Lena had to gather all her strength to walk back through the enormous doorway into the station. And Sofie seemed to have no strength at all. She clung to Lena with both hands.
Ordinarily, it would not have been difficult to feel anonymous and invisible in the huge echoing space of a train station, but she knew that she and Sofie were the only civilians, and they were certainly the only two young women. Even in the dark, she shrank against Sofie and took step after step, matching her pace to the young man’s, keeping close. He led them back under the tracks to the far side of the station, where they climbed a different flight of stairs and emerged on a platform beside a massive train looming in the dim light. They were looking at a passenger car, its dark windows covered with blackout paper on the inside. The man turned right and led them past another passenger car and two freight cars before he slowed down beside a big wooden carriage.
“This is a cattle car,” he said, reaching up and using all his strength to pull back the heavy door just far enough to admit a small body. “Here, let me help you up.”
And Lena and Sofie submitted to being lifted bodily and shoved into the car. Something scratchy enveloped Lena, and she felt a surge of panic. “What is it? It’s full. The car is full!”
“It’s straw,” he said. “Just straw. It will keep you warm and hidden.” And the next thing she knew, he was in the car with them, burrowing into the straw. “You must take your things and crawl in deep. I will bring you food and blankets. I will make sure that no one hurts you. You will be safe, I promise.”
“Why are you helping us?” Sofie said out of the darkness, speaking to the man for the first time. Her voice sounded thin and small. “Why would you help us?”
It was pitch dark in the car. And silent for a moment.
“I want you to be safe,” he said at last. “I … I can’t explain to you now. It is too difficult. But I want you to be safe.”
For a moment, panic flooded Lena again. Please let his reason not have to do with sex, she said to herself—or to God. Another prayer: this one rather strange.
It would be bad enough to be noticed by a boy, any boy, but to be noticed by a German man? He might seem calm and kind, but even putting sex aside (which Lena was eager to do), that did not change what it meant for a Dutch girl to be noticed by a German in the real true world of occupied Holland. Dutch girls were not supposed to be noticed by Germans. Not in that place, at that time. It only led to trouble.
She sighed as she heard the man’s feet hit the ground as he jumped from the car. “My name is Albert,” he said, and the big door clanged shut.
And Sofie came to life. “What are we doing?” she whispered, her voice harsh. “He will have us killed. He will send men to rape us. He will rape us himself. He will abandon us.” She reached out and felt around until she found Lena’s arm. Then she grasped on tight.
“Hey,” Lena said, “let go of me! Whose idea was it to take off on a train? And who kept us safe back there in the station when those men wanted to take us away? I wasn’t the one moaning and puking.”
“It was my puking that saved us,” Sofie spat back. She was no longer whispering. “Without me, we’d be back in their rooms right now, and innocent though you pretend to be, you know what they would be doing with us.”
Lena shuddered. “All right,” she said, hoping that Sofie could hear the appeasement in her voice. “Throwing up wasn’t such a dreadful thing. But after that, what would we have done without Albert’s help?”
“Found a way to go home?” Sofie said. And she started, once again, to cry. Her hand had fallen from Lena’s arm.
Home, Lena thought. Over and over Sofie had said that her home was a terrible place, that she wanted to get away, that she longed for adventure. Yet now she was snivelling for it. Doubt threatened. Lena thought of Bep and Piet and baby Nynke, and a knot of grief made it halfway up her throat before she managed to thrust it back down to her belly where it belonged.
She reached out and found Sofie’s body huddled in the dark. Not sure about it, she put a hand on Sofie’s back and let it rest there. Sofie was surprising her again and again. At home, she had always seemed so brave, so quick to laugh no matter how awful the circumstances. But in Amsterdam, the danger had never been real. Or real, but not immediate. Maybe Sofie hadn’t known how bad it could be.
And I didn’t know either, Lena thought. I would never have come if I’d known. She thought back to those sickening moments on the Hembrug, with the soldiers laughing at her and Margriet and taking their bicycle. She had thought that she was frightened then. Now she suspected that she had a great deal more to learn about fear.
Round and round went the thoughts inside her head, but they didn’t change the facts: she was shut up with a terrorstricken girl in a frigid, dark cattle car, part of a train run by the enemy, soon to head east into unknown territory.
Her head snapped up. She had got one part wrong.
“We’re not locked in here,” she said. “We can climb out and hide and … and find our way out of Utrecht. We’ll walk home. Why not? You should see the trips Margriet takes!”
Sofie’s sniffles stopped. She sat perfectly still. Well, Lena thought, she had put it out there. Let Sofie choose.
In that moment, the train platform came alive with German voices and stomping boots. The two girls clutched at each other. The area had been deserted when they came up.
“Have you checked the cars?” said a voice, almost right beside Lena’s and Sofie’s heads.
“Schultz and Biermann started at the other end. I’ll do these three. Here, jump up with me,” a deeper voice replied.
A grunt of frustration. “Can’t get this door open. Hey, help me, will you?”
Lena gripped Sofie’s neck and leaned to speak into her ear. “They’re searching the cars. We’ve got to find our bags and dig right to the back.” She felt Sofie nod just as the door to the next car opened with a loud creak.
