Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,105

fact, there.

* * *

“Would I be allowed to ask a question?”

“Of course you can ask a question,” James Grant said.

“This is my question. I want to know, what happened to the guards?” Anna said.

“The guards?”

“The SS guards. The British army came. The SS guards waved white cloths at them, and they were made to work. They were made to see and touch what they had done. I would like to know what happened after they were taken away from here.”

“Why do you ask?”

“I saw one of them shoot a woman.”

“Oh, Anna,” said James Grant.

“She was digging with her hands in the dirt, trying to find a potato or a turnip. We all were. There were no turnips, no potatoes left in the dirt; dig as hard as you could, you couldn’t find a thing. One of the guards came over to us, and he shot a woman. I crawled away in the dirt.”

She didn’t tell James Grant what she had thought when she saw that woman die. She had thought: Now I know what it’s like, when someone is shot dead in cold blood. Executed. This is how my mother died, she had thought. This is how my father died. And Franz, he died like this.

“Anna, what is important now is your future. Soon you’ll be on your way to the airfield at Bremen,” James Grant said. “I’m going to drive you to Bremen myself. I’m going to see you get on the plane safely.”

“I can’t go. No one can force me to go,” she said.

He left and came back with tea and biscuits and a clean handkerchief, which he handed to her. He showed her a photograph. He was in the photograph, standing on a beach, his hair ruffled by the wind. He was with his brother, Owen, his parents, his sister, his dog.

She glanced at the photograph. So he had a family, she thought. Big deal.

“I have to stay and look after Natalia,” she said.

James Grant said he would see that Natalia was looked after. He would help Natalia to reach her home in Hungary. Anna did not have to worry about Natalia.

A week later, James Grant drove her in a jeep to Bremen. She wore her new shoes and carried a new canvas rucksack, in which she had an apple and bread, a change of clothes. James Grant waited with her until it was time to board the plane. She was frightened. Her heart was racing; her mouth was so dry she couldn’t speak. She got on the plane; this was the first time in her life she had ever flown.

Part

Three

In my heart I was opposed to war as to any other kind of murder. . . .

—SOPHIE ANDREEVNA TOLSTOY

Chapter Eighteen

On the road from Hanover to Berlin, James Grant pulled the jeep over to let a convoy of American and British military trucks pass. The trucks carried food, medicine, drums of gasoline, carpentry tools, lumber: everything needed to carry out the occupation and rebuilding of a ruined country. After delivering their cargo they would return to port cities—Ghent and Antwerp—to take on fresh supplies. It would go on like this for months, for years, James said. For as long as it took.

The dust and heat made Natalia feel feverish. Had her fever returned? The nurses said she was well. They had packed a few clothes and toiletries for her in a cardboard box meticulously tied with a length of white string. They walked with her to the hospital door. The door was open, and she’d had no choice but to walk through it.

Hundreds, thousands of people were traveling on foot, on the road and in the fields beside the road. An inchoate dark line against the bright summer sky. At first the scene made no sense to her, or, what was worse, it made the most awful kind of sense, as if the barbarity of the last six years had been distilled in this last moment. Some of the people carried infants in their arms. Some pulled carts or pushed baby carriages or wheelbarrows piled with cook pots, clocks, violins, radios, blankets, a birdcage, and even, in one case, a rocking chair—everything left to them, the meager scrapings. The elderly leaned on their middle-aged daughters’ arms. Small boys ran after the military transport trucks, hands out to catch candy and chewing gum tossed to them by the soldiers.

There were concentration camp survivors, slave laborers, prisoners of war, all going home to Belgium or France or wherever home