The Last Train to London

by Meg Waite Clayton

Stephan crept back across the roof toward the servants’-floor sitting room window, staying low, trying not to make a sound, not to knock a slate free. He listened intently over the chaos of the night to hear what was happening inside.

  “Peter and I can get it,” he heard Walter say.

  He leaned down over the roof’s edge to peer into the window. Mutti was wheeling her chair to the Victrola, where poor Walter held Peter’s little stuffed rabbit paw in one hand as he tried to right the table on which the Victrola had sat. Stephan was just reaching down to push open the window when the door from the hallway again opened. Walter hugged his rabbit close, to protect him, as Stephan pulled himself back up out of sight.

  “Wall-man,” a voice said. “Frau Neuman.”

  Wall-man? Stephan listened more intently.

  Someone began resetting the chessboard, banging the pieces.

  “We don’t know where he is,” Mutti said.

  “How about you, Walter?” the same voice—Dieter’s voice—asked. “Do you know where Stephan is?”

  “He doesn’t know either,” Mutti insisted.

  “I can help him,” Dieter said. “He’s my friend. I want to help.”

  Stephan wanted to believe him, wanted someone to help him, wanted not to be out alone on this terrifying night. There were no other voices but Dieter’s and Mutti’s. Maybe Dieter had returned just to help. But mixed in with the memories of exploring with Dieter on their bicycles, rehearsing plays together, searching cafés for Stefan Zweig, was Dieter’s face jeering with the others in Prater Park as the Nazi kicked Stephan, demanding he goose-step yet again.

  Dieter knew as well as anyone how Stephan could slip out a window and down the tree to sneak out at night. Stephan hesitated, torn between the certainty that Dieter would climb out to find him—and help him? or load him into a truck?—and the fear of leaving Mutti and Walter to whatever Dieter might do to them.

  “Even Peter doesn’t know where Stephan is,” Walter said.

  Stephan wiped his face and looked to the horizon, the blazes all over the city. He was no match for Dieter’s strength, and if he was found, Mutti and Walter would be caught in the lie.

  He mapped out in his mind the quickest way into the underground. There was nowhere else to go. If he could get down the tree unnoticed, he could enter through the kiosk perhaps twenty-five steps down the Ringstrasse, twenty-five perilous steps, given the rioting crowds. Or he could slip down the back street to the manhole cover between here and the Michaelerplatz, a longer way to go but perhaps easier to avoid being seen. Or he could just trust Dieter. Was there really any other choice?

  The News

  Truus?”

  Truus looked up from the radio on the narrow table, startled. Joop stood in his nightclothes, lit by the moonlight through the window.

  “I didn’t want to wake you,” she said. She had kept the lights off and the radio so low she could barely hear it herself, even with her ear right to it.

  “Come back to bed, Truus. You need your rest.”

  Truus nodded, but didn’t move from her chair. It was preposterous. They’d had such a lovely evening at the Groenvelds’ that when they’d come home they’d turned on the radio, to dance barefoot together in the apartment, as they sometimes did before they made love. But there had been no music. There had been only the awful news coming out of Germany, all of the Reich burning on account of the death of a low-level diplomat shot in Paris by some poor Polish boy upset that his parents were caught at the border, between a Germany wanting to send them home and a Poland refusing to take them.

  Joop said, “The entire police force are out in Berlin and have been since eight this evening, and hundreds of Black Guards too. Surely the chaos is over.”

  “They’re saying even women are being beaten,” she said. “They’re saying the gangs are drunk with destruction, that they’ve been chasing down Jews in the streets all day and night. Can you imagine? While we were laughing at dinner. While we were waltzing, with no idea in the world.”

  Joop shook his head. “If the German people don’t stand up now, they are finished.”

  “Goebbels spoke a second time tonight, calling for order, but his words are having no impact.”

  “His words are a dog whistle,” Joop said. “I said that earlier. Didn’t I say that when we first heard what he said at that gathering in Munich? In the same breath as he announces the death of vom Rath, he blames it on a Jewish conspiracy and says the party won’t organize demonstrations but nor will they hamper them.”

