In French, one of the women said, “What are you doing? What is she doing?”
Eleanor said, “She wants some air. She needs to breathe.”
The woman said, “We all want air. We all need to breathe.”
Another woman said in English, “She will get us killed.”
Eleanor said, “She won’t get us killed, you fool.” And the women began to bicker and buzz. Eleanor said to me, “For God’s sake, hurry.”
Careful as I could, I turned the bobby pin over in my fingers till it was pointed toward the lock. Signs and trees were rushing by, and I wondered if we could die from jumping at this speed. I couldn’t see what I was doing, so I did my best to feel my way, tapping the hairpin across the top of the lock until I felt it click into the hole.
I thought: Eleanor’s smaller than I am. Her arms are as thin as reeds. She probably knows how to pick locks like an expert, and I’ve never picked one in my life. It seems like she should be doing this instead, especially if she’s as important as everyone says she is. I was beginning to think she didn’t seem like much of a secret agent.
I slid the pin into the lock and then, because I wasn’t exactly sure what to do, I began jiggling it around, trying to find the catch. All of a sudden, I pitched forward, banging my head against the door. The train had lurched and then lurched again, and then you could feel the wheels grinding into the metal of the rails. We were coming to a long, screeching stop.
I pulled the bobby pin out of the lock, and when I did it fell to the ground. I yanked my arm back in through the crack so hard that I fell back into Eleanor. “Here.” She handed me a scarf and told me to wipe the blood off. I dabbed at the scrapes and cuts and then I stuffed the scarf into my own bag and rolled my sleeve back down so that it covered most of it.
My heart was skipping beats and my throat was dry. All I could think was: They knew what I was doing. Somehow someone saw me, and now they’ve stopped the train so they can take me into the woods and kill me.
Eleanor said, “Can you see what’s going on?”
I looked out the crack and I could see some of the guards dragging four men away from the train. The men were prisoners, and I recognized one of them. He was one of the downed airmen from Gossie’s.
The guards made the men stop in a field beside the tracks and stand facing the train. Then, one by one, they went down the line and shot each man in the back of the head. One by one, they fell to the ground.
Suddenly, the guard for our car was unlocking the door, the hairpin shining in the dirt underneath his boot. Don’t look down, I thought. Please don’t see it. He slid the door open and started counting us. Then he marked the number on the side of the door with chalk so that he would know how many of us there were the next time. He said, “We shall be counting and recounting you from now on, and if there are any other attempts at evasion, ten hostages will be shot from the car where it occurred.”
Then he slammed the door closed again, turned the key in the lock, and marched off toward his own car, leaving the hairpin glinting silver in the dust.
The next morning, the train pulled into the village of Nancy, and the door was opened and we were counted again. This time the guard, who had a long, unpleasant face, was smiling. He made a show of counting us, and then he wrote the tally on the side of the car. His hand on the door, he said, “Congratulations. Paris has been liberated.” The door slammed closed again—a heavy, grating sound of metal on metal that sent a chill through me. Through the crack, I could see his face, still smiling, as he lit a cigarette and inhaled and then held it out to us as if he was saluting, before walking away.
Eleanor said, “We are almost to Germany. If we’re to be saved from deportation, it must happen now.” I tried to remember how many days we’d been traveling so that I could know what day it was that Paris was liberated. I remembered Perry saying something about the Liberation, about how we would be there to see it.
I tried to picture what Paris must be like right now. I saw Gossie’s face and Cleo’s and the faces of the people in the street. I thought of all the downed airmen who wouldn’t have to escape to Spain. They were probably kissing French girls on the sidewalks and singing. Everyone singing. Everyone laughing. Everyone drinking champagne. The bells of Notre Dame would ring, all of them this time. The flame would be lit again at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Émile could go to his mother and get her out of the hospital. They wouldn’t have to hide her anymore.
Émile. I touched my lips and shut my eyes, just for a moment, trying to crawl inside the memory of him.
Eleanor said, “We must do something.”
I opened my eyes and suddenly I was back in the boxcar. I thought: You do something. I’m tired of thinking of what to do.
But instead I ran my fingers along the crack in the door, feeling the air, the warmth. The door was closed tighter this time. The space was smaller. I started fishing in my bag for the chewing gum. Before Eleanor could say anything again, I said, “I’m thinking.”
THIRTY-THREE
We crossed over into Germany an hour or so later. Except for the signs that we passed here and there, you couldn’t tell we were in another country, but as soon as we went over the border, the mood in the car grew heavier and gloomier, like a storm was coming. Some of the women began to cry.
The train pulled to a stop and the guard counted us, and his long, unpleasant face was lit up like a Christmas tree. He told us we could get out and stretch our legs, and I thought: Of course we can get out now that you’ve gotten us away from France. You feel safer just being home.
Running beside the train tracks was a road, and just past this road, on the other side of it, was a row of small houses. As we wobbled down off the train, our legs bowing and buckling, the people came out of their homes—the German people—and stared at us. One of them shouted something at the guards, and a guard shouted back to him, and then the people were bringing us water to drink and bread to eat. Some of them filled up buckets with water and brought these so that we could wash our faces and arms and hands.
