radio contact in the chaos of the Soviet counterattacks. He hoped that is what it meant, although he knew that ‘hope’ was not a word you could safely use for what was happening outside Moscow. Russia’s General Winter was snipping off the toes and fingers and ears of the German boys, even freezing the grease in their machine guns and the engines in their tanks. And what if that incompetent barbarian General Stalin hadn’t chosen right now to send in even more waves of fresh troops, whose feet and hands and faces were protected and warm, whose machine guns spat fire and whose tanks raced across the snow firing destruction. Seeing his boys’ faces on the murdered soldiers was an ill omen. Georg was strong, however, and knew to look after his men and himself. What if the worst was that he’d been captured? At least he’d be alive.

  ‘We’re fools, Kopitcke,’ said Bauer, trying to force himself out of his terrible fear. ‘Our ambush has been in the wrong place,’ he said. ‘Get the car ready.’

  Relieved, Kopitcke clicked his heels and gave a salute, although, thank God, not the Hitler salute. Bauer was back in control of his fears. They had wasted too much precious time. He turned to the French inspector. Could he get the schedule for freight and passenger trains from Lyon to Pau? A quick call to the national railways, the SNCF, produced four current possibilities. Bauer thanked him. ‘We’re leaving,’ he informed the Frenchman, who was delighted to be seeing the back of these Germans. Bauer curdled his delight by reminding him that the Wehrmacht’s fury at the murders hadn’t abated one iota. Did he want the French hostages in Nevers to be shot?

  Innocents? Bauer’s conscience asked.

  There were no innocents anymore, it replied. Not now. What would he say to Georg?

  His threat about the French hostages worked, conjuring a way to get to Pau well before those trains were scheduled to arrive there. The nearest airfield belonged to the French air force, although apart from the tricolour and the khaki-coloured huts and hangars, one would never have known that. They were empty, while a biplane stood alone outside the old operations hut. Bauer expected its provenance to be uncertain, its airworthiness dubious. Otherwise it would now have Luftwaffe markings on its side and be flying some military VIP somewhere between north of the Vichy demarcation line and the front outside Moscow. It looked like it wouldn’t fly high enough to top a church steeple, but their route would have them skirt the highest peaks of the Pyrénées. Even this would be faster than a car, which would have to manage the winding, narrow roadway from Perpignan to Pau. The train would have taken them back up the coast and inland to Toulouse. Even longer.

  The pilot came out as their car approached. He saluted Bauer. It was evident that he had been led to expect someone more impressive.

  ‘What’s the point of a damn ambush if you set it up after the enemy has passed?’ Bauer muttered to Kopitcke as they strapped themselves in. His stomach was playing up, and serve him right. While he’d been eating like a king, his Georg was lost on a battlefield deep in snow and enemy soldiers.

  ‘Take us to Pau,’ Bauer ordered in French. Pau had the only other direct rail link into Spain that was not under German control. Pau also had the German Armistice Commission, the only official German presence in Vichy France apart from the embassy in Vichy itself. It would be a poten
tially useful source of support if the French played hard to get.

  To Bauer’s considerable surprise, this piece of aviation history, an English De Havilland, flew well. The sky was clear and looked like a glacier upside down, blue and glistening with ice crystals. He saw with startling clarity the mountains to the south and the pine-clad French valleys that wound up into them through the rising hills now dusted in snow. They branched out into smaller, steeper valleys and reached the higher peaks to become passes, which eventually led to the other side. The ways into Spain were myriad and would be impossible to stem during summer. Even now, early winter, some might still be navigable. He wondered about his two quarries. If they were sticking together, they might even chance their luck by staying on the train down to the frontier and across. Who would expect them, a woman especially, to use this route to escape at this time of year?

  Bauer had a hunch about this. He preferred facts to hunches but this one was particularly strong.

