The Last Train to London

by Meg Waite Clayton

  Out on the ice, the sister took her brother’s other hand. He said something that made the little family laugh, and the three skated off toward the bridge and under it, the father calling back to the other adults that he would see them soon. Truus looked away then, through the bare trees to the barren sky. How many times had she watched as a group of parents visited together, coming to know each other as their children swirled around them? Never with Joop, though. It was the one bit of herself she’d tucked away even from her husband. After her third miscarriage, she and Joop had pivoted silently, Truus turning to the efforts of the Association for Women’s Interests and Equal Citizenship and to social work, to helping children like those her parents had taken in.

  A train whistle sounded. Truus just kept looking across the frozen canal, her hands in the anchor of Joop’s, wondering if he ever came alone to watch these families. She knew he longed for a child as surely as she did, or more. But she had so carefully tucked away her pain, and he had as well, so as not to bring it fresh to the other in an unguarded moment. And now, after years of avoiding the subject of their childlessness, it was habit, impossible to break. Truus, much as she might long to do so, could not simply reach up and touch Joop’s face and say, “Do you ever come here and watch the children, Joop? Do you watch the parents? Do you ever think we might try one more time, before it’s too late?” So she stood silently beside him, watching as the skaters cut the ice and the parents chatted and the canal boats, frozen in place, suggested a future that was still a long winter away.

  Diamonds, Not Paste

  Truus, after Joop left for the office the next morning, dug into her dresser and pulled out the matchbox the man on the train had given her—had it really been a year ago? She opened it over the table and took out the ugly disk of gravel wedged into the box. She rubbed at it with her thumb until bits of gravel broke free.

  She took the bits into the kitchen, set them carefully in a bowl, and filled it with water. She rubbed at the submerged pieces with her bare fingers, the water growing cloudy. She pulled them up from the water and set them on her wet palm.

  It was true after all: we are never more easily deceived than when we are ourselves in the act of deception.

  She telephoned Mr. Vander Waal’s office. “Mr. Vander Waal,” she said, “it appears some apologies are in order. My husband was mistaken, it turns out. I do have something of your Dr. Brisker’s.”

  There were perhaps a dozen diamonds in the “lucky stone”—value enough to begin a new life. This Dr. Brisker had consciously put the risk of carrying his secret treasure across the border on her, couching it in meaning enough to keep her from pitching it into a waste bin. He’d jeopardized the lives of three children just to get some of his wealth out of Germany. And she had been an absolute fool.

  Motorsturmführer

  The SD-hosted daylong Judentagung in Berlin was Eichmann’s triumph. Dannecker and Hagen spoke first, Dannecker on the need for constant surveillance of the Jews, and Hagen of the complications of an independent Palestine that might seek rights for them. As Eichmann took the podium, he felt as free as he had as a young man racing through Austria on his motorbike, he and his friends defending visiting Nazi speakers against crowds throwing beer bottles and rotten food—and themselves leaving the forums smashed to the last beer glass and mirror. The Palestine trip, though a bust, had helped establish his expertise on the Jewish problem. Now he was one of the speakers, and the Judentagung crowd was roaring support for him.

  “The true spirit of Germany resides in the Volk, in the peasants and the landscape, the blood and soil of our unsullied homeland,” he told them. “We now face the threat of a Jewish conspiracy I alone know how to countermand.”

  The crowd exploded in agreement as he warned of the weapons and air power the Palestinian Haganah had amassed, of foreign Jews masquerading as staff for international organizations smuggling out information to be used against the Reich, of a vast anti-German conspiracy led by the Alliance Israélite Universelle, for which a Unilever margarine factory here acted as a front.

  “The way to solve the Jewish problem is not through laws restricting the activity of Jews in Germany, or even street-level brutality,” he shouted over the thundering crowd. “What is needed is to identify Reich Jews to a person. Put names on lists. Identify opportunities to allow their emigration from Germany to lesser countries. And—most importantly—strip them of assets so that, given a choice to stay in utter poverty or to leave, the Jews will choose to go.”