With the guards pacing back and forth, a few of us sat down on the grass that ran between the tracks and the road. I pushed up my sleeves and threw my head back and tried to soak up the sun. For that minute, I didn’t try to think of a way to escape. I just wanted to live in the day.
One of the guards said, “You there.” He stopped in front of me, leaning on his gun. “What happened to your arm?”
I looked down as if I’d never seen my own arm before, at what he must see—the scrapes and scratches and raw skin. I said, “I got into a fight.”
He glanced at Eleanor and then he stared down at my arm as if it might tell him the real story. Finally, he smirked at me and said, “You’ll need to get along better than that. We still have days to travel before we get to Ravensbrück.”
At this, Eleanor said, “Damn,” so low that only I could hear her. The guard was already striding away.
I said, “What’s Ravensbrück?”
“A concentration camp for women.”
Something in me sank as low as the grass. But at the same time I felt something rise in me too. We might have a better chance of escaping from a concentration camp than we would from the train. The chewing gum explosive might work, but I needed a match to light the fuse, or something to smash the gum with once it was wet and sticking on the door of the train. The woman with matches was in another car now, and no one else seemed to have any because the Germans had taken their cigarettes and matches for themselves.
I said, “Once we get there, we’ll figure a way out.”
She was quiet for a good long moment. Then she turned to me, the sun behind her, so that I couldn’t see her nose, eyes, or mouth. She said, “No one ever leaves Ravensbrück.” For the first time, her voice was kind, but it was also sad and distant, like she didn’t need it anymore and was just this minute going away, leaving it behind.
Two days later, sometime after sunset, we passed a sign that read “
Kaiserslautern—5 km.” We went clattering past, and I was just turning to Eleanor to tell her where we were, when there was the great boom of a thunderclap, and all of us—every single woman—went flying across the boxcar into one another, slamming into the walls before we went flying back again. We landed in a pile, the car skidding into the car in front and the car in front of that. We rolled back and forth across the floor until the train started to slow, still shaking, like it was underwater or moving through mud. I lay there, trying to hold on, smoke scorching my lungs, my leg throbbing, my head pounding. I could feel something cold and wet on my arm, my knee. I waited to die, to be burned up like a plane engine.
When I didn’t, I tried to pull myself up out of the bodies, some struggling, others lying still. One side of the boxcar was blown half off. We were still moving forward. Before I could think, I pulled Eleanor with me and we squeezed through the opening and jumped through the blackness of the night. We hit the ground and began to roll, coming to a stop in a ditch just beyond. Outside, the air was damp and misty, but hot from the fire. Clouds drifted across the sky, the moon, just a sliver, disappearing and then reappearing again.
Something exploded to the left of us, shaking the earth so hard I lost my footing. I looked up, expecting to see bombers flying overhead, but the sky was empty except for the smoke that was rising fast into thick black clouds and the blazing orange-red of the fire. The boxcars slid one into another, grinding, screeching, metal on metal. The cars piled up like matchsticks, upended until they were standing on their sides or turned over completely, wheels in the air. The prisoners scrambled out the doors and over the sides, stumbling their way into the surrounding woods and fields, still chained together. The first car, the one that belonged to the guards, lay separated from the others, as if the impact had come from the front of the train. Nothing much was left of it but wood and the bones and burned flesh of the guards trapped inside.
I started to cough from the smoke. Eleanor was saying something but I couldn’t hear her. She finally reached her hand into my bag and pulled out my scarf and hers, which was still stained with my blood. She left me hers and then tied mine around her nose and mouth and waved at me to do the same.
The ground seemed to rise up under our feet, threatening to split open and suck us in. Ash and embers rained down from the sky like snow, and the fire grew around us. The earth swelled up and lurched downward by the front of the train, into a great crater. Steam rose up in a black, evil mist from another crater, just behind. The metal of the tracks was twisted but most of the cars sat on the track, as if nothing had happened at all. Whoever had done this had made sure to target the first boxcar, the one with the guards.
Men were shouting in German, in English, in French. People ran in all directions. In the night and the smoke and the wreckage, it was hard to tell who were the Germans and who were the prisoners.
I suddenly thought: This is hell. This is exactly what hell would be like. I knew in that moment that it existed, just like heaven, because hell was things like this—train explosions and fire and smoke so thick it filled your head, your nose, your lungs.
My heart was racing but my mind was faster. This was our chance and we had to take it, but where could we go? People were everywhere, debris was everywhere, fire and smoke were everywhere. Some of the cars were lying on their sides, people falling from the doors or the place where there used to be a ceiling, a floor. I heard the rattle of gunfire.
I grasped Eleanor’s hand and we started to run. We ran through the ditch and down the line, and suddenly I stopped because the last two cars were sitting on the track, closed up tight. I could hear the people shouting for help. I dragged Eleanor over to the first car, pulling her behind me like a kite. I yanked a bobby pin from my hair and flicked off the rubber tips and started working at the lock.