  “But it makes no sense,” she said. “Why would this one death in Paris spark riots throughout the Reich?”

  “That’s what I’m saying, Truus. It isn’t the cause of the riots. It’s the excuse. When Goebbels said they wouldn’t hamper demonstrations, he was inviting this violence. It’s what the Nazis do so well. They create a crisis—like they did with the Reichstag fire in ’33—which they then use to increase their military control. They want every German to see the havoc they can wreak at the snap of a finger. They want every German to know the violence they can bring to bear on any single person for the slightest perceived offense. What better way to silence citizens opposing the regime than with the prospect that their resistance will jeopardize their families and their lives?”

  “It isn’t just the Nazis now, though. They’re saying crowds of ordinary Germans have been flocking into the streets to gape at the wreckage and to cheer. ‘Like holiday makers at a fairground,’ Joop. Where are the decent German people? Why aren’t they standing against this? Where are the leaders of the world?”

  Joop said, “You put more faith in politicians than they warrant. They cower at the slightest threat to their power, although of course no one but Hitler has any real power in Germany now.” He kissed her head. “Really, Truus, you ought to come back to bed.”

  She watched him disappear down the hallway, headed back toward their comfortable bed in their comfortable home in their country that was free from terror. He was right. There was nothing to do tonight. She should follow him back to bed and get some sleep. But how could she sleep?

  Joop emerged again, shrugging on his robe and bringing hers, saying, “All right then, go ahead and turn the radio up. Do you want the lights on?”

  As he helped her into her robe, she shivered at the thought that she might have lost him, that the Nazis didn’t need any real excuse to hold anyone they wished.

  He turned the volume up, and pulled his chair around beside her, and took her hand. They sat listening together in the moonlight.

  “Joop,” she said, “I thought I might borrow Mrs. Kramarsky’s car at daylight, just to go to the border.”

  “It’s too dangerous now, Truus.”

  “You’ve seen these children.”

  “You’d put your life at risk. Really, Geertruida, the doctor said—”

  “You would ask me to sit now, Joop? Just when it is so important to stand?”

  Joop sighed. He went into the kitchen and put on coffee: the click of the cabinet door being opened, water from the tap, coffee grounds falling onto the metal of the percolator basket as the voice on the radio continued. He returned with two steaming cups, saying, “You’ll just collect the children who’ve already made it out of Germany, like you usually do?”

  Truus accepted a cup from him, hesitating as he again sat with her. She took a sip of the strong, hot coffee.

  “Parents send their children on trains to Emmerich am Rhein,” she said. “There’s a farm on the border there. . . . It’s too dangerous for the farmer and his wife to take in children, but . . .”

  “They call you?”

  Truus nodded. “The committee does, yes.”

  “You’re the one who goes over the border to get them? You go into Germany to get children with no papers whatsoever?”

  Truus nodded.

  “Oh, Truus.”

  Truus unconsciously touched her ruby ring to her lips, then looked at it, slightly surprised to realize that
the ring Joop had given her when she was first pregnant wasn’t there, it was still with the refugee siblings.

  “I know,” she said, “but . . . Joop, I . . . I never told you, but . . . Little Adele . . .”

  “You brought Adele on a train with thirty other children, Truus. You and Mrs. Van Lange did. You had papers for them—”

  “Yes, but . . .” She took his hand, willing herself not to cry. “She didn’t make it.”

  “What are you saying? I don’t understand.”

  She looked to their joined hands on this sturdy table, his wide palm and strong fingers dark against her paler skin. “Adele . . . I . . . Diphtheria.”

  “No. No, Adele is in Britain. The Bentwiches—”

  “She had a mother, Joop,” she whispered, the tears spilling but still she met his gaze, his pain too now set free for this child who had never been theirs. “I might have left her in her mother’s arms,” she said. “I might have put her in yours.”

  The “Ave Maria”

  Ruchele held Walter close as the Nazi boy returned through the window and took up the chore of restoring order to the apartment. He lifted the toppled table, then the Victrola. He placed the record back on the machine.

