Of course, here the bored kitchen hands didn’t ask for any money. Except to bet with, you hardly needed cash in the refugee camp. Marian couldn’t remember the last time she’d spent any-which was good, because she had so little.
Tabakman came in a few minutes after she did. She waved. He touched the brim of his tweed cap, filled his own tray, and came over to sit across the table (plywood over sawhorses) from her. The sausage was bound to have pork in it, if it held any real meat at all. As she’d seen, he didn’t let that bother him. If he’d kept kosher before Auschwitz, he hadn’t since.
“How are you?” he asked politely.
Marian shrugged. “I’m here. My husband’s dead. My house burned up. Otherwise, I’m not too bad.”
“I know what you mean,” he said, and she found herself nodding. If anyone did, he would. “Sooner or later, though, we get out. Life starts over. We get on with it again.”
Later, Marian suspected. She didn’t presume to argue with him, though. He’d used that kind of going from one day on to the next to live through Auschwitz. This wasn’t a death camp. It was only a boring, soul-deadening one.
He took a sip of the coffee. Bad as it was, he drank it with the air of a man used to worse. And no doubt he was. Then he said, “So I was thinking-” and broke off more abruptly than he was in the habit of doing.
When he didn’t go on without outside prompting, Marian gave him some: “Yes?”
“So I was thinking-” He bogged down again. This time, though, with the air of a man remembering he’d used grenades against his German tormentors before they caught him (which he had), he managed to go on on his own: “So I was thinking, maybe you and Linda could come with me to the moving pictures Friday night?”
Of all the things Marian had looked for, being asked out on what amounted to a date came low on the list. It wouldn’t be much of a date, not with a five-year-old along. She wasn’t sure she was ready for even that much. But Fayvl Tabakman looked more frightened than he would have if one of those camp doctors aimed an index finger at him like a rifle. If she told him no, would he ever have the nerve to speak to her again? Or would she lose the one friend here she was sure she had?
“We can do that,” she said, and then, “Linda likes you, you know.”
It wasn’t quite I like you, you know, but it seemed to come close enough. “Good,” Tabakman said. “That’s good. Her I also like. So we do that, then.” He gulped more coffee. That way, he didn’t need to keep talking. How nervous had he been, asking her?
She had to do the good-byes herself, the way she had with Linda. Then, when she was on her way back to the Studebaker she called home, the camp’s loudspeakers came to rusty-sounding life: “Marian Staley! Please report to the administrative center immediately! Marian Staley! Please report to the administrative center immediately!”
“Christ!” Fear filled Marian. The last time they’d summoned her to the administrative tent, it was to tell her the Russians had killed Bill. What horrible news were they going to hit her with now?
Like anyone in Camp Nowhere with an ounce of sense, she stayed away from the people who ran the place as much as she could. The less they noticed you, the better. But she had no trouble finding it. A big flag flew from a tall flagpole in front of the tent. That flagpole was one of the first things that had gone up here.
Typewriters spat machine-gun bursts of noise. Adding machines clunked-a chugging generator powered them. The twentieth century was alive and well here. Marian gave her name to a clerk who finally looked up from whatever he was doing.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “You need to see Mr. Simmons, in accounting.”
“I do?” she said. “Why?”
Instead of answering, the clerk took her to Mr. Simmons, who looked more like an auto mechanic than an accountant. He had an envelope on his desk. “This is the government life insurance policy for your late husband, Mrs. Staley,” he said. “The check is in the amount of fifteen thousand dollars. Less than his brave service deserves, but the amount prescribed by law.”
They’d told her about this when they told her Bill was gone. They’d told her, and she’d forgotten. You could live for two or three years on $15,000. Or you could buy a house free and clear, with money left over. You didn’t have to sleep and live in your car for the rest of your days.
Life starts over. We get on with it again. Fayvl Tabakman’s words echoed in her head. He was right. Because he was, she didn’t think she’d see the movie with him after all.
–
The train wheezed to a stop. Luisa Hozzel wasn’t sure where she was-not which country, not which continent. She’d had no idea a train ride could take so long. She’d never been so hungry, so thirsty, so filthy, so exhausted, in all her life.
She’d had to get off only once after they shoved her aboard in Fulda: at a place with a name she couldn’t pronounce but that sounded like a sneeze with a head full of snot. Herded by guards with machine pistols and snarling dogs-or maybe they were wolves; she couldn’t have proved otherwise-she got into a truck. She couldn’t see much out the back. What she could see looked horrible. Maybe she was crossing land an A-bomb had flattened. She was too miserable too many other ways to care much.
She got into another train on the far side. This time, she rode in a jammed freight car, not a jammed passenger car. It made less difference than she’d imagined it would. She hadn’t been able to see out of the passenger car, either, not with bars and shutters over the window.
Somebody-a guard, no doubt-opened the bar that secured the door. Air and light came in. Luisa hadn’t had much of either lately. She blinked against the glare, but inhaled gratefully. The smell of a pine forest beat the devil out of her own stink, that of all the other women crammed in here with her, and the reek of the slops buckets, which had long since overflowed.
She could see pine trees, too, uncounted swarms of them, darker and gloomier than the ones she’d known in Germany. The only buildings she could see were made from the trunks of some of those same pines.
More guards with machine pistols stood on the siding. They screamed at the confused new arrivals in Russian. No one in the car spoke the language, or had admitted she did. Even when the guards gestured with their weapons, no one seemed eager to come out. Unlike the halt at the smashed city, this-camp?-in the middle of the vast forest was all too plainly the last stop.
Then someone realized that they’d come from beyond the boundaries of the Soviet Union. A plump man in a better-quality uniform strode up to the freight car and bellowed, “Raus! Raus sofort!”
Out! Out right now! Luisa couldn’t very well misunderstand him. She also didn’t dare misunderstand him. She had little experience of Russian guards, but she could imagine what would happen if she were a Jew with SS men roaring at her like that and she didn’t do what they said. She’d never dreamt living under Hitler would give her practice for Stalin, but there you were.
And here she was. Wherever here was.
She and the other women in there stumbled out and stood swaying in front of the car. All of them did but one. When a guard went in to get her out, too, he found she was dead. He heaved out the body. It lay on the muddy ground, staring up sightlessly at the gray-blue sky.
The German-speaking officer made a note on a scratch pad. He didn’t care whether people got here alive or dead. He just wanted to make sure nothing confused his count from each car.