  TRAIN SOUTH FROM TOULOUSE

  Early morning, Friday, 12th December 1941

  The train rattled south through the valley of the Garonne, slowly ascending all the time against the flow of the river, whose waters, bound for the Atlantic, they crossed and re-crossed many times. How much quicker it would be if only they had a boat. Eleanor was allowing herself to daydream of peaceful days, of no Germans on the French Atlantic coast, as if Providence were but a short hop away. It was further than the moon. They passed small villages clinging to the higher slopes, sheep here and there, as peaceful as heaven. Their food was lasting, not their water. At the next stop, Henk hoped, they would still be close enough to the river for him to fill their canteens.

  When the train did stop, it was in a siding carved into the woods that fell away down a short slope to the river. The day was clear, the sun hung golden, without warmth, just over the line of hills, as high as it would get today. Henk scrambled down. The grass was damp, but there were enough stones protruding to stop any precipitous fall, and besides, he was wearing good Wehrmacht boots. He quickly filled the canteens then watched carefully over the cat while it relieved itself. It was a funny little thing, fussy about getting dirty, happy always to climb inside his coat because it didn’t like the cold, oblivious to the danger its master was in.

  Eleanor went to another part of the riverbank, to bear her aches in private. Squatting was torture, although the cold was invigorating after being cooped up for so long. She finished and then, to her great satisfaction, found a small stream trickling down to the river from higher up. She washed her face and her hands and applied some crème. She got up and turned back, and there was the guard at the open boxcar looking down at her. He was older, squat and overweight, and he threw her the filthiest look, then spitefully hauled the door to their car shut.

  ‘You think I didn’t know you were there,’ he snapped. ‘Freeloaders. You speak French?’

  ‘But of course,’ Eleanor said as demurely as her fear allowed. This quite stopped the guard, who had expected another load of foreign Jews. He was sick of them. They were dirty; they left the cars filthy, unfit for reloading. The guards, who were always being urged to help the refugees, got the blame.

  ‘I’m willing to pay you for all your troubles,’ Eleanor said and produced the handful of francs she kept in her coat pocket, offering them to him.

  ‘You’re from Paris?’ he asked, suspicion still in his voice.

  ‘Paris,’ she confirmed and didn’t have to pretend to be wistful. ‘I could not stay there anymore, you understand.’

  ‘A lady like you,’ he said, ‘what’s to stop you going on a passenger train?’

  ‘My son,’ Eleanor replied, heart moving towards her mouth at each question from the guard. ‘He got himself into trouble with the occupier.’

  ‘I knew you had someone with you. Where is he?’

  ‘Down there, filling our canteens,’ she said and pointed to the river. ‘Please,’ she added, and pushed the money towards him. ‘We all have families in these hard times.’

  He took the money. ‘You’re lucky,’ he said. ‘They were watching the trains through Toulouse today and yesterday. They’ll be watching in Pau.’

  ‘Why do we stop all the time?’ Eleanor asked.

  ‘The Germans take all the best coal, leaving us the rubbish,’ he explained. ‘The locomotives can’t go very fast and have to stop more often to load up, so everyone behind gets held up. We were supposed to reach Pau around midday, but at this rate, I don’t know.’ He sighed. ‘I’m sorry, madame, for snapping at you. Times are difficult. You understand.’

  She felt sorry for him. ‘Do you smoke?’ she asked. He nodded. She took out her cigarettes and he took one. ‘Take a couple,’ she said. ‘But hide them. The Americans are the enemy now. We have to be careful.’

  He tipped his cap to her with a smile and went back to his van, his boots crunching more lightly along the gravel, his shoulders less stooped. How quickly his mood had changed, she saw, and how small the reason, just some American cigarettes. Eleanor waited until he was gone. A cold wind began to sweep down from the mountains and kicked up eddies of dust around her.

  ‘You can come out now,’ she said.

  Henk had slipped under the wagons to the other side and was waiting between their boxcar and the next, ready to spring at the guard. She’d seen him there the whole time; she’d also seen the knife in his hand.

  ‘Not all people are your enemy,’ she took pleasure in reminding him.

