He’d memorized the Hebrew prayer from many Friday nights of listening to the Fabers say the words.
All the Jews are gone, Herr Bergmann had said.
And Kristoff’s voice quivered a little as he spoke out loud: Baruch atah, Adonai, Eloheinu . . .
You’ll fight them, won’t you, Kristoff?
For the moment, that felt like a start.
Cardiff, 1989
I’M EXHAUSTED BY THE TIME Benjamin and I reach Wales. After two long flights and a train ride from London to Cardiff, I’m not sure what time it is or even what day at this point, but it’s still light out, and my stomach tells me I’ve missed a meal. Or two. Everything I see out the train window appears stunning, magical, a world so far away from Southern California that we might as well not be on the same planet. The English countryside is quaint, foggy, and quite green, which turns eventually into the murky Bristol Channel, which we cross just before we get to Cardiff proper, a city of old European buildings, castles and spires, misty green lawns that seem to stretch for days.
On the plane I tried to make small talk with Benjamin. I asked him again why he didn’t like Thanksgiving, and he only shrugged and said this week was a good time for him to get out of the country. Then he put on his headphones, turned on his Walkman, and opened his book, and I gathered he wasn’t interested in talking any more. As the train finally arrives in Cardiff, I realize I might actually agree with him, that it is an amazing thing to be out of LA this week, where thousands of miles away from us, the people I used to love, I used to call my family, will soon be drinking too much wine and stuffing themselves on Daniel’s mother’s dry turkey and burned rosemary potatoes. I went to visit my dad yesterday before we left and told him I was going on a trip to the UK, that I wouldn’t be with him for Thanksgiving, and though I felt guilty, he hadn’t seemed to mind. He’d asked a lot of questions about where I was going, what I was doing, and I only told him I was flying to London and taking a train to Wales, without mentioning Mrs. Kleinfelter or the stamp.
“It’s beautiful here,” I say to Benjamin as the train slows to approach the station. He grunts a little, having fallen asleep on the train, and I’m amazed by his ability to sleep in these uncomfortable seats. He’d slept on the plane for a while as well, but I’ve been awake the entire long time.
“You’ve never been to Wales?” Benjamin asks, stretching, yawning.
I shake my head. “You?”
“Once,” he says. “Years ago. With my wife.”
“Your wife?” So Benjamin has a wife? I feel oddly disappointed at the thought. I’d assumed that by coming here, this week, he has no one, like me. That we had something in common. I took care of booking our rooms at the Cardiff Marriott through the travel agent who’d booked a trip to Hawaii for me and Daniel a few years ago, and I made sure to request separate rooms, deciding to worry about the pounds-to-dollars conversion later, when I get my Visa bill. But I can’t imagine his wife is happy about this, even with separate rooms. “You didn’t want to spend Thanksgiving with her?” I ask him.
“She’s dead now,” he says, and he puts his hand to his mouth as if he’s shocked he mentioned her at all. He hadn’t meant to, I realize. The never-ending travel and bizarre sleeps of the past two days had made him say something to me he probably wouldn’t have back in LA.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and I really am. “I had no idea.”
The train comes to a stop and Benjamin stands, grabbing both of our bags from the luggage rack overhead.
“I can take mine,” I say.
“I’ve got it.” He walks toward the front quickly, his arms laden with the bags, and it feels less a gesture of kindness than a need to occupy himself with something else, to run away from me, much the same way he ran out of my house last week.
I fall asleep after a room service plate of Glamorgan sausage, which is tasty in spite of the fact that it tastes nothing like any sausage I’ve ever eaten before. The reputation that the Brits have for bad food seems to be wrong. Or maybe I’m just starving.
I sleep better than I have at home for weeks, months. I don’t dream, and I don’t wake up until I hear a knock on the door the following morning, Benjamin’s voice calling for me.
It’s daytime; the room is somewhat light, and I hear raindrops against the window. I get out of bed, throw on a robe over my nightgown, and answer the door. “What time is it?” I ask him. I’m not exactly sure what day it is either. Wednesday? Thursday?
