“You were safe, Sarah of Elsengrund. On the bloody ferry. What were you thinking?” he whispered with a deliberate intensity.
Sarah wondered this herself. One reason stood out.
“They weren’t going to let you go, were they? I know what they do to you when they get you.”
“I told you to trust no one.”
“Yes, you did.”
“This is like carrying an ox.”
“You’re doing fine.”
“You’re far too big. No one carries a ten-year-old like this.” Sarah slipped off his hip. After an awkward moment she took his hand.
“Like this,” she said. His hand was soft. Not a workman’s hands.
“Why?” he asked after a pause.
Sarah looked at her shoes, scuffed, scratched and muddy. She wasn’t sure why. She had acted without thinking about it. A part of her had spotted something hunted, someone lost like her. He was right, she had been safe. But she hadn’t felt safe at all. She wondered how she felt now.
“My father had an old book, written a long time ago, that said if your kingdom is being threatened by another…you need to…find out who threatens them.”
The man snorted. “‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’. Yes, the Arabs say that as well.” Sarah could feel him tugging on her hand as he walked faster. “You’ve read The Arthashastra? An ancient manual on being a king? What does your father do?”
“I don’t know. He left lots of books like that when he went.” Sarah suddenly felt very vulnerable. “Where are we going?”
“Stadtbahnhof, the railway station. It’s crawling with the SS, but since I can’t get out of town by ferry, that’s the best option. Now. Again.” His voice was steady, but Sarah felt the nervous tug on her hand. They were taking the backstreets, crossing and re-crossing the road so he could glance behind them.
Feed off your leading man. Make his emotions trigger yours. If he’s good, he’ll be doing the same. Sarah looked up at the man, his face a mask pulled too tight at the corners, his blue eyes now glacial between movements. If he’s not, you have to be twice as powerful, twice as good, twice as beautiful. You have to be a distraction. Sarah began to swing her arms and hum to herself. The man stopped.
“What are you doing?” He looked down at her.
“I’m being a little girl. Why, who are you being?”
After a moment he snorted and walked on, allowing his arm to be rocked from side to side.
They rounded a corner and emerged into a wide, open space where the railway station waited, an imposing building decorated in lurid yellow and white.
“Looks like an Apfelkuchen covered in lines of cream.” She sighed.
“That’s what you see? Apple cake? Not the military trucks and staff cars? The SS guards?”
“I haven’t eaten in a long time.”
Sarah stared at the tabletop and ran her fingers along the patterns. She couldn’t trust herself not to watch the black uniformed figures walking about outside the glass. Their smudgy reflections drifted from one side of the table to the other, like storm clouds gathering over the countryside on a close summer evening.
A cup and saucer slid in front of her. She looked down at white froth and frowned before leaning in to sniff. There was a glorious golden coffee smell cradled in the aroma of hot milk.
“Oh,” she chirped. “Melange?”
He shook his head. “No, not Viennese. Italian. Try it.”
She put her hands around the scalding cup and raised it to her lips, letting the warm updraught touch her face. Her nose brushed through the froth, but it gave like soap suds and vanished, popping in a million tiny crackles. The rich, dark liquid flowed through it and cooled as it tore the bubbles apart and slid into her mouth. Both sweet and bitter, sharp and comforting, invigorating and calming like strong arms carrying you through a storm. Electric lights flickered into life in the rooms of her mind. Her aches and pains vanished as if the bruises and the scratches had just melted away.
“Oh my God.” She chuckled, tapping her chest with both hands. “That’s…that’s…amazing.” The man leaned in and made a quieting motion with his fingers. “Oh, sorry,” she gasped covering her mouth, eyes smiling wide. One last hiccupped squeak escaped before she whispered, “Sorry, sorry, sorry…” The plump bald man behind the counter laughed as he polished a glass and smiled beatifically at Sarah.
“You can add sugar of course, but I rather dread to think what that might lead to,” said the man as he stirred his coffee. “Espresso is coffee brewed under intense pressure. Then you add the heated milk and foam to make cappuccino. It’s a true art form.”
“I want another one of these,” she babbled, and jerked the empty cup from side to side.
He shook his head as he passed a plate across the table. “Let’s see how that one works first. Here, eat the train station.”
She fell upon the apple cake and began stuffing the flaky pastry into her mouth with warm applesauce fingers. The barman laughed again from behind his shiny brass pipes and went to serve a customer. Behind him was a painting of a bald man in a funny hat thrusting his jaw and dimpled chin into the air, like a clown imitating someone powerful. Men who wanted to look like that, Sarah thought distractedly, were probably trouble.
