The Last Train to London

by Meg Waite Clayton

  He didn’t know why he needed to revisit this, with school out for the summer. For Walter, he supposed. Poor Walter had cried every morning the last weeks of school. Peter needed to go with him, he’d insisted; if he left Peter at home, the rabbit wouldn’t learn anything.

  Above Stephan, the door to the cocoa cellar burst open, and shiny black boots tromped down the wooden stairs—a sight he’d almost gotten used to out on Vienna’s streets but never imagined seeing inside Neuman’s Chocolates. He closed his journal and tucked it under his shirt.

  As the Nazis set to work inventorying the crates of cocoa beans—there were only four men, but it felt like an invasion—Stephan slipped up the stairs to find others swarming the bean roaster and the conch and the stone tables as the chocolatiers nervously watched. Were the men who worked for his father Jewish? Stephan didn’t even know; they worked for Papa because they made great chocolate.

  He ducked past the elevator and into the stairwell, relieved to find it empty.

  Even before he reached the top floor, he heard his father’s voice.

  “My father built this business from nothing!” Papa was saying.

  Stephan crept toward his father’s office, to find Papa and Uncle Michael in a heated discussion.

  “You have to understand that no one cares about that now, Herman,” Uncle Michael was saying in a surprisingly gentle voice, so low that Stephan had to listen hard. “You’re a Jew. If you haven’t sold to me before these men finish their inventory and report the value, they’ll seize Neuman’s Chocolates for the Reich. And they’ll still make you pay the taxes, with money you can no longer earn. I swear to you, that is what will happen, that is what they’re doing. But I can take care of you and your sister—”

  “By divorcing her and stealing from us?”

  “I’m not divorcing her in a real sense, Herman. I’m just doing it in the eyes of the law, to save us both.” Uncle Michael held out a pen to Papa. “You have to trust me. Sign the deed of sale before it’s too late. I’ll listen to whatever you tell me to do with the business. I’ll take care of you and Ruchele and the boys just as I will take care of Lisl. She’s my wife and you’re my family, whether our relationships are state-sanctioned or not. But you have to allow me to help. You have to trust me on this.”

  The White Sheets of Death

  Truus lay in the hospital bed, a ceiling fan stirring the muggy July day and a radio Joop had brought her the only relief from the white sheets on the iron bed frame, the white walls, the white-capped nurse coming in regularly to take her temperature.

  “Your husband isn’t visiting tonight?” the nurse asked.

  Where was Joop?

  The hemorrhage had been stopped before Truus bled to death, but an infection had left her too weak even to sit up. Without the radio, she would have been left with nothing at all to do but listen to the sounds of new babies being brought to new mothers, and to worry about the German children whose lives depended on her not languishing in a hospital bed, the white sheets of death tucked neatly into hospital corners as if clean, starched cotton could save anyone.

  At the Border

  Joop watched the swastika flag on the chain-link gate plummet into darkness as he killed his headlights. He levered the cool metal door handle, moving slowly, the gun trained on his temple through the open window. A bead of sweat trickled down his forehead, but he didn’t dare brush it away. He slowly pushed the door open. The thin guard stepped sideways to keep the gun trained on him. Joop turned his legs. He set his feet on the ground. He stood carefully. He waited. He didn’t have any children with him, any reason to be afraid.

  He’d gone in Truus’s place to try to persuade Recha Freier to allow him to take the children Truus would have brought across the border if she weren’t hospitalized. He’d come without even telling Truus; she made it seem so simple that he hadn’t imagined he couldn’t rescue the children himself. It had seemed the only thing that might ease her grief at losing their baby, to know that other children would survive.

  He trembled as, with the thin guard’s gun still trained on him, a stockier one patted him down: chest, waist, privates.

  “If you have been in Germany on your banking business, as you say,” the stockier border guard said, “you will not mind coming with us while we confirm this.”

  Joop ventured a quiet, nonconfrontational, “I’m afraid the banker with whom I met will be long ago gone home, it being so late.”

  “We will of course move your auto in that event,” the one holding the gun said, “so it won’t block the road all night.”