  “Would you like me to turn it on for you, Frau Neuman?” he asked.

  “No!” Ruchele cried out.

  At the boy’s startled expression, she said more calmly, “No, please. I don’t think I could bear it, music.” Dieter, she’d almost said, but if she called him Dieter, would he be offended? If she called him Officer, would it break the spell of guilt that surely was what kept him here helping them despite the risky position it must put him in with his new friends? “Thank you,” she said.

  “I’ll put another coal on then,” he said.

  He opened the coal box. Only a few lumps remained. As he looked sadly up at her, he spotted Stephan’s gloves, which had been knocked from the table. He picked the gloves up, saying, “If you know where he went, I can find him. I can let him know it’s safe to return. It’s so cold out. Did he even take a coat?”

  She swallowed back the urge to accept this help, knowing she could expect to be offered no other.

  “You’re sure you don’t want music?” he said. “It might soothe you.”

  Ruchele, careful not to glance in the direction of the dirty little window, now fully closed, said, “Thank you. Thank you so much, but no. Walter can manage that for us if we want music. Perhaps you could just open the window ever so slightly, for the fresh air?”

  The boy opened the window slightly, and bowed, and left Ruchele holding Walter to her, listening for whether the quiet outside the door was Stephan’s friend slipping back to join his comrades, or the boy stealthily waiting in the hallway for Stephan’s return.

  The clock struck the quarter hour, then the half.

  “Walter,” Ruchele said, “can you peek out the door and see if that boy is there?”

  “Dieter snot nose,” Walter said, not in his own voice but in his Peter Rabbit one.

  He cracked the door open and peeked out, then opened it slightly wider and looked about.

  “All right, then,” Ruchele told him.

  “I can make it go, Mutti,” Walter said. “I can make it go.”

  “The Victrola?”

  “For Stephan,” Walter said.

  “For Stephan,” Ruchele said.

  He went to the little machine and turned the crank—a task he’d always loved, but there was no joy on his face now, only studied concentration as he set the needle in place. The music crackled to life, the record damaged, but still the first strains of the “Ave Maria” played in the cold room.

  “Climb into my lap so you can keep me warm,” she told him. “Peter too.”

  He did so, and they sat waiting, Walter climbing from her lap each time the record reached its end to lift the needle and replace it, to once again begin the “Ave Maria.”

  Fighting Fires

  Stephan huddled inside Papa’s cocoa bean cellar (his Uncle Michael’s cocoa bean cellar now), his hands tucked into his coat pockets for the illusion of warmth. How long had he been underground? Surely it must be morning, the chaos of the night over even if there wasn’t yet the sound of workers arriving in the chocolate factory overhead. He took the flashlight from the bottom of the stairs and climbed down the ladder into the cave underneath, pushing away thoughts of Žofie here as he made his way out through the lower cavern and the little tunnel, and up the circular stairs. At the top, he pushed up one of the metal triangles just enough to peek out. It was still dark. There were still people everywhere.

  He slipped back down into the tunnel and hurried along to one of the open-grid grates, where he might see more easily without being seen. Even before he climbed the metal rungs in the tunnel wall, he heard the crowd.

  At the top, as he looked up at them through the grate as if through prison bars, the revelers seemed even more drunk on their anger. What hath night to do with sleep? Hoodlums, Stephan wanted to call them, but they were the same people to whom, not so long ago, he would have apologized as he dashed down the Ringstrasse.

  This crowd was gathered by one of the synagogues as if at the tree lighting at the Rathausplatz on Christmas Eve. There were no chestnut stands or punch stalls here, though. There were only people crowded around, cheering each spike of flame, and firefighters who stood, unmoving, just in front of Stephan. He watched through the metal grid, unable to understand why they didn’t fight the fire.

  A mob of brownshirts dragged a crippled old man from his apartment, his wife trailing them, begging them to leave her husband, that he could harm no one. The firefighters turned to watch, but didn’t move to help the poor couple. No one moved to help.

