The Number 7 (25 page)

“Hey, Louisa,” Mr. Franz pulled up a stool and took a seat next to me. He folded his hands in his lap casually. “Could you meet me after school? There's something I want to talk to you about.”

I looked at Gabe waiting by the door. He looked concerned but left me alone in private conversation with our teacher.

“Is everything okay? Is this about my exam? I kept my eyes on my paper—” It was compulsive worry-speak spewing from my mouth.

“Louisa,” Mr. Franz chuckled and held up his hand for me to stop. “Everything's fine. I just want to talk to you about an opportunity that I'd like to share with you. Listen,” he checked his watch, “I don't want to get into it now, and you have to get to your next final. Come and see me before you leave for the day.”

Gabe wanted to go back to the photography room with me after school, but he had to get to Weaver's instead. He was on the schedule until close. “If you need anything, stop by the store.”

I walked out with him to his car, looking around for Greta to let her know I'd be held up for a little while.

At the far end of the parking lot, I spotted Chris sitting on the hood of his Volvo with a group of friends. Without looking, I could feel his eyes following Gabe and me. And the only thing I could do was hope Gabe didn't kiss me. The whole thing made me feel awful but not as awful as I felt when I saw my sister's car.

Someone had scrawled “Brandywine Witch” in thick smudges of red lipstick all over the exterior. The crimson words gleamed on the green paint in blaring juxtaposition. It was horrible. Gabe stood speechless.

“Who—?” he began, but he already knew the perpetrator.

“You know who,” I replied angrily.

“Jenn,” he sighed. “I'll take care of it.”

Mr. Franz was sitting on the corner of his desk when I entered and he motioned for me to take a seat at the closest table.

“A friend of mine has a gallery in Philadelphia. He's asked me to prepare a show for the end of the month.”

“What do you mean ‘prepare'?” It was probably rude of me to interrupt, but I was trying to figure out my role in his story before he got to the end.

“My friend wants me to put together a small portfolio of my work for display. It will run through February. Why do you look confused?”

“I—”

“Believe it or not, Louisa, I'm a photographer, too. Schoolteacher by day, photographer by weekend. Like Spider-Man, but not as cool.”

I stared blankly back at him, not sure what he was getting at.

“Anyway,” Mr. Franz cleared his throat, recovering from his joke. “I graded your project over the break. You did an excellent job, Louisa. Really, it's one of the best photo essays I've seen. I'd like to ask you if you'd be interested in showing it with my work at the gallery. Occasionally, I like to share my students' work alongside my own. You'd get full ownership of your project, of course. I'm not trying to show it as a piece of mine. I just thought it'd be nice to show some student work at the gallery too, and yours is exceptional.”

For a moment, I only stared at my teacher as he leaned back casually with arms crossed, waiting for my answer. And then it finally began sinking in. My photography project would be on display at a real art gallery in Philadelphia. I shook my head and opened my eyes wide with elation.

“Yes! I'd love to!”

“I'd understand if you had some hesitation. Your project was intimate and special . . .”

I immediately thought back to the snapshots I'd included of my mother and smiled.

“Mr. Franz,” I said graciously, “I'd be honored to show my work next to yours.”

“Great!” He clapped his hands together. “I'll send you the details about when and where as the time gets closer.”

I gathered my things and started heading for the door, feeling euphoric.

“Oh, and Louisa?”

I stopped in the doorway and turned back to face my beaming teacher.

“You got an A.”

Gerhard reported for his day's work earlier than necessary, left his engine clean, and kept a strict adherence to departure and arrival times. He was compulsive with his pocket watch and obsessive about time. The first thing he did before getting out of bed each morning was sit up, swing his legs over the side of his mattress, and wind his watch, cleaning its face with an old cloth and polishing the gold casing.

At the train station, Gerhard performed his usual routine. He signed in. He picked up the key for his train, engine car Number 7. He drank a cup of tea and tried to believe it was coffee. Trelleborg Station had a single office. It was actually a converted broom closet nestled in the back alongside the toilet. On the wall hung a calendar, a telephone, and a thorough chart of the train lines and timetables. Gerhard had visited this office only three times: the first when he was hired as a mechanic at the age of sixteen, again when Kjell promoted him to steam conductor two years later, and the last time on a warm Wednesday in June 1940.

