The Time Between

by Bryna Hellmann-Gillson

  ‘At lunch today Dominique said it was his birthday, and one of the servants brought three tiny glasses of vodka. A votre santé! he exclaimed. I love this country, don’t you?'

  'When’s your birthday, Pam?' Graham asked me. 'Mine’s next spring and I’ll be home by then. What about you?'

  ‘It’s August 18.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say? That was last week, and we’d have celebrated with you!’

  ‘I didn’t remember,’ I told him. ‘I didn’t think about it being August.’

  ‘I don’t believe it, do you, Dom? You just don’t want the fuss, my mom’s like that. I lost track long ago of how old she is. How old are you?’

  ‘Old enough,’ I said and downed the vodka in one fiery gulp. When I sat down to write this, Jo, I remembered Marcus asking why I wanted a calendar and then saying he would make one for me. We didn’t have calendars in the camp. We worked seven days a week, week after week, until we had forgotten what day or what month it was. It didn’t matter, and what time it was didn’t matter either. Dawn was the beginning of the day, night the end. We were living like our peasant ancestors, the cycles of the sun and the moon, the seasons and the weather regulated our lives.’

  It was day number twenty-seven when the colonel sent for her. ‘Ah, Miss Chambers, we have all the papers ready for those of you who go to Holland, Belgium and on to England. Train tickets, ration cards, Nansen passports, everything is here.’

  He looked so pleased with his efficiency that Pam hesitated before she asked, ‘I don’t have to go through Germany, do I?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ he assured her. ‘Hungary is ours, and Austria, so you will bypass Germany altogether, and you will transfer to the Americans in Vienna. I envy you Vienna! Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven! I hope there is music there now.’

  ‘What I found out,’ Graham told her, ‘is that the Russians have control of all of Austria except Vienna. That’s divided four ways, and I’m going to be sure I get to the British part. What about you?’

  ‘The colonel said I’m to go to the Americans, I suppose that’s who’s in Holland, but I don’t know for sure.’

  ‘Well, don’t worry, Pamela, I’ll be right next to you until we get out of Little Russia, or whatever they call Austria these days.’

  * * *

  When Dominique joined them on the train the next morning, he had three loaves of bread and a string of sausages, a bottle of white wine and another of kvas in his backpack. ‘Our hostess, the honorable Countess Galina what’s-her-name, has given everybody the same stuff. A care package apiece. This one is for us three. Remind me to thank the Brussels branch of the Communist Party when I get home.’

  ‘Her name is Deribasovskovna,’ Pam said.

  Galya had written it on the last page of Pam’s notebook.

  ‘You will write to me when you are safely home,’ she had said sternly.

  ‘Of course, I will, Galya, dear friend!’ and, standing on the platform, they kissed one more time.

  In Odessa, more passengers got on. Pam was sure she recognized a mother and daughter from Majdanek, fattened-up like herself and looking happy and excited. They were from someplace on the Rhine, surely they weren’t going back to Germany?

  Galya had given her a present at the last moment, a copy of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry she’d found in her father’s library, an English edition, a Globe dated 1864, and Pam and the two men took turns reading aloud to each other.

  ‘I murder the language, I know,’ Dominique said, ‘but we need laughs to pass the time. It takes so long to go anywhere in this God-forsaken part of the world.’

  * * *

  When the train jerked Pam awake during the first night, the sign on the station platform said BUDAPEST, and the watch the colonel had given her said just after twelve. She went back to sleep thinking they’d come a long way in a day. Another country, though it was in Russian hands. She awoke again to daylight and the same sign outside her window. ‘Haven’t we moved?’ she asked Dominique.

  ‘Not an inch. The conductor says we have to change trains, but the other one hasn’t arrived, and he doesn’t know when it will. Have a piece of sausage.’ That was breakfast and lunch and the end of the sausages.

  In the evening, they were shuttled to another platform and told to get down. Graham was just lifting Pam out the door when they heard screaming. ‘Nein, nein, ich nicht!’

  ‘Komm, Mutti, komm schon!’

  ‘Nein!’

  ‘Es ist gut, Mutti, wirklich, komm schon!’

  ‘What are they saying?’ Graham asked.