  The wind was too cold to stay outside. They ate sparingly and drank the fresh water, though it was meltwater and freezing. She held his hand back as he started to lift the canteen to drink more.

  ‘Enough,’ she cautioned. ‘Wait till it warms up. The American Girl Scouts winter survival list, point two, if I remember.’

  ‘And what’s point one?’ he asked with a hint of sarcasm.

  ‘No sneering,’ she replied tartly. She wondered if Hettie would have been as difficult a travelling companion. She probably wouldn’t have killed anyone. But she was dead, and the thought sank Eleanor into a gloom that crowded out her aches and pains.

  The coal-loader was now silent, yet the train remained stationary, as if stranded and forgotten. Henk took out his knife and began to hurl it at the wooden wall, a particular slat his target. Thwack after thwack. His cat didn’t like it.

  ‘You’re frightening your cat,’ she said.

  He threw it again, this time right by Eleanor. Thwack. She jumped. ‘Put it away,’ she told him.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Come. I’ll show you.’

  ‘Show me what?’

  ‘How to defend yourself.’ He grinned. The look on her face. ‘What? You let me save your life every time?’

  It was a good knife, he told her, a Wehrmacht infantry knife.

  ‘I’d rather not,’ she said.

  ‘This knife saved your life,’ he said.

  ‘I’m all too aware of that,’ she replied.

  ‘Then this is the knife you should learn from.’ He slipped the knife into his pocket. ‘Watch.’

  ‘If someone comes at you,’ he said, ‘you step right foot back, keep left foot forward while you take your knife out, like so.’ And he showed her the way to hold it, diagonally across the palm. ‘Don’t grasp it. You squeeze it, is a waste of energy. Again.’ And he repeated the action, stepping back as he took out his knife. ‘They come for you, you step forward, they step into your knife as you thrust your arm – not your hand, your arm. Now you do it.’

  He put the knife into the pocket of her coat and made her take it out three times before she held it properly.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ she said. ‘I feel ridiculous.’

  ‘Ridiculous is better than dead,’ he said and made her go through each movement, counting them out, one, two, three, four.

  ‘Now, I attack you. Step back, knife out, I keep coming, step forward, your arm for thrust, knife in my stomach.’ He grunted, grabbed his stomach, staggered back. His ey
es back in his head, he fell. She really did think she’d hurt him and cried out. From the floor, he laughed. The kitten thought it a game and jumped on him.

  ‘It is easy,’ he said, cuddling the cat and setting it back down.

  This was the first time she’d seen him really laugh, and what a difference it made to his face. The zealot was suddenly human. ‘You should consider a career on the Palestine stage, if there is one,’ she said drily, handing him back the knife. He hopped up but did not take the knife.

  ‘Again,’ he said. ‘Liberty is better when you are alive.’

  He made her do it six or seven times. Then she said, without considering the consequences, ‘What is the use? I don’t have a knife.’ Thereupon, he offered her the knife he’d taken from the German soldier.

  More standard Wehrmacht issue, she noted. She could hardly complain.

  Before handing it over, he demanded she promise to keep it in her coat pocket. Always. She said she would. He said he did not believe her, that she was just saying that to shut him up. He wasn’t going to waste a good knife on someone unprepared to use it.

  ‘You still do not understand,’ he said. ‘You still think this is a holiday, soon you will be home again, back to normal. This is not a holiday. I have killed two German soldiers. If the gendarmes catch us, they will hand us to the Germans, who will cut off our heads with a guillotine.’ He slapped his hands together.

  He gave her the knife. Chastened, especially as he had said ‘we’, she placed it in her right-hand coat pocket, and thereafter, every now and then, she put her hand in to test her ability to take it up without cutting her own wrist. Which she almost did when the train lurched unexpectedly into life and she lost her balance. But they were moving and the grind of the wheels on the rails that had driven them out of their minds was suddenly as sweet a sound as they could hear. Only minutes passed before they and their every cell were being juddered again.

  TRAIN EN ROUTE TO TARBES AND LOURDES