“You take the far end, Rauch, and dig deep. I’ll start here. Any hideaways in here, we’ll flush them out like rats.”
Lena’s body went rigid. They know we’re here, she thought. Of course they do.
The two girls were sitting almost on top of their bags, so only a moment passed before they were digging frantically in the straw, the noise masked by the men in the next car, who seemed to be enjoying their work. They laughed and joked with each other as they speared the hay over and over again, hoping to encounter flesh. At least, that was what Lena imagined from the sounds she heard.
“You two in there,” a voice shouted. “You think this is a game? Put your bayonets to work and get on to the next car. We’re due to leave. You hear me?”
It took Lena and Sofie a long moment to take in the word bayonets in German, but soon enough the meaning penetrated. They both stopped digging for a moment, only to start again, more frenzied than before. Lena had guessed pitchforks. Bayonets were worse.
The men were loudly bemoaning the lack of bodies in the straw when Lena and Sofie heard the door to their own car creak open. The men heard it too.
“Hey, we’re taking care of it,” one of them shouted, his feet hitting the platform as he spoke. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Come here. I want to tell you something,” a smaller voice said. A familiar voice.
Another pair of boots hit the ground.
Lena and Sofie were at the back of the car now, backs against the cold wood, awaiting their fate. They couldn’t hear the whispered conversation. They would never know exactly what deal was struck, but they did hear the heavy boots move on to the car on their other side, and they heard a body pull itself into their car.
Moments later, they leaned back, looking up into the face of the man who had come for them.
It was Albert. Together, Lena and Sofie let out their breath.
“I brought you two blankets and some food and water,” Albert said. “And those men will leave you alone. Stay out of sight, though,” he added, his voice a wh
isper now. “They don’t know you’re the girls from the station. I’ll come when I can.”
Lena’s jaw didn’t want to move, to speak, to seal the bargain, but she forced it, and her words squeaked when they came. “Thank you, sir,” she said.
“It’s Albert,” he said. “And I don’t know your name.”
Lena stared into the dark. “I can’t tell you that,” she said. “You’ve been good to us, but you’re a stranger. You’re a man. And you’re, you’re … Well, even though you’re helping us, you’re …”
“I know,” he said. “I’m the enemy.” He was silent for a moment. “At least call me Albert,” he said. “This train trip will last for two nights or more. You have to call me something.”
“Albert,” Lena said.
“Yes,” he replied, “that sounds much better. Now what am I going to call you?”
But he was gone before she could make up her mind how to reply.
Lena took the bundle that Albert had left them and crawled through the straw to where Sofie huddled at the back of the car.
“It’s all right,” Lena said. “He brought us food and blankets. And water,” she added. Sofie grabbed the bundle from her, and soon they were both wrapped in blankets and gnawing on the first food they had had since breakfast, and the first bread they had had in months.
They were still chewing when the train rumbled to life. With a small lurch, a screech of metal on metal and the strong smell of burning oil, they were on their way.
“To Almelo,” Lena said.
“To Almelo,” Sofie replied.
CHAPTER NINE
The sound of rapid fire woke them both. Lena and Sofie were wrapped around each other, inside coats inside blankets. Their teeth had chattered as they lay there trying to sleep. Lena was tired—more tired, she thought, than she had ever been. But how could she sleep on a train going to a place she had never been, to people she had never met, with men poised to kill her in front and behind?
After lying awake in the cold for what felt like hours, she had just been drifting off when the most terrible question occurred to her: What if that man was on the train? They don’t know you’re the girls from the station, Albert had said. What had he meant, exactly?
But men must always search the trains. It couldn’t all be because of Lena and Sofie. After all, the officer hadn’t sent anyone after them when they walked out of the station. A bit of vomit on his pant cuffs and he had lost interest. Hadn’t he?
But he could be on the train. Why wouldn’t he be?
Lena twisted away from Sofie and sat up, leaning against the wooden wall, her blanket tight around her. The train creaked and jolted and roared, and the dark seemed darker even than home, though Lena knew that could not be. She shook from cold and swayed with the motion of the train and thought and thought and thought.
She must have slept, though, because then came the guns. The sound brought her up from where she was lying again with Sofie. The two girls reared up together, blankets falling from their shoulders. The train had stopped, but it shook as if it had turned into a gun itself and was firing. It was firing, Lena realized. Anti-aircraft guns. The Tommies were shooting at them, and they were shooting back. The sounds and sensations tangled with each other as if the earth were shattering around them, and light brighter than day sliced through the gaps in the walls behind them, lit the girls and their surroundings for an instant and was gone, only to come again minutes later. The first time, Lena ducked instinctively. Then she realized that the lights were flares dropped by the planes, and that the pilots could not see inside the cars, gaps or no gaps.
They sat, silent, in the mayhem. It went on for hours or a moment. And it stopped. Darkness returned, and silence and stillness settled on the night. Sofie and Lena sat for long minutes tensed for the next flash of light, the next explosion, until without further words they settled back into the straw and into sleep. They hardly noticed when the train rumbled to life once again and began to creep forward through the night.