“Scho,” she mumbled, mouth full, crumbs escaping from the corners. “You haff a planf?”
Sarah felt…not safe, exactly, but she didn’t feel alone. The cafe’s steamy warmth had enveloped her, and the coffee, the cappuccino, was happily tingling down her arms and making her heart feel strong. Right now, when deep down she knew she had nothing to lose, nowhere to go, nothing to hope for, she felt strangely liberated. It was as if she had stayed on the ferry after all.
“I’m taking a train to Stuttgart. You, you’ve no papers, you look like you slept in a bush and you smell like vomit.” He hid his mouth with his cup and his eyes were unreadable.
“Then again…” Sarah swallowed the cake. “They aren’t actually looking for me, are they? So, like I said, you have a plan?”
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen,” she said with great emphasis.
He gave his snort. “That explains a lot. You look eleven at best.”
“What’s your name?”
“Keep calling me Vati.”
“Plan,” she repeated. The cafe hissed and clinked around them. The distant trains rasped and rumbled under the muttered conversation. The barman began to sing, a basso, tuneless growl of lost love. A seagull squarked from outside as if in answer. The man’s eyes, so beautiful, so blue, would have been cold had their intent not been so obviously shuttered, like a summerhouse in winter.
He downed the dregs of his coffee and lit a cigarette in one swift motion. He held his matches up between his first and second fingers.
“What is this?” he said.
“A book of matches,” Sarah replied, avoiding the acrid smoke.
“Yes and no.” He opened the book and bent the cardboard back away from the flat, wooden matches. He then slid the cigarette, filter first, between the two so the lit end stuck out. He then closed the matchbook and dropped it into an ashtray. “Okay, now what is it?”
To Sarah, it was just a square of coloured card with a long white tube emerging from one end.
“It’s a very small gun?” she ventured with a smile.
He tutted and stood up. “You think about it.” He walked over to the bar and began to order something.
Sarah watched the lit end of the cigarette slowly consume itself. The grey curling smoke looped upwards and seemed to follow her as she moved away from it. The white tube got shorter. The glowing embers crept closer to the card.
“So?” He stooped over the table and gathered his things.
“It’s a firecracker. It burns down, lights the card, the matches catch fire.” She smiled up at him, but he didn’t look at her.
“Very good. Let’s go.”
“What’s the plan?”
“Just do what you do.” He was already halfway to the door. Sarah stood and followed, brushing flakes of cake onto the floor.
“Grazie mille!” She smiled at the man behind the counter, who grinned broadly.
“Prego. Hey, beautiful, what happened to your pretty face?” he continued in Italian.
“Oh, I’m such a klutz.” She laughed, touching her bruised nose as she walked through the doorway. Her companion let the door close behind her.
“You know, as a Jewish fugitive, you might want to avoid using Yiddish words. Just a thought.” The scorn dripped through every word.
Dumme Schlampe, thought Sarah. She looked back through the glass. Nobody seemed to have noticed. Get on with the show. Nobody notices anything. Sometimes you wonder why you’re even up there. She skipped after the man and began to hum.
“And as you’re supposed to be from Bavaria you might want to ah-void that Parisian lilt that your accent acquires every time you think you’re being funny. Just…a…th—”
“Yes, thank you, Fräulein Akzentpolizei.”
“Oh, I like that, I like being the accent police. You did it again, by the way.”
He stopped next to a litter bin and began to drop things from his bag into it. “So tell me what you see.”
Sarah turned towards the platform.
“Soldiers checking everyone’s papers. No ordinary Bahnschutzpolizei, these. They think a lot of themselves, like the man in the painting. That’s the Schutzstaffel, the SS?” The man gave a positive grunt as he busied himself behind her. “But they aren’t in charge. There are two men in long coats by the ticket office and the soldiers keep looking at them like they need to be told what to do.”
“Gestapo. Secret police. Very good,” he said next to her. “You going to see me off, then?”
“See you off?” She trailed after him. “What does that mean?”
He did not slow his pace. “Keep up, I’m late,” he called over his shoulder.
Confusion gave way to concern and something unpleasant awoke in Sarah’s stomach. She sped up and tried to get in front of him. Was he intending to leave her here after all that? Sarah looked at the last few hours and saw how shallow this link between them really was.
“What are we doing?” She began to feel cheated.
“Come along.”
