Dry Bones (14 page)

Van Hull was in the same position—staring at the fire—as when Dunne fell asleep.

“That was the worst gin I’ve had since Prohibition.” Dunne rubbed his temples.

Van Hull got up and shoveled coal onto the fire. He turned the large earthen flask upside down. “Worst of all, it’s gone.” He walked outside.

Niskolczi went to the window. Morning sky was as drab and uninteresting as the station’s soot-stained ceiling. “You must let me look at that ankle.” He knelt beside Dunne, lifted the leg, and pressed around the ankle with his thumbs. “Any pain?”

“Some. But less than before.”

Framed in the thin round rims of his glasses, Niskolczi’s blue eyes were sunk deep in their sockets. “You should stay off it as much as possible.”

Van Hull came back in and offered Niskolczi the flask. “I filled it with water from the pump. It’ll have to do unless you know the secret of turning water into wine.”

“That kind of magic belongs to priests, not physicians.” Niskolczi swigged the cold, metallic-tasting water.

“When was the last time you had anything to eat?”

“Me?” The oversized coat hung on Dr. Niskolczi limply.

“All of you.” Van Hull swept his hand over the sleeping forms on the floor.

Dr. Niskolczi rubbed his glasses on his sleeve. “I … I really can’t say.”

Van Hull disappeared into the back room and returned with two empty burlap sacks. He handed one to Dr. Niskolczi. “We’re going on a foraging expedition.”

“I’m going, too.” Using the wall for support, Dunne got up. “Give me that crutch.”

Niskolczi shook his head. “It’s better you stay off that ankle.”

“Save your breath, Doctor. His is a breed that resists listening to reason.” Van Hull retrieved the crutch from beside the door. He pulled the .45 from his belt. “The doctor and I will be the point men. You provide the cover.”

Dunne checked the magazine. “Lot of good this will do if the Krauts are around.”

“Beats nothing.” Van Hull went out the door.

Dunne fumbled in his pocket in hopes of finding the cigarette butt that had been there the night before. The lethal pill spilled on the floor.

Niskolczi picked it up and weighed it in his palm. He seemed about to say something but gave it back to Dunne without uttering a word.

They followed Van Hull into the empty, uneven, half-paved, half-cobblestone street. He looked around. “Where do you suppose everyone went, Doctor?”

“There was no one here when we arrived.” Niskolczi buttoned his coat, put on a cap, and pulled down the earflaps. “Or perhaps there was but they were afraid to come near the boxcars because they knew they were filled with the sick.”

They stepped through shattered storefronts. The gutted interiors were stripped of anything salvageable. Random machine-gun spray pockmarked the facades of shops next to the square.

“Nobody can accuse the Germans of not being thorough.” Van Hull turned right onto a lane with four modest cottages, the first three charred hulks, the fourth intact.

“
If
it was the Germans. It could have been the Hlinka Guard punishing the partisans, or perhaps the partisans teaching Monsignor Tiso’s loyalists a lesson. Everyone, it seems, has his motive.”

Van Hull kicked open the door of the last cottage. He summoned Dunne and Niskolczi with a wave of his hand. Past the
small vestibule, to the right, was a bedroom only large enough to hold a double bed and a bureau. The bed was stripped bare. Van Hull looked inside the bureau drawers: empty except for a homey, warm camphor smell, reminder of a time when moths were deemed the prime menace to domestic order.

They left the bedroom and went into the parlor. A richly colored Oriental rug covered the floor. Opposite a red horsehair sofa was an upright piano. Atop it was a lace runner and framed photographs: old woman with an infant in her lap; ebullient bride and tight-lipped bridegroom; the same couple—the man noticeably stouter—in summer clothes, a snow-tipped mountain behind; in front, three children in descending sizes.

Niskolczi, Van Hull, and Dunne stood mute in the middle of the room, as if they’d stepped into a museum exhibit featuring a re-creation of a vanished planet and the comforts, obligations, duties it once orbited around. Niskolczi picked up the porcelain figurine of a ballerina from the table next to the couch. Poised tiptoe, she had one hand extended, the other raised above her head.

He turned it over. “I thought so.” He pointed at the letter D above a crown. “Made in Dresden. A beautiful piece.” As he carefully replaced it, his shoulders began to shake and heave with sobs. He wiped eyes and nose with his sleeve. “I wasn’t sure a place like this still existed.”

