Lunch with the Stationmaster

by Derek Hansen

  ‘Some of our opposition are unhappy,’ Tibor said wryly. ‘One of their shipments of stolen American aid somehow went astray.’ He unstrapped the flak jacket and threw it onto one of the armchairs. ‘Tinned ham, powdered milk, powdered eggs, flour, condensed milk, cans of peas, beans, chocolate bars and cigarettes. People put too much faith in the railways.’

  He laughed but Milos found little to laugh about. He hadn’t seen his brother for over a month and in that time Tibor seemed to have aged two years. The shadows beneath his eyes also suggested that sleep had eluded him.

  ‘I take it the goods are in a warehouse?’ said Milos.

  ‘Vilagosi’s warehouse,’ said Tibor guardedly.

  ‘And what am I supposed to do now that you have new friends?’ said Milos. ‘Keeping tabs on stock used to be my responsibility.’

  ‘We’ll find something for you,’ said Tibor. ‘Ahh … just what I need.’ He leaned forward to sniff the bowl of halaszle, a spicy paprika fish soup, that a heavyset woman placed on the table with a basket of freshly baked bread. ‘I tell you, Milos, nobody in all of Hungary will eat better than us today.’

  Tibor ladled soup into Milos’s bowl and then into his own. ‘Smell that and think of all the months on the run. This one dish makes it all worthwhile.’

  ‘Is the flak jacket necessary?’ said Milos.

  ‘For the moment,’ said Tibor. ‘Now eat.’

  They ate in silence and Milos had to agree: the halaszle was superb and the bread soft and delicious; nobody in Hungary would eat better than them. They finished the soup and even wiped the serving bowl clean with their bread. Although they now had plenty, the boys still could not allow any food to go to waste.

  ‘It’s time to honour your promise,’ said Milos.

  ‘What promise was that?’ Tibor chewed absently on a crust.

  ‘The Germans have surrendered. All the camps have been liberated. It’s time to go home. We owe it to Dad and Gabriella.’

  Tibor stopped chewing and stared at his brother. ‘Don’t think so,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Little brother, what do you think is happening here? What do you think I do?’

  ‘I know what you do.’

  ‘Any day now the Russians are going to crack down on us. Law and order will be imposed. Some of our opposition have been reckless, some have left themselves exposed. Some will be shot, some will go to prison. We are heading into difficult times but whoever prevails will emerge stronger. Everything I have worked for comes down to this moment. If I leave Budapest now I’m finished.’

  ‘You have a promise to keep,’ said Milos doggedly. ‘I have honoured my part of the deal, now you must honour yours.’

  ‘Palacsinta!’ said Tibor delightedly. He looked admiringly at the plate of pancakes topped with American chocolate and nuts that the woman placed on the table. There was also a little jug of cream. ‘Did you meet Eva? Her husband survived the war only to be caught, tortured and finally hanged by the Arrow Cross one week before the Russians reached Budapest. Hanged right here on the Elizabeth Bridge. Before the war they ran a little restaurant in Pest.’

  ‘I introduced myself,’ said Milos.

  ‘If I was to leave now, Eva would be thrown back onto the streets with no one to look after her. You want that?’

  ‘But it’s okay if Dad or Gabi arrives home with no one to look after them?’

  Tibor put down his fork in exasperation. ‘You go,’ he said abruptly. ‘You keep your promise. Now that I think about it, that is the best course of action. You know how to contact me if either of them return.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to marry Gabi.’

  ‘First she has to have survived, which I doubt. You’ve heard the stories.’ Tibor smiled suddenly, mockingly, and stabbed at another piece of pancake. ‘You go and I’ll stay. If she’s still alive I give you my permission and the opportunity to win her over. But know this, little brother, and never doubt it,’ the smile left Tibor’s face, ‘if Gabi is alive she is mine. One day I will come back to claim her.’

