by Dennis Bock
Thomas got down into a crouch, flashlight shining ahead, and disappeared into the hole.
I followed him, too afraid not to, and crawled after the light that marked his progress.
The tunnel was only just wide enough for one person at a time to pass through it; the earthworks overhead and along the sides fell in clumps here and there as I moved on hands and knees. I heard the door shut behind me, our guide closing the three of us in, and there was just enough light from the flashlight he carried to see Thomas a few body-lengths ahead of me. It wasn’t far, maybe twenty feet away, that the exit came into view.
I wanted to get myself out of that cramped space, but I was afraid of what we’d find at the other end. I saw the small circle of light that was the opening, meaning Thomas was through now, and then a moment later I was through too.
I got to my feet in a room of arched brick walls and wooden benches and bunks similar to the ones we’d slept on in the allotment shelter we’d just cleared out of. A single bulb was strung from the ceiling by a black wire. Thomas was facing away from me, staring at something.
I had no idea what was above us, but I knew the name of the girl he was staring at, standing at the far end of the shelter, and what it was about her—apart from the fact that there was someone else down here—that had captured his attention.
It was Muriel’s hands that held his gaze, of course, and when the man emerged from the tunnel a moment later he told us to stop gawking at one another and to get a move on, there’d be time enough for explanations later.
Muriel and I didn’t speak as our guide led us along a narrow corridor into another cellar, this one smaller than the last. We didn’t stop there. Thomas and I traded looks as we walked. I don’t know what he saw in my eyes. Confusion, mostly likely, and a fearful anticipation of what waited for us around the next corner. That’s what I saw in his eyes, at least—that and the need to know who this girl was. It had been shocking enough to meet her in the light of day. Now, in this strange underworld, he might have set to hunting for an explanation for who and what she was. It was not clear how, if at all, these two were related, our guide and the girl with the claw-like hands, or where he was leading us. But there was no turning back, that much I knew. Any logic to the design and layout of the passageways we travelled through was lost on us after the first few turns. It would have been impossible to find our way back to where we’d started.
There were offshoots and side chambers where tunnelling equipment was stored—shovels and planking and wheelbarrows. The passageway we followed was lit by bulbs strung from the wooden support beams that crossed overhead every fifty feet or so, and soon, as the passageway narrowed, by lanterns set on shelves carved into the dirt wall.
Sharp turns came out of nowhere. Three times I could have sworn we’d looped back around again in the direction we’d started from. There were dips and rises in elevation, and twice we came upon stairs carved into the earth that took us deeper still. The air was stale and cold and set a shivering over me that I couldn’t control. I walked, arms wrapped around myself, teeth chattering, wondering if this was really my life or some stranger’s nightmare I’d stumbled into. Our guide was out front, just a few steps ahead of Muriel. Thomas was behind me.
The man traded his flashlight for a lantern he’d taken from one of the chambers we’d passed through. It cast a yellow glow over the walls of the tunnel as he moved forward, and when the path ahead curved and the roughed-out walls seemed to bend there always came a moment when I felt certain we’d see someone emerge from the darkness, waiting for us. I didn’t know who that would be but it was always a terrifying prospect. I thought of the Citizen Patrol or any of the vigilantes who’d be roaming above ground now, searching for more Germans to lynch. But for now only the darkness we moved towards waited for us as we kept on, marching endlessly through that series of tunnels, shivering and unsure of our next step.
Water dripped from the dirt ceiling and the ground grew soft with puddles that were too big to step over. The wooden support beams bent under the weight of the earth above. We were under the lake now, or maybe the Burnt River, but our guide was too far ahead to ask in a quiet voice, and I worried that any sound above a whisper might bring the tunnel down on our heads.
There had always been rumours about the Germans who disappeared, the camp-dwellers or the families who’d been allowed to live in town among the regular citizens, as we had been—a whole family gone overnight, houses empty the next day, as if no one had lived there in the first place. This wouldn’t be the first time people like us had travelled through this maze, and I wondered if this was an offshoot of the Underground Railroad that had delivered men and women to our town and towns like it along the north shore of Lake Ontario a hundred years earlier, and if by some strange reversal it was now the path that would carry us in the opposite direction, away from our torment and persecution.
The ugly fact that we were German meant we’d be free in America, welcomed into the heart of the nation that had terrified my father. It was the blood in our veins that would speak for us, and as this reasoning came clear to me I wondered if this was what my brother had wanted all along, to go to America—with our parents, not with just me, not under these terrible circumstances—to end up in a place where we’d not only be accepted but privileged for our race and heritage. The salute he’d given the work gang onboard that truck as they’d passed through our sleeping town might have been a first sign of some long-shifting allegiance that would finally find its full expression there, and I felt more trapped and helpless than I ever had, a slave to my fate and the ideals our father had tried to instill in us.
