The Last Train to London

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “Well, why don’t you two step over here and we’ll get your photographs taken?” Tante Truus said.

  Grandpapa handed the woman Johanna’s paperwork.

  Tante Truus said, “I’m really sorry, Herr Perger, but for this train, please believe me when I say it isn’t possible to include toddlers. We hope to include them on the next one.”

  Johanna said, “I’m a big girl. I’m three!”

  Grandpapa said, “Her sister would be with her, and she’s a good girl, she’s no trouble.”

  “I’m sure, Herr Perger,” Tante Truus said, “but I simply cannot . . . There isn’t time for discussion with everyone. Please understand. We must draw lines and hold to them.”

  “I . . .” Grandpapa glanced at the long line behind them. “Yes, I’m . . . I’m sorry. Of course.”

  Tante Truus extracted a linen handkerchief and wiped at Žofie’s face a bit more, then unwound her braids and fluffed her hair.

  “Smile for the photographer, Žofie-Helene,” she said.

  The flash popped, leaving stars of light dancing in Žofie’s eyes.

  Tante Truus took Žofie’s hand and led her behind a screen, where she was to undress so that a doctor could examine her. Žofie wanted to tell her that she was not a baby, that Walter needed more help than she did. But she only skinned off her shoes, which seemed to fascinate Tante Truus even though she’d told her to undress.

  “Are you in charge here, Tante Truus?” Žofie asked as she pulled off her stockings and carefully folded them, wanting to stay in Tante Truus’s good graces. “Mama is in charge of a newspaper. People never expect it, a girl in charge. She says it can work in her favor.”

  “Well, in that case I suppose I should be in charge here,” Tante Truus said. “I do like things to work in my favor.”

  “Me too,” Žofie said. “I’m quite talented at mathematics.”

  “Yes, I saw that,” Tante Truus said.

  “Professor Gödel has left the university, but I still help him with his generalized continuum hypothesis.”

  Tante Truus peered oddly at her, the way people so often did.

  “You know, about the possible sizes of infinite sets?” Žofie said. “The first of Hilbert’s twenty-three problems. My friend Stephan is as smart with words as I am with mathematical concepts. He could study writing with Stefan Zweig if he went to England. He ought to have been in line with us, so perhaps when he gets here you could just put him with Walter and me?”

  Tante Truus said, “Ah, so this is where you were going. And why isn’t your friend here himself?”

  “He’s not in a camp,” Žofie assured her. She’d heard people in the line say there wouldn’t be time to get boys from the camps.

  Truus asked, “Where is he, then?”

  Žofie met her gaze, unwilling to betray Stephan.

  “You must understand, I can’t just move someone in line ahead of the others,” Tante Truus said. “That wouldn’t be fair. Now take your clothes off, Žofie-Helene, so the doctor can see that you’re healthy.”

  “Stephan is in hiding!” Žofie blurted. “It’s not his fault he isn’t here!”

  “I see,” Tante Truus said. “And you know where he is?”

  “He can have my space,” Žofie said. “I can stay here with Jojo.”

  “Oh, sweetheart, I’m afraid I can’t do that. See, each card is specific to a child. The other half of your card is in England, and only you will have permission to—”

  “But Stephan will be eighteen and he’ll be too old!” Žofie gulped back the sob climbing up her throat. “You can send his card for mine and say you made a mistake. Even I make mistakes.”

  The woman pulled her close and hugged her the way Mama sometimes did. Žofie couldn’t help herself; tears spilled from her eyes to be absorbed by the woman’s clothing, which was nearly as soft as the gloves. It had been so long since Žofie had seen Mama.

  “I think this Stephan is lucky to have such a good friend, Žofie-Helene,” Tante Truus said, and Žofie felt the woman’s lips press to the crown of her head. “I wish I had a . . . a friend like you.”

  The doctor peered around the privacy screen. Tante Truus helped Žofie quickly out of the rest of her clothes.

  “Okay, breathe deeply for the nice doctor,” Tante Truus said. “Then quick as you can, dress again and run and get your friend. Bring him directly to me. I can’t register him without a photo or a health certificate, but you just pretend the line isn’t there and bring him to me.”