Lowering himself onto the piano bench, he caressed the polished ebony surface, the gold phoenix logo and the letters of the manufacturer’s name: Schwimmer. He tapped a key with forefinger, spread long, elegant fingers, and began to play a slow, mournful tune. He lowered his head and sang—almost chanted—in a high, tremulous voice:

Lacrimosa dies illa

Qua resurget ex favilla

Judicandus homo reus.

He stopped and wiped his eyes again. Van Hull put his hand
on his shoulder. “The ‘Lacrimosa’ from Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor. It’s among my favorite pieces of music:

‘Mournful that day / When from the ashes shall rise / A guilty man to be judged.’

“You play beautifully, Doctor. Please, continue.”

“Maybe another day, in some other place.”

As Dunne turned to leave the room, the bottom of his crutch caught on the rug. He stumbled and knocked into the table. The figurine tumbled to the floor and smashed. “Christ Almighty, I’m sorry.”

“Forget it, Fin. We’ve got more important business to attend to.” Van Hull left the parlor and entered the dining room.

Amid the destruction in the surrounding village, itself an insignificant fragment of the ruin that had engulfed countries, peoples, and continents and that had reached some terrible—almost incomprehensible—climax in the process of mass murder outlined by Niskolczi, Dunne knew how preposterous it was to get upset by this inadvertent breakage. But he couldn’t stop gazing at the broken figurine, imagining he might find a way to fix it.

Niskolczi pushed the pieces under the sofa with his shoe. “It is a thing, a beautiful thing, but
only
a thing. It can be remade. A human soul cannot. History masks that truth. History is what happens to us collectively, as peoples, states, nations. Tragedy is what happens to us individually as human beings.”

“It was an accident.”

“Of course. Your intent was not to destroy. But regrets are useless. The only way to repair what is broken is to go on living, to look to the future and see to it that the individual victims are remembered, their tragedies honored, their murderers judged.”

In the next room, Van Hull noisily piled plates, cups, and silverware from the sideboard on the dining room table. “We’ll come back for these. Let’s hope we can find something to use them for.” Niskolczi and Dunne trailed him into the kitchen. They searched
the cabinets and pantry, but the shelves were bare. Beside the back door, above the broom closet, was a padlocked half-cabinet.

“Fin, hand me the forty-five, will you?” Van Hull blew off the lock with a single shot. “Well, what’d you know? The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.” He handed four large cans of beans and three tins of biscuits to Niskolczi, who put them in his sack.

They continued their search. They took the thick coverlets from the beds in the two adjoining bedrooms and piled them by the door along with some pots and pans from the kitchen. “We’ll come back for these, too,” Van Hull said.

The remainder of their rummaging through the village turned up half a sack of potatoes, three loaves of stale bread, a bag of salt, and a jar of apple jam. Van Hull found two sets of workmen’s overalls and jackets in an abandoned woodshop. They stopped in the church on the way back. The altar was stripped, the tabernacle empty, and the benches pushed against the wall, as though the space had been used as a barracks. Van Hull found a box of votive candles in the basement and a half-dozen linen hand towels.

It took two trips to return all they’d scavenged to the station. The gray day grew bitingly cold. Van Hull rebuilt the fire. The rich, comforting smell of cooking summoned Dunne from his nap. Van Hull had softened potatoes in a pot of boiling water, sliced them into pieces, and dropped them into the pan in which he was frying beans. Working expertly on the small surface atop the stove, he transferred the beans and potatoes back to the pot. He wet the stale bread and fried it in the pan. The windows drooled with moisture.

Except for two women and a man stricken with typhus, who moaned in a semidelirious sleep, even the sickest and most lethargic sat up ready to eat. It turned out that the curled figure closest to the door, head covered by a red-and-white kerchief, belonged not to an old woman, as Dunne had thought, but to a frightfully thin yet exceedingly pretty girl of about sixteen. Her green eyes
were alert and purposeful. She took off the kerchief. A crop of tight honey-colored curls had already sprouted on her once-shaved head.

Niskolczi nodded toward her. “Frieda Schwimmer,” he whispered to Dunne. “Her family is the famous piano manufacturer. At fifteen she was regarded as a musical prodigy, a female cellist who’d one day play in all the great concert halls of Europe. Her mother, father, and two older sisters perished in Auschwitz. How much music do you think she has left in her now?”