  A Distraction

  The radio was a blessing and a curse: the news bleaker and bleaker. Truus was listening to a report from the world refugee conference, a bit of a recorded speech in a familiar voice—“My hope is to persuade this esteemed gathering of the need for all of the world to join in providing relief for the Reich’s persecuted Jews”—when Joop’s voice interrupted.

  “You need to rest, Truus.”

  “Joop!”

  He turned off the radio, sat carefully at the edge of her bed, and planted a gentle kiss on her forehead. She wrapped her arms around him and held him tightly.

  “Oh Joop, thank the good Lord you’re home!”

  “Klara told you, didn’t she?” Joop asked. “I telephoned from the first public booth I found after I got out of Germany. I told her I would come straight here.”

  “She came the minute she knew, to tell me in person. But hearing you’re safe isn’t the same as seeing that you are. What happened, Joop? Klara said you had your papers and you weren’t bringing any children, and still the Gestapo kept you for questioning?”

  “I’m so sorry, Truus. I’m an utter failure. I couldn’t persuade Recha Freier even to see me, much less put children in my hands.”

  Recha already took so many risks; it was too much to ask her to deal with anyone she didn’t know. Perhaps Klara van Lange would have had more success, but Joop hadn’t asked her to go. Joop had wanted to do this himself, for her.

  “It’s the children Recha fears for, Joop,” she said. “With so much going wrong . . .” Adele Weiss dying, and Recha the one who had to tell the poor mother. Truus ought not to be allowed to touch children. God clearly did not want her to. But she couldn’t think about that now.

  “At least you tried, Joop,” she said. “Thank you for that.”

  “What if Recha had met me, Truus? What if she’d entrusted those children to me?”

  He pulled a chair up beside her bed and took her hand. If he heard the sounds of the babies elsewhere on the ward, he didn’t show it. She tried not to show it as well, tried to wall off the sound of a fussing child quieting as, she imagined, it latched on to its mother’s breast.

  “That was that nice Norman Bentwich we met in London on the radio,” she said, not wanting to dwell on babies or on the danger Joop had been in. “You remember Norman?”

  “And Helen,” Joop said. “I liked them both.”

  “He’s speaking for the British at Évian-les-Bains, where delegate after delegate has expressed sympathy but not a one has volunteered to take in refugees.”

  Joop sighed. “All right, Truus. I’ll turn the radio back on, but you must promise you won’t let it upset you.”

  She blinked back tears, trying so hard not to hear the baby coos. Were they real, or were they imagined? How could Joop not hear them too if they were real? It was this awful white bed, this awful white room, this day after endless day of whiteness driving her to imagine things.

  “It’s a distraction, to think of other things,” she said. “Even horrible ones.”

  Joop squeezed her hand, on which she now wore only the plain band and the ruby, the two bands of the third ring still with the German siblings now both in England.

  “We can try again,” he said, “but I don’t need a child. Really, I don’t.”

  They sat silently, doing their best to spare each other the added pain of knowing of their own pain. He kis
sed her again, then, and turned the radio back on.

  The Servants’ Floor

  I read your play, Stephan,” the English tutor said. “It’s quite good. The play, I mean. The English could use some work.”

  The three of them were in the library: Stephan with Walter and their tutor. Four, if you counted Peter Rabbit.

  “Peter has to play the girl,” Walter informed the tutor importantly.

  “It’s okay, Wall, I can play the girl if it bothers your rabbit,” Stephan offered.

  “Žofie-Helene used to be the girl,” Walter told the tutor, “but now she spends all her time doing maths.”

  As the tutor paged through the playscript, Stephan listened closely to the murmurs of Mutti and Aunt Lisl in the entry hall, Aunt Lisl saying Uncle Michael had arranged for the family to stay in the palais, to have rooms on the top floor.

  “Just our rooms, or the guest wing too?” Mutti asked.

  “The servants’ floor,” Aunt Lisl said. “I know it doesn’t seem like much, Ruche, but most people are being made to move across the canal to Leopoldstadt, where whole families are sharing single rooms.”