  Pam looked down the platform and saw the daughter she’d recognized holding up her arms to the screaming woman in the doorway of the train. ‘She doesn’t want to get out. Her daughter is telling her it’s all right, but she doesn’t believe it. I don’t know why.’

  A Russian soldier came running and she heard him shouting, not at the woman but at a railroad guard. He ran across the platform and struck the side of a freight car with his gun and Pam exclaimed, ‘Oh, that’s what it is!’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The train, look, it’s freight cars, she thinks she has to get into one, she thinks they’re taking us back to the camp.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Graham said. ‘Can’t somebody explain?’

  By this time, half the people on the platform were clamoring to get back onto the train, and the soldier shouted at the conductor to let them on. An hour later, when the freight train had pulled away, a line of passenger cars took its place, they boarded and women came through with tea and small loaves of white bread. They wore white caps with red crosses printed on them, ‘Nemzetközi Vöröskereszt,’ they said proudly and Graham groaned, ‘Not another language! I hope I live long enough to see everybody in Europe speaking English!’

  * * *

  At dusk, they arrived in the Russian sector of Vienna, were divided into three groups, English, French and American, and sent off in buses. The mother and daughter went to the Americans, Mutti smiling and the daughter looking worn-out but happy.

  Dominique flourished the bottle of kvas at Pam and Graham. ‘Come see me,’ he shouted, and they waved until he was out of sight.

  ‘Come with me,’ Graham said. ‘You don’t want to end up in some god-forsaken place like Chicago or Texas.’

  ‘I think I’d better go to the Americans. They're probably in Holland,’ she said, and they kissed, promised to meet soon in Amsterdam or London and parted.

  At the American headquarters, Pam was interviewed three times to be sure she was Dutch and healthy and had someplace to go home to, she slept in a hotel, ate enormous meals in an American army mess, wandered around the city and, on her last night, was invited to a concert by the woman who processed her papers, Sgt Lucie Degrave.

  She had joined the wax, she told Pam. ‘No, not wax, w.a.a.c.s, women’s auxiliary,’ because she wanted to serve a tour of duty in Europe and then stay on to study art. ‘Not in Vienna, in Paris. I’ll get there!’

  She was from Wisconsin, a place in America where a lot of Dutch people had settled. ‘Our name was De Graaf, actually, my Dad’s parents came from some village in the boondocks called Rosendale or Roosevelt, like the president.’ Her grandmother had spoken Dutch to her, so on that one evening together, they carried on a bilingual conversation, Lucie correcting her English and she Lucie’s Dutch, and they laughed a lot.

  ‘You’ll want somebody to meet you,’ she said. ‘Let’s get a telegram off right now.’ Pen in hand, she asked, ‘Name? Address?’

  Whose name, Jo? Where? With Elsie? What was her name, where was the house? Marcus? No! Pam shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh, listen, the Red Cross can find anybody, a name is enough.’

  ‘Jo Hermans,’ Pam said, ‘Just say I’m coming.’

  ‘We can’t say exactly when but, if you’re lucky, it’ll be in two days.’

  ‘I’m always lucky,’ Pam told her.

  Their group of what the army called dp’s,
displaced persons, traveled with an escort of American soldiers. One of them, a Waac on her way to headquarters in Frankfurt, told Pam there had been some trouble in Nürnberg with Germans who threw stones, shouted Juden ’raus and punched and kicked a group of rabbis walking to a meeting. ‘The war’s not over,’ she said.

  ‘The war is over,’ a young man listening to them said, ‘and the Germans won.’ He told Pam he was going home to Rotterdam, he didn’t know what he’d find there or where his family might be living. Their house had been destroyed in the bombing in 1940 and he’d been sent to work in Germany a few months later. When they saw the ruins of Frankfurt, mile after mile of heaped brick and stone, streets made impassable by fallen trees and lamp posts, halves of bridges dangling over the river, he rubbed his hands and said, ‘Yes, good, wonderful!’ It would take a long time for the Dutch to forgive their enemy.