  The doctor listened to Žofie-Helene’s breathing, which she did as quickly as she could.

  “More slowly,” he said. “Deep breaths.”

  Žofie closed her eyes and let her mind fill with numbers, the way she did at night when she couldn’t sleep. What came to mind as he set the stethoscope aside and finished the examination, tapping her knees with the little mallet and looking in her ears and nose and mouth, was a simple problem: if each child took, say, four minutes to process and there were two processed at a time, that meant there were two hours and thirty-four minutes for her to find Stephan. Two hours and eighteen, actually, since she and Walter were already past the table, and two others were registering now.

  “Žofie-Helene,” Tante Truus said, “I’m going to help your friend as best I can, but I can’t put him ahead of anyone given a number before he arrives. You must promise me that you’ll get on the train, with Stephan or without him. If you don’t, six hundred other children will not be allowed to go on account of you. Do you understand?”

  Five hundred and ninety-nine others, Žofie thought, but she didn’t say anything as now she didn’t want to waste the time.

  She pulled her clothes back on, saying at the same time, “It’s binary. Six hundred or zero.” Zero, her favorite number usually, but not now. “I understand,” she said, “and I promise I’ll go to England even if Stephan is number six hundred and one. I’ll take Walter.”

  “Binary, heavens!” Tante Truus said. “Hurry, then. Fast as you can!”

  Though Banish’d, Outcast, Reviled

  Žofie-Helene sprinted off to the nearest entrance to the underground, trying not to think of what her life would be like without Stephan, but awash with memories: that day Grandpapa had pretended to cut Stephan’s hair; Stephan’s birthday, when she hadn’t known it was his birthday, when she hadn’t known that he lived in a big palais on the Ringstrasse with a doorman and famous paintings and an elegant aunt; the first time she’d read one of his plays, the feeling that, even though it wasn’t about her, she was understood; that night on the Burgtheater stage, when she’d closed her eyes and pretended it was Stephan rather than Dieter kissing her; the moment Stephan had looked at her as he goose-stepped up the Prater Park promenade, when she’d known from the shame in his eyes that he needed her to lie to the Nazis and take Walter away. She hadn’t even been afraid that day. The fear had only bubbled up in her later, when Stephan had refused to see her, when she came to realize that in saving his brother she had lost her one friend.

  The moment she reached the darkness of the underground, she began to sing. She sang quietly, the words from that day in the royal chapel, the voice of the single boy left alone in the choir loft, the voice of an entire choir echoing the music back under the unfrescoed rib vault, like the beautiful weight of the intersecting barrels carried on the piers so that the thrust was transmitted to the outer walls.

  “Ave Maria, maiden mild,” she sang softly. She wasn’t much of a singer, not like the boys in the choir. Still, she sang more loudly, “Listen to a maiden’s prayer.”

  She stopped and listened. She heard nothing.

  “Thou canst hear though from the wild,” she sang, even more loudly, her voice the one now echoing as she flicked on the dim flashlight and hurried through the cold darkness. “Thou canst save amid despair. Safe may we sleep beneath thy care; Though banish’d, outcast, reviled.”

  Even Apart

  Truus, just arrived back at her room at the Hotel
Bristol, had not even sat down to remove her shoes when the telephone rang. The operator apologized for disturbing her at this hour, but she had an urgent call from Amsterdam. Would she take it? As Truus waited for the call to be put through, she pulled off her gloves, then sat and removed first one shoe, then the other. She unclipped one stocking from her garter and rolled it down, the rayon on the outside and the wool and cotton underneath for warmth giving way to her pale, exhausted thigh, her knee, her calf, the dry skin of her heel snagging on the fabric. She flexed her naked toes, the arched bones, the clear nails. A plain, Christian foot. How could a Jewish foot possibly be more or less remarkable?

  She folded the stocking and set it on the dresser. The clothes she’d thrown away the night before sat as neatly folded as she’d left them, but on the dresser rather than in the trash bin now. Well, of course the hotel maid would have been confused.