  Choices

  It was still the dark of a winter morning beyond the sash window as Truus sat down to breakfast with Joop. She took up the front section of the newspaper with her first bite of uitsmijter, the egg and ham and cheese toast still hot.

  “Good Lord, they’ve done it, Joop,” she said.

  Joop smiled mischievously across the narrow table. “They’ve raised the hemlines even higher? I know you favor the longer skirts, but you do have the most adorable knees in all of Amsterdam.”

  She tossed a bit of bread at him. He caught it and popped it into his generous mouth, then returned his attention to his own plate, savoring his breakfast in a way that Truus admired but never could muster even when the news was good.

  She said, “Our government have passed this new law banning immigration from the Reich.”

  Joop set his uitsmijter down, giving her his full attention. “You knew they were going to, Truus. It’s been what, a year since the government ‘protected’ just about any profession a foreigner might have been able to support himself in.”

  “I thought we were better than this. To close our border absolutely?”

  Joop took the front page and read the piece, leaving Truus to her self-chastising thoughts. She ought to have tried harder to hurry Mr. Tenkink on behalf of the thirty orphans. Thirty. Too many for her to pass as her own on a passport that listed no children, but she ought to have tried.

  “We can still give refuge to those in danger,” Joop said, handing the paper back to her.

  “To those who can prove they’re in physical danger. What Jew in Germany isn’t in danger? But what proof of physical danger does anyone have until the Nazis seize them and haul them away, and it’s too late?”

  Truus readdressed the newspaper, her mind already on the train schedule to get to The Hague. This was not something she could change, what their government would do, but perhaps Tenkink could be persuaded to bend the rules.

  “Geertruida . . . ,” Joop said.

  Geertruida. Yes, she did lower her newspaper again then. She looked to Joop’s hair, graying at the temples, his sturdy chin, his left ear slightly larger than his right, or perhaps it simply stuck out farther; even after all these years, Truus couldn’t decide which it was.

  “Geertruida,” Joop repeated, marshaling his conviction, “have you ever thought about taking in a few of these children, like your family did in the Great War?”

  “To live with us?” she asked cautiously.

  He nodded.

  “But they’re orphans, Joop. They don’t have parents to be returned to.”

  Joop nodded again, holding her gaze. She saw in the slight squint of his pale eyes, that brief attempt to hide his feelings, that he too did stop along the canal to watch the children play, to watch the parents.

  She reached across the table and took his hand, trying to hold on to an overwhelming sense of hope. Joop was so uncomfortable when she became emotional.

  She said, “We have the extra bedroom.”

  He pressed his lips together, accentuating his sturdy chin. “I’ve been thinking we ought to move to a bigger place in any event.”

  Truus looked down to the newspaper, the headline about the new immigration law.

  “A bigger apartment?” she said.

  “We could afford a house.”

  In the squeeze of his hand, she knew this was what she wanted, and what he wanted too. A different kind of family. A family one chose rather than one God gave you.
Children you chose to love.

  Truus said, “It would be difficult for you to manage when I’m away.”

  Joop sat back a little, his grip on her hand loosening, his fingers tracing the rings she wore: the gold band that marked their marriage; the ruby that was real, not one of the paste copies she’d had made for bribes not long after she’d begun bringing children across the border; the intertwined bands he’d given her the first time she’d been pregnant, to mark the beginning of the family they thought they would have.

  “No,” Joop said. “No, it would be impossible to manage children if you weren’t here, Truus, but with this new law there will be no more bringing anyone out of Germany anyway.”

  Truus looked to the Nassaukade and the canal, the bridge, the Raampoort, all still dark. Across the canal, in another lighted third-floor window, a father bent low to a child still sitting in bed. Amsterdam was just waking. It was empty now, but would soon fill with children carrying schoolbooks, with men like Joop going off to work, with women like herself setting out for the market, or pushing baby strollers, walking in pairs or little groups as they visited together, even on a cold morning like this.