  A day, a night, a change at a small station in the south of Holland and, late the next afternoon, they pulled up to a platform in the Amsterdam station. There was the green river bank, the houses perched along its rim, boats anchored on the water below, all just as she’d left it. In the sunshine outside the station, she stood with her suitcase between her feet and wondered what to do next. Lucie had given her the address of the Red Cross, they could tell her if they’d found Jo and delivered the telegram.

  What she wanted to do was go home. She’d left her key in Marcus’s room, but Ted would be there to let her in, or her parents back safely from wherever they’d been. They would look exactly the same, Ma laughing, Pa looking more serious than he felt, Ted grinning and not wanting to let go of her hand, maybe Adrian. She would go there first.

  The tram was the same one, the street where she got off hadn’t changed, most of the shops open and busy, but the name next to their bell was not theirs. The woman who opened the door told her she’d never heard the name Chambers, she’d moved into an empty apartment the year before. Yes, completely empty, she insisted, and shut the door.

  ‘I can’t do this,’ Pam said, and a man walking just ahead of her turned his head to look at her. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Sorry,’ but he’d already walked on. If she stood on this street corner, would someone she knew come along? Would someone say, ‘Oh Pamela, come home with me, let me take care of you?’ Galya had said it, she could have stayed with her. Why did she want to come home?

  The address Lucie had given her was near the station, she walked back and arrived just as they were closing the door. ‘Come in,’ the woman said, ‘sit down. You look exhausted.’ She took Pam’s suitcase, sat her down and gave her water, while she looked at her Nansen pass and the card the Polish Red Cross had given her.

  ‘Did you come this afternoon? Didn’t you see us at the station? They sent a telegram from Vienna? What’s your name? Oh, Chambers!’ She jumped up and came around the desk to shake her hand. ‘Oh, my goodness, you’re Pam! Your friend Joanna has been in here every week for months, ever since we opened, every week, and then we just sent her your telegram yesterday. Oh my goodness!’ Seeing Pam’s face, she said, ‘Don’t faint, here, drink this. It’s a surprise, isn’t it, but a good one?’

  Pam nodded, took a deep breath and then another one and started to laugh. ‘Lucie said you could do it.’

  ‘Lucie was right, we can find anybody if we go after them long enough. But it was Joanna who found us!’ She looked at her watch. ‘It’s late, she should be home by now. She lives with the Moss family, do you know them and where they live?’

  ‘I was there once, but I don’t remember where it is.’

  ‘Here’s the address.’ She looked doubtfully at Pam’s tired face and her suitcase. ‘I’ll take you there. It’s all right, it’s on my way home.’

  When she drove off, waving, Pam looked up at the house and around at the rest of the street. She’d come there once late at night, left hurriedly, didn’t recognize anything. She would ring the bell, and some strange person would open the door and say, ‘I don’t know anybody by that name.’

  When Hans opened the door, they stared at each other wordlessly, then he reached out and pulled her into the hall. ‘It’s you, it’s you! It is, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered, her face pressed against his chest. It didn’t make sense for it to be Hans, but it was. When he leaned away to look at her face, she saw tears in his eyes.

  He took the suitcase and led her into the kitchen. Two men sat at the table, an old man with a beard and a young one wearing workman’s blue overalls and a khaki shirt. A woman stood at the stove holding a spoon in one hand and the lid of a pot in the other.

  Hans said, ‘Elsie, look, it’s Pam!’ and the pot lid clattered to the floor.

  ‘Get Jo!’ Elsie ordered. 'Is this Pam? Oh, sweetie, hello! Welcome! Where did you come from? Where have you been? Sit down, sweetie, sit down. Hendrik, move over. Pam, this is my son and this is Jo’s father. Please, sit down, sit down. Jo!’ she called, ‘where are you?’

  ‘I’m coming, I’m here!’ She ran into the room and into Pam’s arms. ‘I thought I’d lost you,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d never! When the telegram came, we couldn’t believe it, they spelled your name wrong, but then Hans said,’

  ‘I said, it’s just a mistake, of course it was you.’

  ‘But they didn’t say when you’d arrive, and I wanted to go to the station every day to look for you,’

  ‘And I said, no, Pam will want us to be here.’

  ‘And you were right! Oh, Pam, say something!’

  Everybody laughed at that, they sat down and Elsie gave them supper.