“It’s ten o’clock,” Benjamin says, walking into my room. He holds two Styrofoam cups and hands me one. I take a sip expecting coffee, but it’s tea, strong and bitter, and I make a face. “I thought you’d be up,” Benjamin says. “Sorry I woke you.” His voice is soft, sweet, kind. I remember what he said yesterday about his wife being dead, and I’m sad for him.
“No, it’s okay. I’m glad you did.” Now that I’m awake I feel eager to do what we’ve come for, to go deliver this letter to its intended recipient at long last. “Just give me ten minutes to get dressed.” I put the Styrofoam cup down. “And I have to find some coffee. They do have coffee in Wales, right?”
Benjamin laughs, says he’s sure they do, and that he’ll meet me in the lobby. He looks different than he did yesterday, more relaxed. He turns and walks out slowly and I’m glad that he seems to be done running away from me.
Half an hour later, we’re in a cab on our way to the nursing home. Benjamin located some coffee while I got dressed, and I drink it on the way even though it’s bitter, terrible, acidic. I should have stuck with the tea.
Mrs. Kleinfelter’s nursing home is a place called Raintree, and it’s by the River Taff, not too far from the hotel, but far enough we can’t walk. And I wouldn’t want to anyway in the rain. My hair is already four times its normal size, and I forgot to pack an umbrella. Benjamin has come more prepared and he offers to share.
Raintree is located in a brick building that I bet has been here already for two hundred years or more, because it looks old, and also dank, dirty, shabbily upkept. It’s a far cry from Santa Monica, and the Willows. And though the inside is a bit newer and shinier-looking, it smells too strongly of Lysol, and the reception area in front shines a putrid yellow from the terrible fluorescent lights buzzing overhead.
“We’re here to see Mrs. Kleinfelter,” I tell the nurse at reception.
“Americans, are you?” She scowls a little. It’s possible Benjamin and I are the first Americans to visit Raintree. Maybe ever.
“Yes,” Benjamin answers. “We’re visiting from California.” I elbow him, wanting him to stay quiet. Whatever bad things we Californians think about British food, the Brits probably hate everything about us “LA types” ten times more.
“You’re family?” she asks.
I’m not sure if she’ll let us back, if we say no. So I quickly say yes before Benjamin can answer truthfully. “Distantly,” I add. The nurse raises her thin-penciled brown eyebrows and I’m not sure if that’s to register her surprise or disbelief. “Well good on you, then, for making the trip,” she finally says. “Twelve-C.” Then she adds, with a dry laugh, “Best of British to ya.”
“Is she lucid today?” I ask tentatively, hoping Mrs. Kleinfelter is in better shape than my father.
The nurse laughs again. “She’s full of beans, she is.” I’m not sure what to make of that, but I’ll see for myself soon enough, so I just murmur a thanks. She points down the hallway, presumably toward the direction of 12C.
I feel a sudden deep sadness for Mrs. Kleinfelter as we walk down the dimly lit yellow hallway, which smells faintly of urine. I get glimpses inside tiny hospital-looking dark rooms along the way. The inside of this place is even more depressing than the outside.
We stop when we reach 12C. The door is slightly ajar and I can hear the sounds of the television on inside. I feel nervous, and my hands shake as I reach inside my bag to pull
out the letter I’ve been walking around with for weeks. A gem. But maybe it’s not. And maybe she won’t remember, even if it is.
Benjamin steps forward and knocks lightly on the door. “Mrs. Kleinfelter?” he calls into the room.
“I already told ya, I’m not taking any more of those pills,” she yells.
Benjamin pushes the door open more, and takes a step inside. I do the same, my breath suspended in my chest, unable to speak for a moment, as Benjamin says, “We don’t have any pills for you.”
Mrs. Kleinfelter sits in a wheelchair by the window, her left leg braced and extended outward, somewhat unnaturally. She has gray hair, long, wispy, pulled mostly back into a braid, but it’s still speckled with brown, a remainder of her youth. She doesn’t seem as old as I’ve pictured her in my mind. Younger than Gram. Maybe younger than my father.