He turned his attention back to the room, sternly warning them all not to eat too much and to eat slowly. When everyone had finished, Dunne washed out the pot. He filled it with water and put it on the stove to boil. He tied up a mound of coffee in a linen hand towel and dipped it in and out repeatedly, like a tea bag, until the brew was dark. He scooped out a cupful to taste.

Van Hull stood ready with a cup of his own. “How is it?”

“It’s not Maxwell House, but it’s coffee.”

A line of people formed, each with a china cup to use as a scooper. They helped themselves to the crackers and apple jam. The coverlets were spread across the floor, around the stove. Before long most of those in the room were asleep.

Niskolczi put his coat on and in a hushed voice asked Dunne and Van Hull to step outside. The frigid night, windless and starless, was momentarily refreshing.

“What is your plan from here?” Niskolczi pulled his coat close around him.

“To get back home,” Van Hull said.

“That’s an aspiration, not a plan.”

“For now, it’s both.”

“Those inside are too weak to walk anywhere.” Niskolczi glanced at the station. Votive candles flickered in the windows, a substitute starlight. “But you’ve done all you can, and I’m deeply grateful. I’m sure the partisans or Russians will come. It’s only a
question of when. Your duty as soldiers is to get back to your own lines, is it not?”

Dunne shrugged. “I’m not sure all the services see it that way, but the OSS does.”

“The more who survive, the less chance the world can deny or ignore what happened.”

“We’ll figure out a plan as we go along. That’s how we got this far.”

“Your ankle will make it all the harder, no?”

“He’s been doing fine with the crutch.” Van Hull folded his arms and hugged himself, an instinctive but ineffective protection against the cold.

“I can help you get a good start.” Niskolczi led them back to the station and handed them each a votive candle. “Follow me.” They went out the rear door, to a shack atop the siding beside the main track. He stepped in and held up his candle. “It’s an old piece of machinery but still in good working order. It should be most useful.”

Candles aloft, Dunne and Van Hull stood on either side of the four-wheeled wooden handcar. Dunne sat on the flatbed. “One time, at the Catholic Protectory in the Bronx, two of my dorm mates jumped the wall, stole one of these in the Tremont train yards, and rode it all the way to Penn Station. They made a clean getaway.”

Van Hull gripped one of the handles on the cast-iron seesaw bolted to the flatbed and pulled himself up. “I’m not sure this will get us all the way to Penn Station, but if it were the Golden Chariot of Achilles, it couldn’t be more of a godsend.”

Before they retired for the night, Niskolczi produced a pint-size glass bottle. “This is what’s left of the alcohol. Here’s to your journey, gentlemen.
L’chaim.
” He took a swig and passed the bottle to Van Hull. “Do you know what that means?”

“To life.” Van Hull enjoyed an equally generous draft.

“I’ll drink to that.” Dunne matched them.

They finished the bottle on the next round.

The itch on Dunne’s scalp made it hard for him to sleep. He sat by the stove, picking through his hair until he felt the squiggle of a fat louse beneath his fingernail. He catapulted each one into the fire, where it made a small
pop
. He kept at it, tweezing lice between thumb and forefinger and tossing them into the fire. Finally, his eyes began to close. He got beneath a blanket on the floor and fell instantly asleep.

In the morning, they pored over railroad maps from the stationmaster’s desk. There weren’t a lot of choices about which route to take. In a few spots a trunk line was available. Mostly they’d have to travel west and south on the main track. The handcar wasn’t exceedingly heavy—four men could lift it off the track so it wouldn’t delay oncoming trains—but with only two, one with a bum ankle, it would be problematic.

One way or another, they’d ride the handcar as near as they could get to Bratislava—Van Hull fingered it on the map—stopping before the concentration of military traffic would make it almost certain they’d be detained and discovered. From there on, they’d revert to the roads, doing their best to blend in with the swelling flow of those uprooted by the unfolding doom of Germany’s eastern empire.

Dunne and Van Hull donned the jackets and overalls rescued from the woodshed. Niskolczi presented them with two workers’ caps he’d found in an abandoned locker, the railway metal identity badges still attached. He also pointed out that they needed to do something about the American army boots they were wearing, which would give them away immediately. They substituted string for the shoelaces and pared off the leather high-tops, which gave them a suitably derelict look. They packed a portion of fried bread, crackers, and apple jam in a burlap bag.