Gerhard stood in the office's doorway and noticed how tired Kjell looked. The heat and humidity lingered like thick smoke in the small room, and the old man constantly wiped his forehead with a dirty rag.

“You wanted to see me?”
What was this all about?

“Yes. Right.” The two men stood looking at each other, both visibly uncomfortable. “Let's take a walk,” Kjell finally suggested. “Tea?”

“
Nej, tack.
No, thanks.”

The older man ran his dirty hands up and down the front of his vest, wiping dirt and grease on his chest. Gerhard knew that his employer missed the hard labor of the men beneath him. He wore regret openly on his face. Kjell was never meant to wear a suit. Strangers to the station would never guess he directed it all.

He led Gerhard to the station platform where two young boys sat and waited for the 7:10 to Malmö. Kjell took a deep breath and looked around, lost as to what to say next.

“Let's go look at your Number 7.”

When they reached the train, Kjell at last turned to his young worker. A lock of white hair fell loosely onto his forehead.

“Listen, Gerhard, you're one of my best conductors. You're dedicated to what we do here. I've noticed how, for the most part, you keep to yourself.”

Gerhard nodded in agreement. Other than speak with Robert, his assistant, Gerhard mostly kept to himself.

“Something's come to Trelleborg, something I've been put in charge of directing. And I'm going to ask you to assist me because I trust you. You're earnest and hardworking, and you don't meddle with the things the other boys do.” Kjell spoke slowly and lifted his hand to shield the sun from his eyes. The creases of his forehead and the cracks around his eyes brimmed with dirt. A single drip of sweat ran from his brow to his chin, streaking a line of soot as it rolled. Gerhard said nothing.

“I've been asked to set aside a daily train, a round trip route from here to Kornsjø. We'll transport German troops each week across the Norwegian border. I want you to run it. I want you to run it and I want you to keep your mouth shut about it. Say nothing to no one. If anyone asks, direct him to me. You understand what I'm asking, don't you?”

Gerhard nodded stoically. He'd do anything for Kjell; he'd built his life around following orders.

“Good.”

Later that morning, Robert, Gerhard's young apprentice responsible for stoking the coal in the firebox, leaned against their engine car and rolled a cigarette as Gerhard approached.

“Morning, Robert.”

“Morning, Gerhard.” The young boy lit his cigarette and inhaled. “Nice weather.”

Gerhard agreed.

“The switch at mile two is sticking. They've got men out there trying to grease it up,” Robert informed him.

“Sounds good.” Gerhard began his habitual inspection of the Number 7. He looked for flaws: divots in the wheels, loose screws, obstructions, jams, or rust. As usual, his train looked perfect—the epitome of human ingenuity in raw steel.

“Did you hear about the boat from Germany?”

Gerhard looked up at Robert briefly before turning back to his work. He'd heard nothing.

“It wasn't in the papers, but everyone down at the docks is talking about it. I was down there last night.”

Robert was an Artful Dodger: too young to know he was too young to know it all.

“Some Germans tried to forge the 100 kilometers across the border, but their raft sunk. They all drowned. All but one. The only survivor made it to shore around four o'clock this morning, mumbling nonsense. The boys and I couldn't really make out most of it. Said he'd been trying to escape from Sassnitz. Said there had been twelve of them.” Robert took one last long drag on his cigarette. “You should have seen this guy. Skin and bones. Couldn't have weighed more than forty-five kilos. Anyway, the old man kept crying the same word:
Vernichtung. Vernichtung.
Do you speak German, Gerhard?”

“Not well enough.”

“Me either. So I asked a guy.” Robert paused and looked beyond Gerhard to where the distant land met the sky. “It means extermination.”

