Lunch with the Stationmaster

by Derek Hansen

  The blind man fought back the ripple of delight that raced through his body. The game had moved to another level. He felt like shaking his friend’s hand, congratulating him. Milos never disappointed.

  ‘Please, please,’ said Gancio. He pushed his way through to the table. ‘I make another place alongside Milos, okay? Between Milos and Neil?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Milos. He introduced Gabriella to Gancio.

  ‘Anything you want, you just ask,’ said Gancio. ‘I have a special Italian lemon liqueur. Not for them, they have grappa, but special for you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Gabriella.

  Gancio grabbed a chair from a nearby table and held it so Gabriella could sit down. The men followed.

  ‘Before you say anything,’ said Gabriella, ‘let me apologise for my intrusion. Milos was against my coming but I nagged at him until he gave in. A wife is entitled to do this, no? I wanted to come so that I could thank you personally, not just for the pleasure your stories have given me. You see, stories are precious to me, their value goes far beyond mere pleasure. There have been times in my life when stories were the only thing that kept me going, the distraction that helped me cope with a life I could not face, a life I did not want to live. To you, your stories are fictions and a playground for rivalries, an enjoyable and also stimulating diversion in your busy lives. Milos says it is an opportunity to exercise your egos. But to me they are therapy. I don’t just enjoy your stories, I live them. Every twist, every turn, every nuance. Tell them, Milos.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Milos. ‘For all these past years, when you thought there were four of us sitting around this table, there have been five.’

  ‘Your Thursdays are as important to me as they are to you,’ said Gabriella. ‘You have no idea how impatient I get waiting for Milos to come home. First we have dinner, a light meal because Gancio always makes him eat too much, then he relays your stories to me. My Milos has always been a good storyteller, even back in Tokaj Street. When he tells your stories, it’s your voices I hear. I know whose story it is by the way he tells it. He doesn’t have to say, “This is Ramon’s story or this is Lucio’s.” I know whose it is. I hear your voices.’

  ‘And do you help Milos construct his stories?’ asked Ramon.

  Again Ramon heard Gabriella’s brittle laugh.

  ‘When you know me better you would not dare suggest such a thing. You would not even think it! I am a listener. I am happy to listen.’

  ‘But will you join in the telling?’ asked Ramon. He knew he was pushing but wanted a sniff of a reason for her presence beyond what she was admitting to. Ramon liked to be ahead of the game. Anticipating the direction of a story was half the challenge and half the pleasure.

  ‘No,’ said Gabriella. ‘Don’t think I haven’t discussed this with Milos. I have, but we both agree I am not yet ready. Almost ready, but not quite. I have made progress, lots of progress. Milos is very pleased with me. We no longer have locks on our doors, we no longer have bars over every window. I can hear a knock on the door and know it is a friend on the other side and not an enemy. I can get on a train now and not beg to be taken off. I can even listen to the eggs break, I can listen to the eggs.’ Gabriella smiled and there was triumph in her voice that the blind man immediately picked up on. ‘But, am I ready to help Milos tell this story? No, not in any way that would do justice to it. I wish this were not the case so I could repay my debt in person. After all, this is my story too. Maybe I can add detail if Milos agrees.’

  ‘Scallops,’ said Gancio, interrupting them with the first course. There were three scallops on each plate, on the shell, barely cooked and quivering. ‘A drop of garlic olive oil, a drop of balsamic, lemon and a light sprinkle of Italian parsley, salt and pepper. Beautiful.’

  ‘My goodness,’ said Gabriella.

  ‘Gancio leaves the scallops in the shell so Ramon can find them,’ said Neil.

  ‘Neil!’ said Gabriella. ‘You shouldn’t say such things.’ She reached across the table and tapped his hand in a pretend smack.

  Once again Ramon’s senses pricked up. He couldn’t see Gabriella tap Neil’s hand but he heard the smile in her voice.

  ‘Ignore him,’ said Lucio.