  Stephan looked to the ceiling high above him, the map of the world painted there, with a full-sailed ship of explorers charging across it. Beyond it were his parents’ bedrooms, and his and Walter’s. The servants’ rooms were on the top floor, the attic floor that the elevator didn’t reach.

  “Here, Stephan, where you use ‘amaze,’ you might consider ‘astonish,’” the tutor was saying. “The meanings aren’t all that different, but ‘amaze’ suggests a more positive response than I think you mean. And here, with ‘damage,’ perhaps you’d be better served with ‘ruin.’ Again, they’re similar, but ‘damage’ leaves the possibility that a thing can be fixed, while ‘ruin’ is more permanent.”

  “Ruin,” Stephan repeated.

  “Like the ruins of Pompeii. Your father told me you’ve been there, right? It was rediscovered after, what, fifteen hundred years? But it will never be put back together again.”

  “Ruin,” Stephan repeated again, thinking that even in ruin, some things were perfectly preserved.

  LISL WAS SITTING with Ruchele in the library when the Nazis arrived, one waving a swastika-stamped document granting him the palais. They watched through the doorway as, in the entry hall below, Herman handed over a set of keys: to the china cabinet, the silver closet, the wine cellar, his office here at home, his desk. The man’s cadre of accompanying soldiers—some only boys, really—began the process of inventorying the artwork, starting in the entry hall with the Van Gogh self-portrait, the painter laden with a box of paints and brushes and a canvas on the road to Tarascon; the Morisot girl reading, which made Lisl think of Stephan’s little friend, Žofie-Helene Perger; the Klimts—the Birkenwald birches from the artist’s summer retreat in Litzlberg on Lake Attersee, and the scene of Malcesine on Lake Garda—and the Kokoschka of Lisl herself.

  As the men laughed at the red scratches that were Lisl’s own cheeks, Ruchele said soothingly, “They have no idea what they’re looking at, no appreciation.”

  “No,” Lisl agreed. “No.”

  Michael had promised her he would claim possession of her portrait, and the Klimt of Ruchele as well. How he would do that, she didn’t know, but she chose to believe he would.

  Hope. Until the day when God will deign to reveal the future of man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words—Wait and Hope, Alexandre Dumas had written in The Count of Monte Cristo, a book she and Michael had talked about the first time they’d met.

  Other men were set to inventorying every piece of furniture, jewelry, silver, and china; every linen (table and bed and bath); every clock; the contents of every desk and dresser; and the clothes Lisl had brought with her when she moved from the home she’d shared with Michael—a palais they’d bought with her money, which now belonged solely to him. They inventoried Ruchele’s letters and Herman’s too, and Stephan’s stories. They even inventoried Walter’s toys: one electric train set; one red rubber racer, Ferrari-Maserati model; forty-eight metal toy soldiers from a box of fifty Herman had bought him in London just last year.

  One stuffed Peter Rabbit, much loved, Lisl thought. But Peter was safely in her nephew’s arms.

  On the radio, which had not yet been inventoried, in Herman’s library, which had yet to be breached, the result of the Évian Conference was being announced by the Nazis: delegates from thirty-two countries, after nine days of meetings, had nothing to offer but abundant excuses for closing their doors to refugees from the Reich—“an astounding result from countries who have criticized Germany for our treatment of the Jews.”

  Ruchele whispered, “Two thousand Jews have already committed suicide since the Germans seized Austria, Lisl. What difference would one more make?”

  “Don’t, Ruche,” Lisl said. “You promised me. You promised Herman. Don’t—”

  “But I’m dying,” her sister-in-law said softly. “I will die. There is nothing to be done about that. If I were gone, Herman would take the boys. He’d flee Vienna. He’d find a way to live somewhere outside Hitler’s reach.”

  “No,” Lisl insisted, but an unfaithful little chip in her heart thought yes. If Ruchele died, her brother and her nephews would leave Vienna, and her with them. Michael had said she should flee Austria, that he could help her get out of the country with money enough to live on. But how could she leave every single person in this world she had ever loved?