The morning of the first transfer was electric. The sky was a muted, washed-out purple—the color of veins under a pale forearm—and a strangeness hung in the air. White noise? Gerhard arrived at the station early and met Robert on the tracks. His young companion was restless; it was obvious he knew what they were about to do. Gerhard suspected all the men at the station knew what was going on. How could they not?

It made Gerhard nervous, and he wanted to tell Robert to settle down. The wind whipped the boy's hair back and forth across his forehead as he struggled to lick a cigarette paper. The sun rose slowly in the sky like a white slab of damp clay.

The German train arrived from the shipyard quietly, crawling its way onto the foreign soil as if it knew it wasn't supposed to be there. This train was a sly fox in a chicken coop. Gerhard didn't like it.

He never forgot the first face he saw from behind a little window in one of the cars. It was small and white and round, surrounded by shadows. The soldiers crammed into the cars, standing in the pitch dark. They appeared innocent and naïve. Some looked like children. They certainly didn't resemble the beasts Gerhard had imagined them to be.

There was a thirty-minute pause, and then a shift in energy as the car doors opened and men came stepping out into the muddy rail yard. They stretched their legs, lit cigarettes, and chuckled in low murmurs to each other. He'd been told they were noncombatants, that they were there to provide aid to injured soldiers on the Norwegian border, but Gerhard knew by looking at them that they were military. And the Nazis themselves didn't seem so concerned with maintaining the ruse.

The soldiers were deliberate and calculating in their movements. They worked as a single force, and Gerhard found them stronger and more powerful than any group he had ever seen. There didn't seem to be an individual heartbeat among them; there was only one living, breathing beast.

After the brief respite, the soldiers transferred onto Gerhard's cars while he stood watch. A few young soldiers glanced his way and they locked eyes, questioning each other silently.

Once they'd all boarded, Robert smiled somberly toward Gerhard and held a small flask up in mocking jest. “Heil Hitler,” the young fireman whispered, and he lifted the flask to his lips.

In the middle of the night, I woke up in a cold sweat. I had been dreaming of Grandmother. We sat in the slave graveyard Dad had shown Greta and me. Grandmother sat on a beautifully woven blanket in the middle of the grass and I lay with my head in her lap as she read from a book. She was reciting Grandfather's story to me, and as she spoke, the stories were played out like a marionette show in front of my eyes. The characters hung from strings: Gerhard and Lasse, Åsa and Leif, Anna, and Robert. Their movements were jerky and uncoordinated.

And then, all of a sudden, Grandma stopped reading and the puppets fell into a lifeless heap on the floor. “The End.” Grandma shut the book, shrugged her shoulders apologetically, and folded her hands.

“But I don't understand.” I began to panic. “What happens?” I looked at the stage where the puppets lay still.

“It's what happens, Louisa.” Grandmother reached down and stroked my hair, trying to ease my alarm. “It ends.”

“But what about me? What about Dad?” I asked anxiously.

“Your dad? What does he know about anything? He ran away, remember?”

“He wants to know!” I shouted at her, but she only stared sympathetically back at me, as if I wouldn't face the truth. And I suddenly realized I didn't know
what
the truth was. “I think he wants to know.”

“Then tell him,” she whispered.

“Tell him what?”

“The end,” she smiled sadly.

And then I awoke. I walked to the hallway bathroom and drank a glass of water from the faucet. It tasted metallic. I stared at my reflection in the mirror. For a split second I could have sworn I saw Grandmother's face staring back at me. She flashed quickly into my eyes—from
behind
my eyes, her face replacing mine—but then she was gone. I splashed water onto my cheeks and rubbed the mirror with a wet hand. Was I chasing her or she me?

The story is coming to an end
, I thought. Grandmother had been calling me for two months, and I finally felt closer to discovering the mystery. But I couldn't see the conclusion. I leaned on the sink and ran my fingers through my hair in frustration.
Think, think, think. What am I supposed to do? I have this story that no one seems to know but me, and I don't know what to do with it. Do I tell Dad? Won't it be painful for him to hear? Do I really want to be responsible for that pain?
I stood under the fluorescent lights for five minutes in a sleepy stupor, and then a truly horrific thought came to me:
What happens when the phone calls stop?