  ‘You mentioned Tokaj Street,’ said Ramon. ‘Perhaps while we eat and before Milos resumes, you can tell us a bit more about your home and your early days. I have had photos described to me of Jews crowded into ghettos prior to the war. The photos were taken in Poland, Carpathia and Ruthenia which, of course, is not too far from where you lived. They were descriptions of abject poverty, of a deprived people crowded together and stripped of all but the very essentials. Yet you had a large house and people who helped with the housekeeping.’

  ‘There were poor Jews in Hungary too, plenty of them,’ said Gabriella. ‘But we were not crowded into ghettos like the Polish Jews. I was also fortunate to live in sleepy Sarospatak. Did Milos tell you that Sarospatak means “the town on the muddy stream”? No? Yet at one time it was famous as a place of learning and known as the Athens of Hungary. It is a nice town, a pretty town. My home in Tokaj Street was the biggest in the street, one of the few that didn’t share an adjoining wall with neighbours.

  ‘I look back and to me it was Camelot. For years it was my retreat, the place I hid when my mind could not face the world. My poor Milos lived in fear that one day I would go there and not come back. Oh, I was tempted! It was so seductive, the prospect of letting go of reality and sinking into dreams. So very seductive. You see, I was happy back then. In my memory it never rained and winter was only an excuse to build big warm fires. There were no Germans, no Arrow Cross and no war. My home was filled with sunshine, laughter, music and, most of all, lovely, kind, gentle people who were my family. No one in my family ever wanted for love, support or affection.

  ‘My father and brother spoiled Elizabeth and I. We could do no wrong. Sometimes my mother tried to be stern but she wasn’t very good at it. I don’t recall ever being scolded. We had golden days, days when Aunt Jutka and Aunt Klari came and boiled up the apricots and plums and made enough jam and preserves to last us a year. I can still remember the heat from their big cast-iron pots, the steam and my aunts’ sweating faces. They used to sing lovely old songs and make us help take out the stones from the fruit. They let us lick the ladles.’

  ‘Milos told us about the Sunday lunches,’ prompted Ramon. ‘They were obviously very special to him.’

  ‘They were also special to us. We had people come to lunch every Sunday, sometimes very important rich people, but my sister and I most liked the Sundays when Uncle Jozsef brought the boys. I think we all preferred those Sundays. They were much more fun. I was madly in love with Tibor of course which helped. But in those days we had to be very demure and proper. Tibor was tall for his age and oh so handsome! My parents were always saying how clever he was and how astute but he was daring as well. You could not imagine anyone more sure of himself. Even my brother Balazs was impressed by his courage and his cunning. When I dreamed of getting married it was always Tibor slipping the ring on my finger.’

  ‘What about Milos?’ asked Lucio. ‘Wasn’t he madly in love with you as well?’

  ‘Yes, and he showed it.’ Gabriella once more treated the table to her laugh. ‘I used to wish Tibor would be so obvious. Milos used to follow me around like a puppy dog. He had these big mooning eyes. My parents insisted that we didn’t embarrass him. Poor Milos. His face used to turn as red as a beetroot when he was nervous or embarrassed. I always had to sit between him and Tibor and pay equal attention to both. The only times Tibor and I were alone together was when we played hide and seek and Milos was hiding. Milos thought he was so good at hiding but the truth was we didn’t want to find him!’

  ‘That’s enough,’ said Milos gently. ‘Finish your scallops.’

  ‘Two is plenty,’ said Gabi.

  Over the main course Gabriella recounted some of her memories but they were always pleasant things, childish, girly thing
s. They were memories enriched and mellowed by time, like the polished top of an antique table. They gave no hint of the horrors waiting around the corner or the traumatic aftermath she’d hinted at. Ramon found it hard to reconcile the image of the happy, carefree, blessed and privileged child her anecdotes portrayed and the forlorn, desolate figure Milos had described stranded on the platform at Krakow.