  The Mathematics of Song

  What are we doing here?” Žofie-Helene whispered to Stephan. They’d just emerged from an incense-tinged hallway into a line of well-dressed adults descending from a stairway, waiting to enter the Hofburgkapelle. Žofie had done exactly as Stephan directed even though he refused to explain why: she wore good clothes and met him at the Hercules statue in the Heldenplatz.

  Stephan said, “We’re lining up for communion with the people coming down from the upper boxes.”

  “But I’m not Catholic.”

  “Neither am I.”

  Žofie followed him into the chapel, which was surprisingly narrow and plain, as royal palace chapels went—a room that went up and up in a Gothic way, circled by balconies from which an orchestra played and a choir sang, but all of it a single white. Even the window glass behind the altar was colored only at the top, terribly unbalanced.

  She accepted a dreadful bit of bread and a sip of sour wine, whispering as she followed Stephan back from the altar, “That was quite unpalatable.”

  Stephan smiled. “They serve Sacher torte at your church, I suppose?”

  The people they’d joined in line headed back up the stairs, but Stephan took up an awkward place standing at the edge of the chapel, and Žofie waited beside him. When communion ended, he led her to two open seats at the back. As they sat waiting for the mass to end, he noted in his journal: Communion = quite unpalatable.

  For no reason Žofie could fathom, they continued sitting even after the mass was over. Most everyone remained although the priest had left. She returned her attention to the ceiling, the unfrescoed rib vault in which the weight of the barrels was carried on the piers at the intersections and the thrust transmitted to the outer walls. If she had been with anyone other than Stephan, she would never have tolerated sitting in a chapel doing absolutely nothing, but Stephan always did have a point.

  “Know why this ceiling doesn’t collapse?” she whispered.

  Stephan put a hand to her mouth, then removed her glasses, cleaned them on her scarf, and replaced them on her face. He smiled and touched her infinity-symbol necklace.

  “It wasn’t actually a gift from Papa,” she whispered. “It was a tie tack he won in school. Grandpapa had it made into a necklace for me after Papa died.”

  Lines of young boys in blue-and-white sailor uniforms began filing in, lining up in front of the altar. After a hushed moment, a single beautiful voice sang from the choir loft, the first high note of Schubert’s “Ave Maria” from a boy left behind. In the abandoned boy’s pure voice, the notes trickled rhythmically down and up and down again, settling back to the opening note and resting, just resting in some place inside Žofie that she hadn’t even known was there. The boy’s voice was answered then by the entire choir of beautiful boy voices soaring even further upward, echoing from the plain white stone of the vaulted ceiling, surrounding her from every direction, mingling in her mind with an equation she’d spent much of the week mulling, as if they were of the same heaven. She sat, just letting the music fill the empty spaces between the numbers and symbols inside her, and then she sat in the hush of the others leaving, until only she and Stephan sat side by side in the empty chapel, the fullest place she had ever been.

  Kipferl and Viennese Hot Chocolate

  In the Michaelerplatz outside the Hofburgkapelle and the palace, it was clear and bright and cold, and everywhere leaflets and posters scattered from trucks proclaimed “Ja!” and “With Schuschnigg for a free Austria!” or “Vote YES” in the plebiscite Chancellor Schuschnigg had called to determine whether Austria should remain independent from Germany. Crosses of the Austrian Fatherland Front—the chancellor’s party—were painted in white on the walls of buildings and pavements. Crowds in the streets and youth groups chanted “Heil Schuschnigg!” “Heil liberty!” and “Red-White-Red until Death!” while others chanted “Heil Hitler!”

  Žofie tried to ignore them all. She tried to hold on to the music and the mathematics still mingling inside her as she headed with Stephan down the Herrengasse toward the Café Central. If the chanting crowds bothered Stephan, he didn’t say so, but then he hadn’t said anything since the music began in the chapel. Žofie supposed it had taken him into his world of words, just as it had taken her into her world of numbers and symbols. She supposed that was why they had grown to be such friends even though Stephan had known the others far longer than he’d known Žofie—because his writing was like her mathematics in some way they both understood, even if it really did make no sense.