  After the farmer had buried Julia he picked Gabriella up and carried her back inside. His wife heated a tub of hot water and bathed her and made up a bed for her to sleep in. They didn’t ask any questions because they already knew the answers and were shamed by them. In the morning they gave her clean clothes, which were too big but far better than her threadbare camp clothes. They also gave her a cup of coffee with milk and sugar for breakfast and a piece of heavy rye bread with a sliver of cheese. Gabriella ate the thin piece of cheese immediately but kept the bread to take back to the camp. At the door, the old lady put her arms around Gabriella, hugged her and began weeping softly. Gabriella was still in the thrall of bereavement and too much of a zombie to respond.

  Gabriella walked back into the camp, lost for an alternative. Her sense of volition had died with Julia. She and Julia had lived together and survived together, shared food and supported each other. They’d faced death together, prayed for liberation together and had been as close as any two people can be, two halves of a single entity forged by trial, need and affection. Gabriella sat down on her bunk but it could as easily have been the brink of the abyss. She was aware of other prisoners looking at her, wondering, guessing. Most of the women had stayed in the barrack and there were many other Julias lying and dying on their bunks. She gave the piece of bread she’d saved to a helpless young girl on the bed next to her. It was the sort of thing she’d always done for Julia and now she did it on behalf of Julia. Though the faces around her were familiar, Gabriella had not felt so alone since she’d been abandoned on the platform at Krakow.

  The next day the Russians arrived. Those who could raced out to greet them as conquering heroes, but, as heroes went, they were a sorry bunch. These were no knights in shining armour but a raggle-taggle formation of exhausted men with strange, frightening faces and an incomprehensible language. Their lack of surprise or curiosity showed that this wasn’t the first labour camp they’d liberated. They gave food to the prisoners, which they could ill-afford to do, and through sign language indicated that they should remain where they were. The Russians were generous and sympathetic even though their needs were almost as great and they were worn out. Prisoners who could still walk were given a boiled potato each and a piece of flat stale bread. The bedridden were given two potatoes.

  Life needs incentive to persist and Gabriella had to push herself beyond her loss to find a reason to keep going. What she did next made no sense, but staying in the lager to slowly starve to death didn’t make much sense either. Gabriella desperately needed comfort of the kind which could only come from one source. With the food in the pocket of her new clothes, she set off once more to walk home. To walk seven hundred kilometres across Czechoslovakia and Hungary on one potato and a piece of flat bread.

  That first day Gabriella managed to walk for two hours before her strength gave out. She stopped, rested and ate her potato. Afterwards she walked for another two hours before stopping and eating her piece of bread. She walked for one more hour before accepting she could walk no further that day. She had covered maybe ten of her seven hundred kilometres and already all her food was gone. She lay down on a bed of pink, white and red blossoms beneath some cherry trees in an orchard near a farmhouse and drifted away into weary sleep.

  A gunshot awoke her. She lay trembling in the dark, too terrified to move. There were screams coming from the farmhouse and men shouting in Russian and German. A woman screamed nearby, not from the house but from the other side of the orchard. Men laughed at the poor pleading woman and Gabriella didn’t need to speak Russian to realise they were drunk. For hours people ran and stumbled through the orchard in drunken bawdy pursuit but none stumbled over her. Gabriella realised the terror was over when the only sound she could hear was women sobbing.

  As soon as the sun rose she ran away, too scared to go to the farmhouse to ask for food. She found three mushrooms at the base of an oak, as if placed
there by Mabel Lucie Attwell. Gabriella grabbed them and washed them in a nearby stream, intending to eat one and keep the remaining two for later. She scoffed the first one, barely tasting it, but it did little to ease the craving in her belly. She ate the others and washed them down with water scooped up in her hands. It still wasn’t enough and she wasted precious energy wandering around the fields looking for more. Finally she gave up looking and struck out east, bitterly regretting the bread she’d given away to the sick girl in the lager. As she walked on the cravings in her body made her regret the pieces of turnip she’d given to Julia and even the piece of potato cake she had shared with her. What had her generosity achieved? Nothing. Julia was dead and Gabriella’s generosity had simply made her hungry.