  Horror immobilises. The enormity of the catastrophe exceeded Gabriella’s capability to respond. Paralysis deprived her legs of movement, her throat of voice and her eyes of tears. Only her brain functioned and it teetered on the very limit of comprehension. As the train began moving away, Gabriella grasped in full the completeness of her abandonment and could think no further. She didn’t know where she was, didn’t know where her mother and sister were going, didn’t know how they’d ever find each other again, couldn’t even imagine where to begin looking. Surrounding her was an alien, friendless world of hostile soldiers and slavering dogs, of terror and disbelief, of grit, smoke and a language she couldn’t understand. There was nothing normal she could turn to, no anchor point to cling to. She was alone, abandoned, cast adrift. Beyond that, there was nothing.

  Gabriella had never been alone in her life and couldn’t begin to conceive of a life afterwards. Around her guards restrained other distraught young women who tried to run after the train, but Gabriella had no need for restraint. Her paralysis was total. Her horrified eyes remained fixed on a particular box car as it moved away from the platform, away from the station and was sucked into anonymous darkness. The train disappeared, taking with it everything she had been, leaving her with just her name, memories, the clothes she stood in, her bag, and a terror which was absolute.

  ‘Schnell!’

  Rough hands grabbed her. Soldiers screamed incomprehensible orders and began dragging her to the centre of the platform. She went unwillingly, as though to move from the spot destroyed for ever any possibility that her mother would find her again. The soldiers interpreted her reluctance as resistance and called for dogs. The brutes leapt at her, snarling, snapping their jaws and straining their leashes in their eagerness to rip her apart. Gabriella screamed. She screamed as anyone would who’d been set upon by vicious dogs. In that instant, pure fear transcended all thought. She felt nothing but a desperate primal urge to flee. A soldier laughed as she leapt away from the dogs, kept laughing as she ran, stumbled and fell into line with a group of girls all as terrified as herself.

  The soldiers marched them up stairs and along corridors. Gabriella dared to glance at her companions, looking for a familiar face, anyone who could form a connection with who she was and who she’d been. Some of the girls were older, some younger. One appeared no more than eight or nine. There were eleven girls in her group, two of whom Gabriella knew from school, and three or four more she vaguely recognised. This familiarity brought comfort. She wasn’t alone, not entirely. When the soldiers marched them down stairs and onto another platform crowded with more young women and girls, the Sarospatak contingent automatically pressed in close to one another.

  Many of the young women on the platform were weeping soundlessly, others had cried themselves out or given in to despair and hopelessness. Yet whether in their twenties, teenage or younger, the expressions on their faces were always the same. Fear, apprehension, devastation. It took a while for Gabriella to realise another thing they had in common. No one spoke. There were hundreds of young women sitting and lying on the platform, awaiting a fate they feared but couldn’t even guess at, yet no one spoke. No one. The silence terrified Gabriella as much as the dogs had.

  The women waited throughout the night while trains came and went. Some wept, others exchanged frightened whispers. Shortly after six they were once again herded into box cars, sixty to a carriage. They had a little more room but still only one bucket of water and one bucket as their lavatory. It took two days of sporadic travel, during which their train swung south-east to Prague, before turning north to their destination, Theresienstadt. They arrived beaten into submission by hunger, fear and exhaustion, accepting of whatever the Germans chose to do with them.

  Gabriella had given up. She expected to be marched directly from the train to her execution. After all she’d been through, the rumoured death camps her Uncle Jozsef had told them about in the kitchen at Tokaj Street no longer seemed extreme but probable. She was prepared for death, prepared for anything except what happened.

  Her first surprise was that Theresienstadt was not a camp so much as a town. The Germans had quickly realised the potential of the eighteenth-century fortress town which nestled into the conjunction of two rivers, the Elbe and the Eger. Both the natural and man-made barriers meant that large numbers of people could be interned there and guarded with minimal force. The Germans evicted the villagers and converted Theresienstadt into a ghetto. In other times and circumstances, Gabriella could imagine Theresienstadt being quite pretty. As it was, she was impressed by what she saw. The street they were marched along was spotlessly tidy and clean. Prisoners were busy painting the fronts of every building along the cobbled road from the station, and even in her weakened and dazed state Gabriella could appreciate the care they were taking. The buildings looked immaculate.