We emerged into the night air at the foot of a hill overlooking the lake after three or four hours down there in those miserable tunnels. I was exhausted, my feet were sore and wet, but it felt good to breathe fresh air again. We drained the water from our shoes and wrung out our socks and rested for a short time, and slowly the warm summer night took hold again and the shivering fell away. Out on the lake a flotilla of twenty or thirty ships was lit by the half-moon that had illuminated the allotment we’d passed through earlier that night. It had leapt westward in the sky, I could see, marking the hours we’d spent underground.
I got a clear look at our guide for the first time since he’d emerged from that door in the shelter. He was older than my father by twenty years or so and had deep lines in his face and sad, intelligent eyes that roamed among the three of us as we sat there, confused and frightened. My brother asked him to tell us what was going on, where he was taking us. “And who’s this?” he said, meaning Muriel. “We don’t know you. Either of you.”
It’s here the night’s strange events began to make sense to me. The man identified himself not only as our guide that night but as our guardian, too, and said that our welfare was as much his responsibility as was the welfare of his own daughter. Muriel didn’t seem to react at all when he turned to her as he said this. It was a surprise only to me and to Thomas, not at all to her, and in a moment the last two months dissolved before my very eyes. Everything I’d seen and thought and felt about her, it was all recast now. She was not an orphan, she was not alone. Here before us sat father and daughter, and now the orphan was me.
She did not attempt to hide behind the remoteness she’d met me with that first day at Mercy House. Now she was tired and undone, as much as Thomas and I were. She didn’t care to explain herself or to hide her hands when it was clear my brother was staring. As for Thomas, he might have begun to understand that she was the person who’d seen us from the window at Mercy House after the Russian inspector blew his cigarette smoke over my cut hand. He would piece it together soon enough if he hadn’t by now.
Muriel’s father got us up and moving again, now in the direction of the gravel road not far from where we’d come up from the tunnel, where we waited until a truck came around the bend, headlights cutting the darkness.
We stood off in the trees and waited after it came to a stop, and
when its headlights flicked off and on three times, Muriel’s father stepped out from our cover and spoke to the man through the driver’s-side window. He waved for us to come out, and we piled into the back of the pickup and were driven over a series of country roads that rang with the sound of calling crickets. The half-light of the waning moon shimmered on the dusty leaves of the trees at the side of the road, and when the bush cleared and the open pasture came into view we saw horses in a field, swinging their heads in the grey light.
It was maybe four in the morning when the truck left us at the edge of Hamilton Bay, overlooking the red glow of the Stelco furnaces. We watched the coke ovens throwing a sun’s worth of sparks into the night. The air smelled of petrol and burning rock and iron.
There was water waiting for us in a satchel hanging from a tree branch Muriel’s father knew to look for. The satchel carried bread, too, but no one was interested in food yet. We passed the water among us and eventually broke off chunks of bread from the loaf and sat without speaking until we saw something begin to move on the other side of the bay.
It was still too dark and too far away to understand what we were seeing, but after a time the crane and the long line of railcars heavy with slag came clear, and we saw the crane manoeuvre its claw and tip the house-sized loader buckets that sat on the car beds. One by one, the buckets were emptied and the molten slag, glowing like lava, spilled its orange burst of light down the hillside to the slurry pit of the bay, where it met the water in an eruption of steam that rolled upwards to the sky in great roiling clouds.
The sound came a moment later, like a thunderclap after a flash of lightning. It split the night, and the air around us was alive with light and sound as the bay boiled and the slag spilled down the hill, one enormous bucket after another. Before the last one was emptied we felt mist falling over us like a light rain as we sat in the trees eating our bread and watching the world burn.
Muriel’s father led us to a shallow cave close by when we heard the voices echoing up through the trees. It was almost light now. After we slipped into the rock shelter he raised a finger to his lips and nodded, but we would not have said a word for the fear that gripped us.
The men were near. We heard their voices coming from where we’d sat just moments before, though too far off to understand what they said or even to know how many of them there were, and finally the sound of the voices faded, tracking off downhill towards the bay.
UNTIL DARK WE WERE not allowed to wander more than a few steps from the rock we were camped under. It was too dangerous. More patrols might be out, Muriel’s father said. Which meant we’d sit through the day with nothing to do but dwell on our hunger and thirst and boredom and, worse yet, the reality that our father was dead and there was no reason to believe we’d ever see our mother again. She’d been swallowed up by the amnesty as sure as our father had been swallowed by the smoke and the fire we’d only barely escaped.
Muriel now seemed to know what had happened to our family—her father would have told her in the hopes of explaining Thomas’s silence and the sobbing that overcame me as I sat staring out across the bay. She did what she could to distract us from feeling the way we did, and though she was not much older than me, and the same age as my brother, she did her best to corral us away from our thoughts, at least for short periods while we waited to set out again.
She made us each a small sculpture of a butterfly using twigs for the body and antennae, and for the wings the whirlybirds that spun down and drifted into our rock shelter from the maple branches nearby. It was a small diversion but I was thankful for it, as was my brother. We collected our own twigs and maple keys and watched how it was done. Already the strangeness of her hands didn’t seem to bother Thomas. If he hadn’t figured out where she was from before that, he did now when she told us that one of the sisters at Mercy House had shown her how to do this when she was little.