  Gabriella saw plenty of Russians as the day passed but, despite the incident at the farmhouse, they gave her no reason to fear them. They looked frightening and alien when they passed by in their convoys but didn’t harm her. Before long she took no notice of them. They were just noise and dust, the backdrop of a war drawing to a close, and she couldn’t relate these soldiers to whatever had happened at the farmhouse. She walked and rested, walked and rested, dazed and zombie-like while the war rolled on past, ignoring her. But she could not ignore her weakness or hunger. Every time she sat down to rest it was harder to get up. All she could think of were food and rest. So when she saw a small group of Russians bivouacked by the side of the road that evening, she had no hesitation in walking up to them.

  ‘Please,’ she said.

  It occurred to her that she didn’t know how to beg for food or how to ask for their protection and to share their fire. She just stood before them helplessly, holding her hands out, saying, ‘please’. The events of the previous night should have made her fear them but she was starving and they had food. She was cold and they had a fire. She was sixteen years old but starvation and the work camps had left her with the body of an eleven year old. She was a dirty, pathetic little bag of bones in someone else’s clothes that were far too big. It did not occur to her that the Russians could want anything from her. It didn’t occur to her that she had anything to give. Although she didn’t know a word of Russian, and Magyarul was clearly incomprehensible to them, she managed to communicate her need.

  ‘Sit!’ they said and laughed. They made room for her.

  It was Gabriella’s good fortune that they were just preparing to eat. The Russians had made a stew using a hare they’d shot, sausage they’d stolen, and potatoes, turnips and paprika they’d gathered along the way. They’d boiled everything together in a pot balanced on stones over their fire. Gabriella watched disbelievingly as they shared out their dinner, putting two large spoonfuls onto every plate, taking care to make sure everybody got a fair portion of meat and vegetables. The portions were so large that Gabriella despaired of there being anything left in the pot for her, and was stunned when they handed her one of the plates. Two spoonfuls of meat with vegetables, plus a piece of dried bread to eat it with.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, so overcome by their generosity that her voice was barely audible. She started to cry.

  One of the soldiers put his arm around her and gave her a reassuring hug. He said something in Russian which made the other soldiers laugh. But Gabriella ignored them and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. There was meat on her plate when she couldn’t remember the last time she’d tasted meat and the odours were irresistible. A distrust bred in the camps seized her. She scooped up the biggest piece of meat with her bread and stuffed it in her mouth, chewing furiously in case the Russians changed their minds and demanded the food back. Gabriella could not get that meal inside her fast enough. The Russians watched her eat, amused by her hunger, and gave her water to drink. They also offered her some foul-smelling spirits but Gabriella turned her head away from the fumes in disgust. They cursed when they drank the spirits but they didn’t spit it out. Gabriella ignored them. She had food with meat in it, bread and water, and nothing else mattered.

  Tiredness set in the instant she’d scraped her plate clean and there was nothing left, not even the smell of what had been upon it. With her belly full and in the warmth of the fire she was overwhelmed by both weariness and gratitude and sleepy in the way small children get. When a soldier put his arm around her she snuggled against him, like a daughter secure in the familiar arms of her father. If anyone had asked her at that moment how she felt, she would have replied, ‘Safe. Safe and happy.’ The Russians had given her a real meal with meat in it and she basked in the unfamiliar sensation of having a full belly. Now all she wanted from the soldiers was the warmth of their fire and rest. She believed she was under the protection of the liberating army and safe. She was Wendy in a land of fantasy but the fantasy existed only inside her head.