  Pam told them about the castle, the trains, Vienna. It made a good story, all those kind and efficient people who had helped her get back to Amsterdam.

  ‘You’re exhausted,’ Elsie said. ‘Take her home, Jo.’

  ‘Don’t you live here?’

  ‘Across the street,’ Jo said. ‘Hans and I got our own house just a month ago. Papa is staying with Elsie, she wants him to, otherwise it’s just she and Dirk and Hendrik. I’ll explain later, come on, I’ll show you where you'll sleep, and we’ll talk tomorrow.’

  They wanted to know what had happened to her, and there had been no time to ask about any of the others. In the morning, if she could think how to do it, she would ask Jo about Adrian and Ted. Perhaps it was all right to ask if she and Hans were living together. Married? She hadn’t asked, but Jo looked happy.

  * * *

  They sat all morning at the kitchen table, and they told her what had been happening. After the Germans left and the Allied troops arrived, life slowly got back to normal. Hans had a job at a hospital laboratory, Jo at a newspaper. They tried to find missing friends, there were lists of returning prisoners in the newspapers but, Jo said, ‘We never saw a name we knew. I looked for Adrian,’ and she shook her head.

  When Pam told them about the woman who turned her away from the door, Hans said, ‘But that’s where your family will go, that’s where you’d all expect to meet. Do you think she knew who you were?’

  Pam nodded. ‘Idiot! I’ll get after her!’

  ‘I should go to Uncle Abel’s house, that’s where they’d go if they have to.’ Ted had heard their parents were safe in Switzerland, and he started guiding people through Belgium and France to Spain. But that was years ago. How could they find him if he didn’t come home? And Simon, what happened to him?

  Hans wrote down the names, Ted, Simon, her parents. He thought the newspaper would know about Abel, he’d been their chief editor, they’d want to know. They would get information about everybody, he promised. Switzerland was a good start.

  While she made lunch for them, Jo told Pam about Sieny and Fanny, who were all right, and about Mr Süskind, who’d gone from Westerbork to Auschwitz with his family. She took Pam’s hand and turned it to look at the number on her arm. ‘Do you want to tell me?’ she asked.

  Pam shook her head, ‘Not yet. While I was at the castle, I wrote lots of letters to you. I could have mailed them, but I knew I wa
s coming home and I could bring them with me. I’ll give them to you someday. Leave it, tell me about here.’

  ‘You won’t like it,’ Hans said. ‘The same hard-working dedicated civil servants at City Hall, just a different boss, the same law-and-order policemen, just a different uniform. We’re back to 1939 and, whatever happened between then and now, most of us would rather not think about it, it’s over, it’s done, it doesn’t matter anymore.’

  ‘Not everyone!’ Jo protested, but Hans shook his head. Maybe it wasn’t everyone, he agreed, but too many people just wanted to get back to business as usual, and no-one had time to listen to sad stories.

  ‘They didn’t know, because they didn’t want to,’ he told Pam, ‘that the work camps were death camps. Hundreds of people who had once been their neighbors aren’t ever coming back but, well, they were Jews, weren’t they? Isn’t there a Dutch saying, it serves you right? Besides, we Dutch suffered too, didn’t we, aren’t we entitled to as much sympathy as you are? Come on, you’re alive, isn’t that good enough? Can we please just forget the rest?

  ‘That woman who’s living in your house will tell you she bought it fair and square, paid for it, Pam, but you know someone stole it from your family, and you’ll never be told who it was, and you’ll never get it back. And Jo’s father won’t get his business back either. Did your family sell some paintings to the Germans? Well, they wanted to, didn’t they? Nobody held a gun to their heads, and a sale is a sale in Holland, signed and sealed. We’re a commercial people, after all, we know how it’s done.’

  ‘Oh Hans,’ Jo said. ‘Stop! We hear stories like that every day at the paper, and the editor has been told not to print them. It's wrong and it’s cruel, but what can we do about it? We have to help Pam now, that’s what’s important.’

  Adrian had called it the between time. When they’d won the war and the Germans were gone, they would start from where they had left off, they would become the people they were meant to be. If people could make themselves believe that the between time didn’t matter anymore, wasn’t that a good thing? If they wanted to forget that meantime, who could blame them for trying.