She looks at Benjamin, then at me, and she frowns. “You got the wrong bloody room, I tell you then.”
“No.” I finally find my voice, and I step forward. “I’m Katie. You don’t know me, but I think I have something that might have been meant for you once.” My hands are still shaking as I take the letter from its plastic sleeve and hand it over to her. “My father has been a stamp collector his whole life, and I came across this letter when I was going through his collection.”
As soon as I say “stamp,” she seems to perk up a little, and she takes the letter from my hand and gestures to the metal nightstand. “Get me my glasses.” Benjamin does, and she puts them on, and holds the envelope close up to her face.
“You were Fräulein Faber once, right?” I ask, hoping we haven’t come all this way only to have her say we’re in the wrong place.
She lowers the letter, places it in her lap. “I was Fräulein Faber. Once.” She hands the letter back to me, and she frowns. “But you’re wrong. This letter wasn’t meant for me. It was meant for my sister.”
Austria, 1938
MY SISTER HELD on to my hand as we walked through the woods, leaving our home, everything we had ever known behind. We had both packed small sacks with our belongings. She’d packed some clothes and some books and I’d packed clothes and a few art supplies I’d taken from Kristoff’s room in the attic. I wasn’t sure if he’d miss them after I was gone. I imagined him puzzled, looking through his stash only to find it smaller than he’d remembered, but would he ever think of me as the culprit? Would he ever think of me again, at all? Probably not. I was just the little girl who annoyed him with my nonsense, as my mother had called it. Stop pestering Kristoff with your girlish nonsense. She’d meant that pesky mouse in the wall, that I’d invented so Kristoff would come into my room and talk to me. So I was thirteen and Kristoff was eighteen or nineteen, but what was five years? Father was seven years older than Mother, anyway. Not that Kristoff ever looked twice at me when Elena was in the room, too.
“Miri, keep up,” Elena said to me. The snow was so deep and the air was so cold, but I wanted to walk through the woods slowly, to remember all of it forever: the feel of the snow seeping through my worn boots, the sharp smell of the fir trees, the pale gray color of the winter sky. Elena had told me that we were going to England together on a train, a Kindertransport, that we would be happier and safer in England, and that it was all only temporary. But that morning, as we trod through the snow, I suspected she was lying about all of it.
“What if we just stay?” I asked her as we reached the Bauers’ farm. I remembered coming here as a little girl when Herr and Frau Bauer were still alive. We didn’t have close relatives—Father’s family had disowned him years before I was born when he’d married Mother out of order from his older sisters, and Mother’s relatives were almost all dead. So the Bauers were like our family, and we’d celebrated many Passovers and Rosh Hashanahs at their farm, up until a few years ago when Herr and Frau Bauer both fell ill and passed within a few months of each other.
Josef was a few years older than Elena and always bigger than us. When we were kids he used to chase us around the chicken coop. Once, I fell in the mud and started crying and Josef, probably no more than ten, taunted me: hampelmann. My mother told me Frau Bauer later washed his mouth out with soap for being so rude to an innocent little girl. And I’d felt pleased that I’d elicited such a punishment for him, big bad ten-year-old Josef.
But Josef was a man now, so serious and worried, the way Herr Bauer used to look. Always frowning. He was frowning as he stood there outside the main house, waiting for us. “You’re late,” he barked at Elena.
But she didn’t apologize. My sister apologized for nothing. Ever. That’s the way she always was. “We’ll make up the time on the road,” she said instead, jutting out her chin, as if to make herself a little taller in Josef’s large presence.
Josef knew a man with a car, who was willing to drive Jews, to hide us in the backseat the two hundred kilometers to Vienna, Elena had told me this morning before we left. I hadn’t asked how he knew this man, or what should happen to us all if we were caught. I couldn’t stop thinking of my mother, being pulled out of our house by German soldiers while Elena and I hid in the floor in Father’s workshop. I tried not to imagine what happened next, where she was now. But I knew it wasn’t England.