  Gabriella had experienced no difficulty communicating her need, now the Russians had no difficulty communicating theirs. There were seven of them and all seven raped her, one after the other. Gabriella didn’t resist. She just lay still and let them do it, trying her hardest to think of the food they had given her and how it would sustain her, and trying not to cry from the pain and her feelings of betrayal. The soldiers weren’t rough and they didn’t hurt her deliberately but neither could they be accused of being considerate. They just used her to fulfil their needs in what they considered fair exchange. But they did hurt her. Worse, all the pushing and jiggling made her want to throw up and that was something she fought with all her might. To give up her wonderful dinner, and to have suffered for nothing, was unthinkable.

  Once they’d finished with her, Gabriella fell asleep where she lay. She slept through the night and no one so much as touched her again. When she awoke the soldiers were already packed and ready to move on. They were kindly once more and gave her coffee, more bread and a wine bottle filled with water. One kissed her on the cheek. Although she couldn’t understand his language, she believed he’d wished her luck. She watched them walk away down the road before struggling to her feet. The food had given her strength but the Russians had left her sore. Anyone who caught a glimpse of her walking that day would have known immediately what had happened.

  Without realising it, at some point during that day Gabriella crossed the border into Czechoslovakia. She’d learned her lesson and from then on made sure that she spent every night in a town or village. She knocked on doors until she found someone who would take her in. The Czechs and Slovaks had fought alongside the Germans yet, for the most part, Gabriella was met with kindness and compassion. The Czechs took her in, fed her and washed her. These acts of kindness were repeated across Czechoslovakia as she made her way down towards Austria and the border with Hungary. Some of the women wept and held her and tried to make her feel human again. They were kind people, good people. Gabriella couldn’t help wondering where they’d all been hiding during the war.

  After five weeks on the road, Gabriella was picked up by a refugee agency and put on a train heading south-east to Brno. The train was full of haunted people just like her, all on the same desperate mission to go home and see how much of their lives remained. Nobody seemed to care about fares, or maybe the relief agencies paid them. An army of skeletons swept across the continent in every direction. Wherever deportee met deportee the litany was repeated. ‘Where were you? Did you know my wife, husband, brother, sister, daughter, son?’ There were too many negative answers, too many missing people, to ignore the implications. Still people asked. ‘Where were you, where were you, where were you?’

  Workers from the relief agencies met the refugees at every stop and provided bread and soup. There were so many hungry people that they formed into three or four queues. Standing in line on the platform at Brno, Gabriella witnessed a miracle. A man left his place in line and staggered towards the next queue. Gabriella couldn’t help watching because his action was so unusual: people never left their place in line in case the food ran out. But this man did, his arms outstretched, his disbelieving eyes unnaturally wide.

  ‘Agnes?’ he said
. ‘Agnes?’

  A woman turned at the sound of her name and the familiarity of the voice. She saw the man and nearly collapsed. People around her had to hold her up.

  ‘Thomas?’ she said. ‘Thomas?’

  The two wrecks teetered towards one another then fell crying into each other’s arms. They collapsed to their knees between the two queues, touching, not believing their good fortune, while everyone looked on. Against all odds, a husband had found his wife and a wife had found her husband. Nobody said a word. The sobbing and endearments rose above the shuffle of feet in queues, above the scrape of plates and the huffing of the engine. Still nobody spoke. The miracle was too overwhelming. It meant there was hope for the rest of them. There was still hope.

  Gabriella closed her eyes and imagined her mother and Elizabeth waiting for her on the platform at Sarospatak.

  The relief agencies put her on a train to Vienna and then another to Budapest. The carriage was crowded and hot but everyone had a seat and nobody complained. All the travelling had taken its toll on Gabriella’s reserves and time and time again she awoke to find herself leaning against the woman sitting next to her. Suddenly someone called out that they had crossed the border into Hungary. Gabriella had dreamed of this moment and in her imaginings it was always momentous. But the reality had a numbing effect on her and her fellow travellers. It was cause not so much for celebration as apprehension. When they got home, what would they find?