  “He’s a good man,” the woman pleaded. “I tell you, he’s a good man.”

  One of the brownshirts raised an ax. Stephan couldn’t believe it even as he watched the man swing it at the woman. Her husband groaned at the sight of his wife felled to the ground, the blood pouring from her arm.

  Another Nazi put a pistol to the man’s temple. “Now you are ready to identify for us your Jew friends?”

  The man could do nothing but plead, “Ignaz! Ignaz, no. Ignaz, no,” as his wife bled to death.

  The Nazi pulled the trigger, the shot barely registering over the noise of the crowd as the man crumpled to the ground just at the grate, his lips still moving.

  “I ought to finish you, but there are too many Jews in Vienna to waste two bullets on only one of you,” the Nazi said as he kicked the man’s head with his heel.

  Something oozed from the man’s ear, leaving Stephan feeling the vomit rise in his throat, but too afraid to move away lest he be found.

  Another brownshirt said, “You better be careful or you’ll have Jew brain on your boots,” and the whole group laughed.

  The firefighters turned back to watch the fire again, one saying, “We ought to do something before the flames spread to the other buildings and get out of hand.”

  “This mob would kill us for interfering,” his companion said.

  The crowd cheered at the sound of something collapsing—a roof beam, Stephan thought, although it was outside the frame of what he could see. All he could see through the grate beyond the man’s head was spark and flame roaring up into the dark, smoky sky. A spark alit on the roof of the building beside the synagogue. Only then did the firefighters move to action, and only to keep the fire from spreading as the synagogue continued to burn.

  BACK IN THE tunnels under his own neighborhood, Stephan peeked from the kiosk on the Ringstrasse up to the servants’-floor windows, hoping to hear the “Ave Maria.” But there was only Rolf standing guard at the door for the Nazis now.

  He returned through the underground to the chocolate cellar. He was so tired, so cold. He moved in shadow and silence up to his father’s office. He stretched out on his father’s office sofa, where, in the earliest days of Mutti’s illness, he had often come after school, as tired in those day
s as he now was. He used to fall asleep on this couch to the comforting sound of Papa working at his desk, and wake hours later to the soft feel of a blanket Papa had spread over him, and Papa, working at his desk, smiling at him and saying, “Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work and helps make something of the world.”

  He wondered where Papa was now, where the truck had taken him.

  He would wait here for Uncle Michael. Uncle Michael would help him figure out what to do.

  No Escape

  Stephan woke in the darkness to the sound of a woman’s voice approaching, a familiar voice. He rolled silently off the couch and under it just as the office door opened.

  The woman giggled. “Really, Michael, I couldn’t.”

  Had Aunt Lisl come back from Shanghai?

  “Why can’t you?” Uncle Michael said in a teasing tone not unlike that he’d so often used to ask whether Stephan had kissed Žofie-Helene.

  Stephan listened, holding his breath, as his uncle lifted the woman and laid her out on the sofa, which sagged toward him. His uncle’s feet skimmed off shoes only inches from Stephan’s face.

  “Michael,” the woman said, and Stephan recognized the voice of Anita, his father’s secretary, to whose image Stephan had sometimes pleasured himself.

  “Didn’t you do this with Herman?” his uncle asked. “After Ruchele got so sick?”

  “Michael,” the woman said again, with a note of objection in her voice.

  Her breathing grew deeper as Uncle Michael’s trousers dropped to the floor around his feet, the belt buckle clanking against the wood floor so close that Stephan nearly gasped. The gasp, though, came from Anita, as the shadow of Uncle Michael stepped out of the puddle of trousers and the couch above Stephan creaked even lower under his uncle’s added weight.

  The woman’s gasp turned to a moan, then, as it had so often in Stephan’s dark bedroom, in his imagination. The couch overhead began to move rhythmically, slowly at first, and then faster and faster, until his uncle gasped quietly, “Lisl.” And still Stephan could do nothing but lie there, absolutely still, trying not to think of his own shameful imaginings, pushing away the awful thought of his father with Anita on this same couch, where Stephan had so often found escape.