“What…”
“Papers, please.” The guards were on top of them. There was a tall officer in an immaculate dark uniform, his fox-like features topped by a spotless peaked cap and a shining death’s-head badge. It made his skin look too pale, like he himself was close to death. He was flanked on both sides by soldiers affecting a bored arrogance but with machine guns gripped tightly in their hands. Sarah looked up at the man at her side as the SS officer looked at his papers. His face was impassive, even irritated. The shutters were closed. He was going to be fine. He knew it.
“What are we doing?” she whispered.
“Not now, Ursula, be a good girl.” He didn’t even look at her.
“Herr Neuberger. You work at the Zeppelin plant?” The officer’s accent wasn’t local.
“Yes.”
“And what do you do there?”
“As you well know, I’m not allowed to talk about it.” Authority. Arrogance.
“Is that so?” The officer swallowed. It was like a snake passing a bird. He pushed the pages of the booklet back and forth, not really reading them. “And where are you going? If, of course, you can talk about that?” He smiled. It was a sickly thing, like a stillborn kitten. He put it away again.
“Stuttgart for a meeting, and no, I can’t talk about that, either.”
He was going without her. After everything she did, he was going without her. The misery welled up inside her and she didn’t even try to stop it.
“Stuttgart! Stuttgart? Without me?” she shouted, her foot involuntarily stamping.
Everybody looked at her. The SS officer. The guards. The other passengers. Her companion, a look of injured innocence on his face.
A train whistle punctuated the illusion of silence and the noise of the engine rose behind it. For an instant, Sarah saw in his eyes just the tiniest flicker of recognition, the slightest flash of a message. Go on.
“Again? Stuttgart again? Oh, Vati, how long will you be gone this time? It’s just not fair!”
“Now, Ursula, behave. It’s not for long and then I won’t have to go again…”
“That’s what you said last time.” Sarah raised her voice over the incoming train and folded her arms.
“Now stop. We have one ticket, you aren’t coming and that’s final.”
“Herr…” the officer tried to interject.
“Vati, no. Vati, don’t go. You promised. No more trips.” Her arms swung petulantly.
“That’s enough, Ursula. There’s the train, now are you coming to see me off or not?” He held out his hand to the officer. “My papers, please.” The carriages ground to a halt in a fizzle of noisy steam. The officer had to shout over it.
“Where are her papers?”
“What?” Exasperated disbelief.
“Vati…”
“Her papers?” A queue had formed behind them.
“She doesn’t need papers. She’s a child.”
“For the train,” the officer said.
“She’s not going anywhere. Look, that’s my train. Papers?” He reached out his hand and stepped towards the platform. Sarah grabbed his outstretched hand and pulled back on it.
“No, Vati, don’t go…” Sarah began to cry. Think about the car… No, think about being left behind.
“Ursula, stop. Do as you’re told.” He snatched his hand clear and grabbed his ID out of the officer’s hand, before seizing Sarah’s arm.
“Please, Herr Neuberger…” The officer found himself stepping back to avoid being pushed over. He gestured to the guards. “Bäcker, go with him.”
They walked onto the platform. Sarah allowed herself to be half-dragged towards the train, sobbing loudly, before they stopped next to the carriage door. One of the guards gingerly followed the scene. The man stooped and wrapped his arms around Sarah.
“Wait for it,” he whispered. “Any second now.”
“Wait for what?” Sarah tightened her grip on him, utterly lost.
The train whistle went, deafeningly close. He stood and climbed into the carriage. He turned and leaned through the open door.
“Home to Mutti now. Go on.” The train shivered and rocked gently. Sarah looked up into his eyes. The stern irritation vanished and the cool blue pools smiled at her. Now, they said.
The train started to move. Sarah took a half step to her left. Then another. She could see the guard reflected in the metal and glass, standing about three metres away. She looked back up into the man’s eyes. What? She stared. He rolled his eyes and looked at his watch.
The flash lit up the side of the carriage, silhouetting Sarah and the guard for an instant before the scalding wind pushed her forward. She fell, then two hands grabbed the lapels of her coat and lifted her in one clean motion in through the moving door.
Behind her the fireball burned itself out in the rafters of the ticket hall, having set light to everything within five metres of the litter bin. There was smoke, screaming, chaos. The platform receded as the train accelerated and the guard picked himself up off the ground.
Sarah was lowered carefully to the floor and the train door closed behind her.
“I obviously need to work on my timing,” he said, smiling, “but I thought that went pretty well.”