Eleanor said, “Hurry, Clementine. For God’s sake.” Her eyes darted to the right of us, toward the front of the train, toward the fire and the smoke and the guards. Finally, she grabbed the hairpin from me and started working at the lock herself.
Seconds later, she pulled on the lock and it came off in her hand. Together, we pushed open the door and the women spilled out, dropping to the ground and running in every direction. Eleanor and I ran to the last car and she slid the bobby pin into the lock and twisted and turned and jiggled it, but the lock wouldn’t give. Below the car the track was split, just like it had been blown.
I pulled a stick of gum from my bag. I said, “Here.” Then I spit into my hand and wet the gum and stuck the gum on the lock. I shouted to the people in the car, first in English, then in French, “Stay back!”
In the ditch there were stones of all sizes, and pieces of boxcar, blown all the way from the front of the train. I picked up a stone and dragged Eleanor back, away from the car. Then I threw the rock as hard as I could so that it smashed against the chewing gum. At the same moment, Eleanor and I dropped to the ground and covered our heads as the lock blew right off. From inside, there was a kicking and a banging, and then the men began to push and pull until the door was half open.
I jumped at the sharp crack of a gunshot close by. Eleanor tugged at my arm with the chain. I said, “Unlock us.” She worked for a minute. There was another crack of a gun. Then she threw the cuffs onto the ground and grabbed my hand.
We ran away from the wreck as fast as we could, leaping over the ditch and over the tracks and into the woods. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw two of the guards start after us, one of them shouting, the other aiming his gun. A shot sounded, and without thinking I turned in time to see one of the Germans fall to the ground. Standing over him, in the haze and the smoke, I saw a figure. It had the lean, proud face of a boxer, with a chin that sliced into the night and a shock of dark hair. “Barzo! Barzetti!” I shouted it over the noise. “Barzo!” The face turned in my direction. There was war paint on the cheeks. It wasn’t the face of a boxer at all—it was the face of a warrior. He seemed to be saying something, waving me on, telling me to go, but a second later he was swallowed up by the crowd, disappearing into the smoke.
Eleanor tugged at my hand. The other guard kept after us and then I tripped over something and went sprawling, bringing Eleanor down with me. Before she could swear at me to get up, I saw what I’d tripped on—the man who had guarded our boxcar. His eyes were open and staring up toward the treetops, up toward the new moon. A single line of red seeped down the middle of his forehead. I watched as it ran toward his ear. He’d been shot clean through the head. I thought of Perry, lying in a field in France, blue eyes like still, dead pools.
Without saying “I’m sorry” this time, I took the gun out of the guard’s hand and Eleanor took the knife off of his belt, and we kept on running. I heard another shot behind us. Instead of getting farther away, the gunfire was getting closer. In the distance I could see the lights of a town, and in the other direction there was nothing but blackness. A river, a mountain—it was hard to tell in the night. On the back of my leg, I felt something wet and warm, and I thought: I’m hit. Someone shot me.
Eleanor stopped suddenly and I ran right into her. We stood, both of us, not sure which way to go. Back toward the train or through the woods and the field ahead toward the town? Or into the blackness that might be anything at all? The only other way was the road, but we were in Germany now, which meant we had to stay hidden. I could hear the sound of someone running after us, and I didn’t want to wait to see who it was.
I said, “The town isn’t far.”
Eleanor said, “We should stick to the woods.” She was holding her arm, which was twisted at a strange angle.
I looked back where we’d come from, off toward the wreck. The fire and smoke filled the sky, reaching high above the trees. Through the trees I could see figures still running every which way. I said, “Let’s go.”
Just in case we were being followed, we loped off in a zigzag through the field and toward the black that lay beyond. As I ran, I freed up the safety on my gun. El
eanor said, “This way.” I followed her through a break in the trees and then we doubled back to the right, to the left, to the right.
She said, “They’re coming.” Her voice was hoarse from the smoke. We pulled off our scarves and kept running. Suddenly, up ahead and to the side—it was hard to tell in the dark—I heard a cracking in the trees, and for a minute I thought it was the pop of a gun, aimed in my direction. The sliver of moon dipped behind the clouds again and at just that same moment, a figure broke out of the trees and it was big and dark and rushing for us.
The brush snapped as Eleanor and I ran forward, blind as bats, reaching our hands out in front of us, trying to find our way by touch. All of a sudden, the clouds shifted and the moon reappeared, and we could just make out the line of a creek to our left and, up ahead, a field, and beyond that, nothing, like everything ended there.
We ran toward the field, and the figure kept coming. I turned around and fired off a shot, and a voice said, in English, “Goddammit.” Good, I thought. I hope you’re hit. I hope I hit you smack between the eyes.
I ran a few more paces, not thinking, just running. The dark figure was almost on top of us. I turned to fire again, and it yelled in French, “Stop shooting at me! Who do you think blew up the goddamn train?” Suddenly the figure was caught in the pale, thin glow of the moonlight. The hair was gold, the skin was gold, the cheekbones high and wide. There was a scar over one eye now and a smear of blood on the face. “You nearly blew my head clean off.” He spat on the ground and said in English, “Shit.”
Becoming Clementine: A Novel Page 27