  Joop’s voice crackled in the receiver, demanding, “Where have you been, Truus? I’ve been trying to reach you all day!”

  Truus exhaled the dank air. “Six hundred children, Joop,” she said.

  She sat back in the chair, one leg bare, the other still the sun-beige of her stockings. She might just tip her head back and close her eyes and sleep, upright and half dressed.

  “All right,” Joop said. “The steamer Prague will lie ready at Hook of Holland. But only the one ferry. I’m sorry. I can’t get a second on such short notice.”

  “Six hundred, or not a one, Joop. Eichmann could not be clearer.”

  “But that makes no sense. He wants to get rid of Vienna’s Jews and England will take them. Why demand they all be gone by Saturday? Why not Sunday or—”

  “Saturday is the Sabbath,” she said wearily. “We are to find six hundred families willing to hand their children over to strangers to travel on the day their religion forbids it, to go alone to a world in which they will certainly be lonely and frightened. And if a single parent has a change of mind at the last minute, the whole scheme collapses.”

  “He can’t be that cruel.”

  “Joop, you cannot believe the humiliation he—”

  The truth, the details, would only make her husband worry for her, and worry would do them no good.

  “We haven’t begun to see the extent of this man’s capacity for cruelty, Joop.”

  “What humiliation, Truus?”

  She stood and, with the receiver tucked under her chin, gathered the clothes folded on the dresser and placed them, still in their tidy pile, back into the empty trash bin.

  “Truus?”

  She reached into the bin and pulled the shorter skirt he’d given her from the other clothing, and held it to her chest. She wanted to tell him. She wanted to take the burden off her own soul, but she couldn’t bear to place the weight of it on him. He had borne so much already. There was so much he deserved that she might never be able to give.

  “Truus,” he said gently, “remember, we’re stronger together, even when we’re apart.”

  Packing

  Žofie chose three of her mathematics notebooks and set them in her empty suitcase on her bed. She stood before the little bookshelf her father had built her, trying to decide how many of her Sherlock Holmes books she had room for. She liked “A Scandal in Bohemia” best, and the novels—A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Valley of Fear—but Grandpapa said she must choose only two. So she selected The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes for the stories, and The Sign of the Four because it had the number four in its title, such a comforting number, and also because she liked Mary Morstan and the mysterious six pearls and the ending, where Mary doesn’t get to become one of the richest women in England, but she does get Dr. Watson.

  Johanna appeared at Žofie’s side, saying, “Žozo,” and handing her a framed photograph of the two of them with Mama, Jojo still a baby, in Mama’s favorite frame. She tried to think of the hidden photograph in “A Scandal in Bohemia” for the distraction, so she wouldn’t start to cry.

  “It will be cold in England,” Grandpapa said. “You will need more clothes. And remember, nothing valuable.”

  He took the photo from her, removed it from its expensive frame, and set the bare photo in the suitcase, inside the top notebook so it wouldn’t get bent.

  Žofie lifted Johanna and held her close, nuzzling into the warm, yeasty smell of her little-girl neck.

  “Johanna can’t come,” she said to Grandpapa. “Stephan can’t come. And Mama isn’t here to say goodbye.”

  “I want to go with Žozo,” Johanna said.

  Grandpapa folded Žofie’s favorite sweater and set it in the suitcase, beside the notebooks. He added skirts and blouses, panties, and socks, all the while speaking soothingly, saying, “Your mother will be released soon, Žofie. I’ve been assured she will be released soon. But Austria is no longer safe for us. She’ll want you to go to England. When she’s released, we’ll all go to Czechoslovakia to stay with your grandmère until we can get visas to join you.”

  He closed the suitcase, to make sure it wasn’t overfilled, then opened it again.

  “Just think of everything you have to look forward to, Engelchen,” he said. “You can see the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum.”

  “And the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus,” she said.

  “Sherlock Holmes’s house on Baker Street.”

  “I could give my space to Stephan and come to Grandmère’s with you and Mama and Johanna,” she said. “Then there would still be six hundred.”

