Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,102

the hospital who never complained but just lay there in her bed. The quiet ones were the sickest, the nurses said. Anna helped her to raise her head, to sip from the glass. Take just a sip or it will make you gag, she warned.

This patient pushed her hand away. “Anna,” the patient said.

Anna looked at her. “Frau Faber?” she said.

Frau Faber had no hair, and her blue eyes were bloodshot, the lids inflamed. There was nothing to her. Perhaps enough of her remained to reconstitute a viable person, perhaps not.

“Natalia,” Anna said, and they smiled at each other.

In the weeks that followed the camp’s liberation, the British army went house to house in the neighboring towns and demanded donations of clothes and shoes for the internees. Everything they brought back got heaped on the floor in one of the huts at Camp Two. Anna picked out a print dress and a sweater. A woman tried to pull the sweater out of her hands, but Anna refused to let go, and the woman gave up. You had to be like that in the melee, to get anything. She searched in a pile of shoes and couldn’t find a single matched pair. People clomped around in mismatched shoes. They spoke in Czech, Dutch, Hungarian, Polish, German. A woman found Anna mismatched shoes, and she put them on at once. One fit, the other was a little too big. There was room for at least two Annas inside her new dress. Her hair was shorn, and her face had erupted in a rash from the DDT delousing powder. She imagined her mother could see her and was consoling her, saying it was all right, her hair would grow, and she must let the nurses put ointment on the rash, which would soon heal.

Every day, she silently spoke to her mother. The dead get buried, she said, and there are prayers at the grave, and the Kaddish is said, and everyone cries, even the British doctors and nurses cry. Today, however, for the first time, no one has died.

Natalia looked pale and thin, lying there on her pillow. But she would get well. Anna wouldn’t let her not get well. She bathed Natalia’s face and arms with a cool cloth to bring down her fever. Natalia’s scalp itched, and she was afraid she had lice again. But Anna told her that no one had lice anymore—bad reactions to insecticidal powder, yes, but no lice. She changed Natalia’s bedsheets and washed her nightgown in the bathroom sink, and helped her to eat. At first it took half an hour for Natalia to finish a small bowl of broth, but at least she kept the soup down.

Are the thermometers disinfected? Anna would ask the nurses. Are you sure this hypodermic needle is sterile? Where is the adhesive tape? Don’t you think this patient needs a chest X-ray? She preferred being at the hospital to the hut where she slept, even though it had been thoroughly cleaned and supplied with blankets and mattresses.

A social worker with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration interviewed her in an office at the hospital and let her know that she couldn’t stay at the camp; everyone was being transferred to more suitable places. If possible, they were being returned to their countries of origin and reunited with their families.

Anna said she couldn’t leave without Frau Faber. Frau Andorján, she corrected herself. But you must understand, Anna, that no one is staying here, he said. Some are, she said stubbornly. She happened to know that a school was being started for the Jewish children who had to wait for the British government to arrange for them to go to Palestine. If the Jewish children were allowed to stay, why couldn’t she, also, attend the school and perhaps also go to Palestine, where she had a friend called Rosa. She could live with Rosa’s family, and she could go to school with Rosa. It seems like a very practical solution to me, she said, looking out the window. Then she turned to face the social worker, who wore pinned to his uniform jacket a badge with his name on it: JAMES GRANT. He told her he was from Seattle, Washington. She pretended she knew Seattle, who didn’t? She took the chocolate bars he gave her. American chocolate, she said disdainfully, and told him her grandmother, whose name was Katharina, had made the best chocolate in Prussia at their chocolate factory in