Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,103

Halle an der Saale.

The room where James Grant interviewed her was above the kitchens, which were staffed by British soldiers, who cooked and baked from early morning to night, so that the smell of boiled meat and potatoes and freshly baked bread wafted through the building. It was the kind of smell that induced acquiescence, she thought, and she tried not to think of being hungry. James Grant moved his chair out from behind the desk and wrote in a file folder balanced on his knee. Three times he asked her age, and three times she gave a different answer. “Fifteen,” she said at last. Her real age.

He tried to get her to talk by talking about himself. He told her he had a degree in sociology. His parents owned a department store. His older brother, Owen, was a captain in the U.S. Army. He had a pet dog. What about you, Anna? Any pets at home? She didn’t answer. What a stupid question, she thought.

Did she have relatives in France? A number of the camp children were going to live with French families. “I’ve never been to France,” she said.

“Any family in England?” he said. “Sweden?”

“Why would I want to go to Sweden?”

“One of the nurses told me your mother was a doctor.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, my mother was a doctor.” She looked away. She let herself float out the open window into the June sunshine and over the fields until she became a mere speck in the sky. She thought: What a relief it would be, to be done with the me that is me.

* * *

On a warm summer morning, James Grant removed his uniform jacket and hung it on the back of his chair. His hair was thick and straight, light brown with streaks of blond, and his features were neat, well organized. He had a lot of straight, very white teeth. He looked not quite real. If anyone qualified as a displaced person, it was him, not her, Anna thought.

“How would you feel about going to the United States?” he said. “An air force flight leaves from Bremen in five days. I think we could get you aboard. You’d be staying with a family I have in mind. A nice family. I know they’d look after you very well. What do you think?”

“I am not leaving here,” she said. “I told you before; you can send me to Palestine if you want. I am willing to go there.”

“Anna, you are not Jewish.”

“Don’t you ever listen to me? I have a friend in Palestine,” she repeated, this time in English. “Her name is Rosa.”

“But still, you cannot go to Palestine.” He sighed. “Anna, you can’t stay here. You’ll understand when I tell you there are active cases of tuberculosis here. For that reason alone, we’d like to get you away. Germany is not the place for you right now. Do you really want to go to another refugee camp, a displaced persons camp? I don’t want that to happen.”

“Why do you care?”

“I just do, Anna.”

“I can’t go because of Natalia,” Anna said. “We’re going to stay together.”

“I’ll talk to her, then,” James Grant said.

“She won’t want to talk to you.”

“We’ll see,” he said.

The next time she saw James Grant, he presented her with a pair of shoes that matched, a new pair of shoes. She took them out of the white cardboard shoebox and held them. “Do you like them?” he said. “Try them on. Let’s see how they look.”

She studied her feet in the mismatched shoes, one black with perforated holes in a swirly pattern, the other brown and too big, and thought she’d become accustomed to them. She bent and undid the buckle on the black shoe and the laces on the brown shoe and stepped out of them. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she slipped her feet into the new shoes. Never had she worn such beautiful shoes, not even from the Bata shoe store in Prague. She remembered that when James Grant had traced her foot on a piece of white paper, she had actually thought it was nothing unusual, that it was part of the UNRRA bureaucracy, another means of identifying her as a refugee, another paper to go into that file folder James Grant carried around. Nothing seemed too strange to believe. He told her now that he’d sent the outline of her foot to Seattle, and his parents had chosen the shoes in the shoe department at their store.