“Sleep is good, but food is better,” said a voice.
Lena knocked her head on Sofie’s elbow as she sat up abruptly.
“Hey, now! It’s only me. Me and breakfast, that is!” Albert had cleared the straw from around them without waking them, and he knelt, holding out a canvas sack.
Sofie was sitting up and rubbing her elbow. Lena stared at Albert. He had opened the door, entered the car, created a path to them, shoving aside mountains of straw, and they had slept on, oblivious. Through the gaps in the wooden walls, daylight striped the heaps of straw, turning it gold. The train was still. Her heart beating fast, Lena stood and put her eye against a knothole in the wood. She gasped at what she saw. It was something out of stories and years gone by: a snow-covered wood, trees growing close to the track, leafless branches glittering icy white in the sun. Beneath the trees was a world of wonder—no undergrowth, just white, unblemished snow and grey shadows dancing among the tree trunks. A few rows of rabbit or deer tracks added to the perfection.
She turned and looked at Albert and Sofie. Sofie was wolfing down a piece of bread, but Albert was watching Lena. “It’s a field of stubble on the other side,” he said. “We’re stopped here until dark. Can’t move in the day or the Brits will see us and shoot.”
“They saw us in the dark,” Sofie said through the bread in her mouth.
“In the day, we make a better target,” Albert said. “Believe me.” He tore off a piece of the loaf he held in his hand and held it out to Lena. “I have a bit of cheese too,” he said.
Birds and fairylands forgotten, Lena dropped to her knees and reached for the bread. Albert handed her the cheese, and she took a bite of bread and cheese together.
She looked at Sofie and grinned. “Train travel is looking up,” she said, taking care not to waste her mouthful by spraying food.
Sofie grinned back. “It’s a feast,” she said.
Albert looked back and forth between them. “You are an unusual pair, aren’t you?” he said.
Sofie’s eyes glittered.
Albert reached into his sack. “If bread and cheese has you in hysterics, what will an apple do?” he said, all innocence. “Or what will you do for an apple,” he added, as if he had only just thought of it.
“A kiss,” Sofie cried. “I’ll give you a kiss for an apple.” And she crawled forward on her knees, took Albert’s face in her hands and kissed him right on the lips. She shuffled backwards, apple in hand.
Breathless, Albert turned his gaze on Lena. She saw that he held a second apple. “And you, nameless one? What will you give me for an apple?”
Lena fell back on her haunches, stunned by what had just happened. Why did Sofie have to behave like that? What had happened to the snivelling girl of the night before? And why did he let her kiss him? Even encourage it? It wasn’t Sofie he gazed at …
“I can’t kiss you, Albert. Keep your apple if you must,” Lena said, her voice loud in the cold, straw-filled space. She took her last bite of bread and cheese, willing her mouth to produce enough moisture to choke it down.
“Oh, why are you so stuck up? Kiss him! He deserves it. You know he does. And you’re the one he wants, not me!” Sofie said in Dutch, munching her apple while she spoke.
“I’m not kissing anyone, Sofie. And I don’t know why you—” Lena couldn’t speak anymore because she was fighting back tears, her back turned to them both, furious with herself, with her friend and with that man. She heard mumbling but didn’t take in any words. Then she heard the door creak open. Boots hit the ground, and the door creak closed again. She kept her back turned, reached behind herself for her blanket, curled up and thought of sleep.
“He left the apple for you,” Sofie said, her voice subdued.
Lena ignored her.
For a long time she lay there, awake but drifting. Nynke came to her, snug in her arms in the kitchen; Bep, her head resting on Lena’s shoulder as they gazed at the baby together; Piet, trying to save the world; and
Mother; Father too, and Margriet. Were they growing hungrier? Did any of them give a thought to Lena? Less than twenty-four hours had passed since her departure, but it seemed like so much longer. She thought about Sofie’s impulsive gesture and told herself that it meant nothing. Why did it matter anyway? Could she be jealous? That seemed ridiculous. Frightened?
Sofie was brazen one moment and sick and whimpering the next. She couldn’t be counted upon, not even to stay out of things. And men. Lena did not understand Sofie and men. It was as if Sofie knew something she didn’t. But not just that. Try as she might, Lena could not solve the puzzle that was her friend.
Last, she thought about what scared her most. If that officer was on this train and he found them … they would not escape so easily again. She must talk with Sofie, tell her of the danger.
The thought of talking to Sofie brought that kiss back to mind. Disgust and fury held a brief battle inside Lena’s heart. Sofie’s warning would have to wait. Lena pulled the blanket tighter, tucked her head down and willed herself to sleep.
It must have worked, because she became gradually aware of light and laughing voices. She opened her eyes and poked her head out to nothing but heaps of yellow straw. She listened. And dread flooded through her.
Sofie was speaking nearby in stilted German. Her voice loud and full. “You come from Worms? Do not people laugh when you tell them you are from Worms?”
“Ja, and what about some of your towns? All countries have towns with strange names.” The responding voice was young, younger than Albert’s, and at ease with itself.
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