Josef reached into his coat pocket and handed Elena an envelope. Our tickets, I assumed. “You are only sixteen,” he said to her, gruffly. “They are only taking children younger than seventeen, so if anyone asks . . .” Really Elena was almost eighteen, but she was short, and beautiful enough so that no man would question her, I was sure.
She took the tickets from Josef and put them in her bag, and she ushered me into the backseat of the stranger’s car and told me to crouch down low. She went to get in, too, but Josef grabbed her, folded her tiny body up into a hug. “Be safe,” he commanded her, but she didn’t answer. She pulled herself away and got into the car with me. I tried not to cry; I tried to be brave the way Father would tell me to if he were here.
“What if we just stayed,” I said again as the car jolted forward and we rolled on the floor of the backseat. Elena held on, clutching the side of the car. “We could hide in the cabin with Father for a little while longer.” I was desperate to get out of the car. My stomach roiled, and I thought I might be sick. And Elena would kill me if I got sick all over her.
“Miri,” Elena said harshly. “This is what we have to do. Be quiet so the man can get us to Vienna safely.”
The last time I’d been to Vienna was the summer I’d turned ten. Father and Mother took us into the city to see an opera. We’d all dressed in our best clothing—Mother had bought me a new dress for the occasion, which rarely ever happened, since mostly I was forced to wear Elena’s old clothing when she grew out of it. That dress had a lace bodice with a skirt that was the prettiest shade of blue I had ever seen. And I’d thought Vienna the grandest and most beautiful city in the entire world.
“What was the name of the opera?” I asked Elena as Josef’s driver let us out at the train station and then sped off, into the rush of the city.
“What?” The station was crowded, so many children. Elena stood up on her tiptoes, trying to see through the crowds. The children surrounding us appeared mostly younger than me, their clothing more tattered. One little boy whom I guessed to be maybe eight or nine was holding on to a baby, who was crying, and the boy looked bewildered; he didn’t understand how to comfort the baby. I wondered what had happened to the baby’s mother, and why this silly boy was in charge. But after everything we heard and read about die Kristallnacht, I grew afraid that the baby’s mother was dead, gone. Murdered.
I looked away. “The opera we saw, when we came to Vienna with Mother and Father,” I asked Elena. “What was the name of it?”
“Miri.” She said my name with an air of exasperation, and she held on tighter to my arm, afraid she’d lose me in this crowd of lost and forlorn children, though I was much too old to be a child who could get los
t. “Why does your mind always have to wander into such silliness? I’m trying to figure out where to get on the train.”
“I just want one perfect memory,” I said softly, and I wasn’t sure she heard me, because she didn’t say anything else about it. But that was all I wanted, one complete, perfect memory of my family, in Vienna, when it was wonderful still, when it was whole, when we were whole, dressed up in beautiful new clothing, listening to beautiful new music.
“Come on.” Elena tugged on my arm and pulled me forward, yanking me through the crowd, bumping me into other children who were younger, sadder. She stopped when we reached the line that had begun to form to board the train.
The train was already at the station, and the children who had tickets were showing them to a uniformed train worker. The children in front of us got on board, one by one. Some of them were crying, and no one hugged them, or told them to stop. Elena pulled us into the line, and she took the tickets from her bag.
We inched forward slowly, and though it was very cold here, nearly as cold as it had been in the woods in Grotsburg, I found myself sweating, a trickle of sweat running under my braid, down my back. I unbuttoned my coat a little, and no one noticed, told me not to.
When at last we reached the front of the line, Elena handed our tickets to the uniformed man, and he barely glanced at them; no one asked her age or mine. He just ushered us on board, where Elena pulled us to a seat and then exhaled.
“Miri,” she said to me as I sat down. “I want you to promise me something.” I was still sweating. I unbuttoned my coat the rest of the way. “No matter what happens, no matter what I do, I want you to stay on this train, follow their instructions, and go on to England. Promise me.” She shook my shoulders a little.
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