  They were pushing through the glass doors of the Café Central when Stephan finally spoke, his eyes dry now although they had been moist in the chapel, which she supposed would have embarrassed him in front of the coffee-house gang.

  “Imagine, Žofe, if I could write something like that,” he said.

  Beyond the pastry case, at the far end of the café, their friends sat around two tables pulled together near the newspaper racks, already gathered and waiting for Stephan.

  “But you write plays, not music,” Žofie said.

  He pushed her lightly at the shoulder, the way he’d taken to doing lately, just being playful, Žofie knew, but still she loved his touch.

  “So abominably brilliant, so technically correct—and so abysmally wrong,” he said. “Not the music itself, you idiot. A play that would move people the way it does.”

  “But—”

  But you can, Stephan.

  Žofie couldn’t say why she stopped herself from saying the words aloud, any more than she could say why she’d stopped herself from taking Stephan’s hand in the chapel. Maybe she could have said it there, in the silence after the music, like she’d told him about the necklace. Or maybe not. It was daunting, to realize you knew someone you thought might make magic like that someday if he just kept stringing words together, creating stories and helping everyone else see how to make them real. It was daunting to think that his plays might someday be performed at the Burgtheater, his words spoken to an audience laughing and crying and, when it was over, standing and applauding, as audiences did only for the best of plays, those that lifted you from one world and set you down in another that, improbably, didn’t even really exist. Or it did exist, but only in the imaginations of those watching, only for those few hours in the dark. The theater paradox: both real and not.

  STEPHAN WANTED TO ask Dieter to move up to the end seat so he could sit next to Žofie, to stay close to her and the choir music and the feeling, the hope that sharing the music with her had somehow brought. If she hadn’t been coming with him for the read-through of his script, he would have taken his journal and gone directly from the chapel to Café Landtmann, or even better the Griensteidl, where no one would interrupt him; he would have sunk his fingers into words, to make one of his plays better or start a new one. But
Dieter popped up to hold the chair for Žofie, and it was Stephan’s play they were meeting about; everyone needed to be able to hear him over the din—the table on one side in a heated discussion over a copy of the Neue Freie Presse Aunt Lisl sometimes read, the chess players on the other side arguing too, the entire café seemingly abuzz with speculation about whether Austria would go to war with Germany, or when. So Stephan sat in his usual seat and ordered kaffee mit schlag and apple strudel, then quietly asked the waiter to bring Žofie—who’d said she wasn’t hungry—a kipferl and Viennese chocolate, an extravagance for her that it wasn’t for Stephan and the rest of his friends.

  A Fumbled Code

  Trolleys sat as empty as the train tracks below the bridge to the Hamburg station, as empty as the German station itself at this early hour. On the walk over from the inn, Truus and Klara van Lange had passed only a single soldier, a young sergeant who turned for a second look at Klara. It was a difficulty, Truus knew, that Klara would forever draw attention, that she was so memorable. But even great difficulties could be turned to advantage. And there were thirty orphans to collect, far more children than Truus could manage alone.

  “You will be wonderful at this, I promise,” Truus assured Klara as they entered under the huge swastika pasted on the station’s ugly facade. Was that glass at the top? It was so filthy, it was hard to tell.

  They descended dirty stairs to a dirty platform, brushed a bench with a handkerchief, and set their overnight bags beside them rather than on the even dirtier ground.

  Truus said, “Now, here is what I would like you to do: The soldier who will be overseeing the boarding of our carriage? Show him your ticket, and ask him in Dutch if this is where you belong. Perhaps you can express confusion that you are not in first class? But not too much confusion. We don’t want him to move you to a better carriage and leave me to tend thirty children alone. If he doesn’t know Dutch, pretend a poor knowledge of German, but enough to make him feel attractive. Do you understand?”