AFTER DARK FELL, A young man carrying a walking stick and canteen appeared at the mouth of the shallow cave. We followed him through the woods to an old, beaten-up truck parked in a clearing just off a gravel road. We climbed in the back and drove for close to an hour to the edge of an orchard, where we waited, eating peaches we pulled from the trees, until a man and his shepherd emerged from the darkness. It might have been close to midnight by then. The sounds of crickets and the smell of fruit rotting in the grass filled the night.
The glow of the Stelco fires was behind us now. We saw them from the hill we climbed when we cleared the orchard. We’d travelled south. From there the fires were small in the distance.
This man took us into his home and gave us sandwiches and potato salad and apple juice at his kitchen table. I was determined not to think about what lay ahead, only about the meal in front of me. The man leaned against the countertop and watched us as we ate. He was a big, bald man named Avrahm who wore horn-rimmed glasses and had the name Babette tattooed on his left forearm. Afterwards he led Muriel’s father into the backyard, where they spoke in whispers. I watched them from the kitchen window and imagined that my mother was sitting at the table behind me, knitting, counting stitches, or spinning wool the way she used to, and that my father was setting up the chessboard in the next room, getting ready to beat me the way he always did. I turned from the window, so taken by the hope, almost expecting her to be there with me, but only Muriel and my brother were there, hovering over their empty plates.
THE GUIDES WE MET as we travelled south along that network of tunnels and roads and rest stops told us of the chaos we’d escaped. The second wave of refugees had hit our town two days after we’d left Port Elizabeth. They’d flooded our streets and parks and slept in church basements and in the auditorium of our school. The arson and lynching had gone on for days, until there wasn’t a German left in town. Little Berlin had been burned to the ground.
Most of the refugees coming north had escaped by water, as we’d predicted, but some came overland, too. We’d effected no one’s rescue in the end, my brother and I, and failed to benefit from the wave of Jewish fugitives as we’d hoped.
We saw signs of the exodus everywhere, as they must have seen of ours—cold campfires, tin cans, fresh initials carved into a tree—and on our fourth night on the road Muriel’s father finally managed to tell us his story.
We were set up in the woods just east of North Pelham, tired and hungry after walking through the night, the early morning hovering at the edge of the trees. He told us about the assassination and the labour camp and his escape to Holland, and about the day he met Muriel’s mother on the Eendracht and the months they’d lived in a church in a London suburb after they’d fallen blind. We’d seen pictures of these evacuation centres and the blind survivors waiting to board hospital ships bound for Canada and other points in the Commonwealth. And we knew about the assassination, too, of course, but little about the man behind it. He’d seemed to disappear from the story, the events that followed erasing the very individual who’d triggered them, like a magician who vanishes into thin air at the height of his powers. And now here he sat, fully realized and connected to us in a way that hardly seemed possible. I was used to believing what adults told me, and more often than not what I heard from them was some unpleasant truth they felt I might not stumble upon without their help. Which was certainly the case now. Suddenly he was someone to be feared and respected—a man who’d done and suffered more than I could in ten lifetimes—and the idea of what awaited us at that point, under the guidance of such a man, sent my imagination on a frightening tear.
It seemed Muriel knew most of this story already, though. There was no look of surprise on her face as she sat staring into the campfire. She was beyond that, I think, with most of the facts already before her. But I wonder now if she was on the edge of understanding some newly revealed essential truth about the absences that had defined her life, and that these terrible circumstances that surrounded her might reverberate in some secret corner of her being for all time.
THE FOLLOWING DAY
THE four of us crossed the Niagara River on a rowboat called the Molly Bloom piloted by a man who spoke with an Irish accent. He had a heavy growth of white beard and a broken hand wrapped in blue cloth, though he refused to let Muriel’s father take the oars when he offered. There was a fog over the river that morning that rendered the light a dull pearl grey. The current was slow and steady, pulling us in a way the oarsman had to correct for, and when he landed us on the other side he passed me a rucksack of supplies that he said would hold us for two or three days. Without another word, he pulled away from the shore again, swung the boat around, and started back. I watched him disappear into the fog and thought how strange it was that he was rowing home now, all the while facing backwards.
ONCE WE CROSSED OVER into America, we travelled with a group of men and women sympathetic to our cause. From them we learned of the deportations that were already underway in the eastern states, targeting the Jews and everyone else who didn’t belong, they said. Muriel’s father told us that we were not headed for the America we’d been taught to fear but to somewhere out west, one of the sanctuary states or cities in the part of the country that had held out, rejecting federal immigration and race policies.
In mid-September we followed a group of Hasidic Jews, grateful for their numbers but fearful, too, that they’d discover our background and take their revenge on us. We camped at a distance from them, watching their fires, and in the morning when we broke camp we followed. The group consisted of five families, perhaps not so unlike my own, broken and grieving. On the seventh day a man from the group approached our camp with bread and sat with us and told us in detail of the place they were headed. Every port of the eastern seaboard was now gearing up for the project they were fleeing, he told us, but in the west there was still hope.