  Herman and Stephan were already carrying the Victrola out to the elevator, where a Nazi forbade them entrance. They carried it instead up the main staircase and around to the narrow servants’ stairs, “helped” by Walter and his rabbit. It was the old wind-up they kept in the library, not the Electrola used to play music during salons and simpler gatherings that didn’t require the hiring of a quartet. They were being allowed to keep only this one old player, and a very few records.

  Lisl followed her brother up the stairs, whispering, “I think it would be better to move Ruchele now, Herman. It will destroy her to see them pawing through your books.”

  They placed the Victrola in the small, low-ceilinged sitting room that adjoined two servants’ bedrooms next door to the room Lisl would use, at the opposite end of the floor from the staff staying on to serve the Nazis. She turned on the lamps to make it a little more cheery. At least they would have electricity, as the servants’ floor wasn’t separately metered, and the Nazis who would occupy the main floors weren’t about to go without.

  They returned to find the Nazis beginning to inventory every bit of Herman’s library, but if the intrusion pained him, he bore it stoically—her book-proud brother for whom chocolate was a business and literature a joy. Lisl wondered if he’d had the sense to destroy the books by authors who were banned: Erich Remarque and Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, H. G. Wells, Stefan Zweig, whom Stephan so loved.

  Herman removed his suit coat and easily lifted Ruchele from her wheelchair, as if she weighed nothing. He set her on the library chaise, one of the few pieces of furniture they would be permitted to take upstairs.

  As he and Stephan carried the heavy wheelchair upstairs, Lisl carefully folded Ruchele’s blanket, cream-colored cashmere that was the only thing Ruchele could bear against her dry, translucent skin. A soldier watched every smooth crease Lisl made. Yes, it was a valuable blanket, and no, she would not allow it to be taken from her dying sister-in-law only to be shoved into some storage facility in Bavaria, to be put to no use at all.

  Herman returned for Ruchele. He lifted her from the chaise and began up the stairs.

  Ruchele looked back over his shoulder to the Nazis swarming the main floors. Lisl, with a nod to the soldier, followed them, blanket in hand. Her sister-in-law would not easily come down these stairs again.

  At the top of the servants’ stairs, Herman set Ruchele in the wheelchair’s cane seat. Walter climbed up into his mother’s lap—clearly causing her pain, but she tousled his hair as if she
were perfectly comfortable. Lisl unfolded the blanket she had so carefully folded and spread it over Ruchele, and Stephan took the handles and wheeled his mother toward their rooms.

  The wheelchair wouldn’t fit through the doorway.

  Before Lisl could suggest they might try removing the brass wheel handles, Herman grabbed a fireplace poker from inside the room and swung it at the door trim.

  Soot flew from the poker as it slammed into the wood.

  The trim splintered, but remained affixed to the wall, now sprinkled with soot.

  Herman swung the poker again, his shirt ripping at the arm just as the cast-iron poker hit the wood. He swung again. And again. And again. His rage poured into the effort, the wood collapsing and splintering, bits of it flying everywhere with the soot, splattering back onto his shirt and into his hair, littering the floor around him, landing even on Ruchele’s blanket and Walter’s little rabbit. The whole area around them was sprinkled with soot and wood bits, and the trim was completely battered, and still the door frame remained intact.

  Lisl watched silently—they all watched silently—as Herman sank to the floor beside Ruchele’s wheelchair, weeping. That was what terrified Lisl more than anything: the sight of her big brother, whom she had never seen anything less than composed even when they were children, now sitting on the floor in his torn shirtsleeves, covered in soot and wood chips, and weeping.

  Ruchele touched Herman’s hair as comfortingly as she had touched Walter’s. “It’s all right, darling,” she said. “It will all be all right somehow.”

  Stephan—dear sweet Stephan—took the poker and gently applied it as a wedge to the smashed trim. The wood popped loose at the point of contact with the wall. Stephan repeated the move all up and down that side of the doorframe, until the battered trim could be pried off. He stepped into the room and removed the door trim from inside the little room, too.