  Her confusion grew as the guards marched them not to any place of execution but to showers. They were ordered to strip, given soap and also instructed to wash their hair. The water was cold, their time in the shower limited and their overseers abrupt. There was no concession to modesty. Yet the effect of the showers was transforming.

  Once showered, the women and girls were given clean clothes and marched to a parade ground where they were each handed a lump of dry bread and a bowl of soup. There were pieces of potato and turnip in the soup, pieces not just scrapings, and there was a sheen on the surface which suggested that at some stage it had contained bones or meat. It didn’t matter that the soup was weak and unsalted and tasted like dishwater. Gabriella attacked it voraciously, dunking her bread to soften it, saving some to wipe her bowl clean. Every crumb and every drop were treasure. The meal eased the craving in her stomach and provided much needed nourishment but, more than anything else, gave her heart. Optimism dared to creep in where previously there had been only despair. She imagined her mother and sister sitting in another camp somewhere with their own dry bread and soup.

  After their meal the prisoners were processed and given back their bags, complete with their few possessions, taken to a barrack room and each assigned a narrow slatted bed. For the first time since they’d disembarked from the train there were no guards in sight and no dogs. Whispered conversations began as scared people dared to believe things were not as bad as they’d feared. Gabriella checked the beds around her but none of her acquaintances from school were nearby. A girl her own age just two beds away caught her eye and smiled tentatively. Gabriella smiled back.

  Over the next few hours, Gabriella tried to come to terms with everything that had happened and her new circumstances, and began making plans that would see her reunited with her mother and sister. One day the war would end and when that happened, Gabriella decided, she’d somehow make her way home to Sarospatak. That seemed the logical thing to do. Just the thought of her home on Tokaj Street brought tears to her eyes. When she thought of the reunion that would follow she had to roll over face down on the thin mattress so that no one could see or hear her cry.

  Having become accustomed to confinement in the box cars, it never occurred to Gabriella that she could leave the barrack room. She lay on her bed trying to ignore the pain from her swollen bladder, hoping that a guard would come and march them to the latrine. She jumped in fright when she felt a hand on her shoulder. It was the girl from two beds away.

  ‘Will you come with me?’ said the girl.

  ‘Come with you?’ said Gabriella. ‘Where?’

  ‘To the latrine.’

  ‘Are we allowed?’ Gabriella looked around to see if a guard had miraculously appeared. One hadn’t.

  ‘Ye
s, but I’m too frightened to go alone.’

  Gabriella swung her legs off the bed.

  ‘I’m desperate,’ said the girl.

  ‘So am I,’ said Gabriella.

  The girls slipped tentatively down the narrow aisle between the beds, gradually gaining pace as if their distended bladders could sense relief was at hand and had become impatient. For some reason, their urgent need to pee struck them as funny and, despite everything, they began to giggle. Gabriella held out her hand to the girl as they walked towards the latrines.

  ‘I’m Gabriella.’

  ‘Julia,’ said her friend.

  They turned the corner of their barrack and stopped dead in their tracks. Ahead of them in the queue for the latrines were groups of women, all of them gaunt and hollow-eyed, their expressions blank or haunted, their clothes threadbare. But if the appearance of the women stunned the two girls, the girls had a more marked effect on the women. Without exception they turned and stared as though struggling to comprehend what they saw. One of the women spoke to them in a language they didn’t understand. They shook their heads. Another woman spoke in halting German.

  ‘Where you from?’

  ‘Debrecen in Hungary,’ said Julia.

  ‘Sarospatak,’ said Gabriella.

  ‘Ahh, Hungary,’ said the woman. She turned and translated for her friends.

  ‘Where are you from?’ asked Julia.

  ‘France, Holland, Austria — what does it matter where we are from?’ The woman smiled grimly. ‘We are here, that is all that matters.’

  The latrines were little more than slit trenches into which prisoners occasionally tipped buckets of soil, but they were a vast improvement on the buckets in the box cars. On the way back to their barrack, the girls passed more women all with the same emaciated, haunted look.

  ‘They must have done something wrong,’ said Julia. Gabriella could see no reason to disagree.