  Grandpapa put his arms around the two of them, and held them safe and together. “Frau Wijsmuller has already explained, Žofie, that the cards have been processed with the Germans. They have to match here as well as at the border leaving Germany, and in England. But Stephan will be on the next train.”

  “There might not be a next train before he’s eighteen!” She pulled back from Grandpapa, still with Johanna in her arms. “Tante Truus wouldn’t promise there would ever be a next train!”

  “If we don’t finish packing and get to the station, there certainly will be no next train, or even a first,” Grandpapa scolded.

  Johanna began to wail. Žofie-Helene pulled her sister’s face to her chest, as Mama used to do to protect them, to comfort them.

  Grandpapa, with tears in his eyes too now, said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He reached out and stroked Jojo’s hair. “It’s as hard for me to say goodbye, Žofie-Helene, as it is for you to leave.”

  Žofie felt herself begin to cry despite all her promises to herself that she wouldn’t, that her crying would only make Grandpapa and Jojo sadder. “But you’ll have Mama and Johanna,” she said, “and I’ll only have Sherlock Holmes, who isn’t even real.”

  “But you’ll have Cambridge, Engelchen,” Grandpapa said in a more comforting voice. “I think you will have Cambridge. It’s where your mother would want you to go even if we didn’t have to leave Austria.”

  Žofie set Jojo down, got a handkerchief, and blew her nose. “Because I’m very good at maths,” she said.

  “You are extraordinary at maths,” Grandpapa said. “Surely someone in England will see that and help you find a mentor there.”

  He took one of her blouses from the suitcase and returned it to the dresser.

  “You are extraordinary, period,” he said. “Now look, I’ve made room for one more Sherlock Holmes book and another of your maths notebooks. You’ll want some pencils too. But hurry now, it’s time to go.”

  Leave-Taking

  Stephan, in his coat and Žofie-Helene’s pink plaid scarf, kissed his mother’s forehead.

  “You’d better go or you’ll miss the train,” Mutti said. “Take good care of him, Stephan. Keep him with you, always.”

  Stephan said, “The Wall will take care of me, won’t you?”

  Mutti buttoned Walter’s coat and tied his scarf.

  “But really, Stephan,” she said, “promise me.”

  Stephan looked away, to the two suitcases wai
ting side by side at the door. His held only a single change of clothes and his notebook and pencil, and the copy of Kaleidoscope that Žofie had kept even though it was dangerous to have. It was too dangerous to be taken on the train too, but it didn’t matter.

  “I know you’re young,” Mutti said to him. “But you must be the man now.”

  She pulled Walter to her, inhaling deeply. “You do what your big brother says, everything he says,” she said to him. “You promise me?”

  “I promise, Mutti,” Walter said.

  She took Stephan’s hand again. “Promise me you’ll hold his hand all the way to England,” she said. “Find a family to take you both.”

  Stephan met her gaze, knowing he needed to seem to her to be marking her face, remembering her forever. If he hadn’t hesitated when he first heard Žofie singing . . . If he’d run faster . . . But then Mutti would have been left with no one.

  “I’ll keep him safe,” he said.

  That much was true.

  “You and Stephan will go to a family together, Walter,” Mutti said.

  “And Peter too?” Walter asked.

  “Yes, and Peter too. You and Stephan and Peter,” Mutti said. “You will all live together with a family. You’ll take care of each other.”

  “Until you come to England to be the mommy again,” Walter said.

  “Yes, sweetheart,” Mutti said, her voice catching. “Yes. Until then you will write me lots of letters, and I will write you back.”

  Watching her work so hard not to cry, Stephan wanted to cry himself. He wanted to tell her not to worry, that he would still be here. He would take care of her. She wouldn’t be alone.

  “Teach him to be a man like you are, Stephan,” she said. “You are such a good man. Your father would be so proud. Make your brother know how much we love him, how much we love you both, no matter what happens.”

  Walter took out his handkerchief and unfolded it carefully, and put it to Peter Rabbit’s eyes. “Peter wants to stay with you, Mutti.”