The Postmistress (34 page)

The needle skittered to the end of the disk and the
sh, sh, sh
spun around the little room. She sat up and pulled the arm off, flipped it over, and set the needle down on the other side.

There was the old man speaking in broken, halting English,
I looked and saw my wife there on the stairs. She was so
—he coughed, and Frankie heard herself murmur something to him—
wanted
. Frankie remembered the man had been sitting alone at the station.
They woke us up
, a woman explained in French, and
I had no time to get food for my boys
.
Your name? My name is Hannah Moser—

The voices were old and young, soft and round, and rasping, brittle, thirsty.
Just like that,
her voice instructed somebody. They spoke languages Frankie didn’t know, hadn’t heard ever spoken, mountain Hungarian, Serb, Croat, thick tongues and slivering syllables peeling off into the air as Frankie listened through disk after disk. Three minutes to a side. Most said their names. There was a child who couldn’t say it—every time she asked, he started and burst into fits of laughter, and Frankie’s laugh was on there, too, go on, she’d giggle, try again,
Pet
—and then he was off.

She set the needle down on the last disk, the one she had recorded on top of what was already there, and the first seconds of sound—
Jaspar, I am, Greta, went looking for him, what is? The smallest house at the end of the block was marked but I, Ruth, Sebastian, am
—sprang out at her like some mad creature.

She sat there listening to the weird chaos of that last disk—
Hannah, I am, non, non j’ai dit, C’est quoi, ça? Ein Kartoffel. No!—
voice replacing voice, high and low and insisting one on top of the other. Human voices chasing each other into the air, only to be followed finally by the
shh shh
of the machine, as she listened to the silence overtaking the men and the women, the giggling children. She had ridden with them, she had stood in lines, she had watched them pass through doors and climb back on trains.
Merci, Mademoiselle
, they had said.
De rien,
she’d said. Just the month before last.

23.

Frankie woke up, her heart slamming against her chest. Someone had been screaming, and after a minute she realized it was her. Her throat was sore and dry. She pulled her knees up under the covers, staring into the mirror over the bureau at the foot of the bed. A woman stared back at her whose white face seemed to have no eyes. Frankie blinked slowly twice and the woman’s scattered face crept back into place. She slid her cigarettes and her lighter off the night table and pulled the pillow up higher behind her back, her heart still pounding.

She had the sense of having to climb a long way back up to the world. The shade hung still. The light in the room was softer. She looked over at the clock and saw she had slept far into the afternoon. She heard women’s voices out on one of the porches and she lay there a little, with her eyes closed, listening without hearing what they said. She opened her eyes. All right. She swung her legs off the bed and stretched.

From the end of her bed she could see straight through the living room to the door onto the front porch, where someone was sitting in one of her chairs. She stood up quietly and went to the window, but the high back of the white slat chair kept whoever it was completely hidden. She pushed open the screen door.

The German man from the café rose from the chair. He pulled off his hat and nodded at her. He smelled faintly of turpentine.

“Hello.” She was wary.

“Are you all right?”

“What do you mean?” She frowned.

“You were screaming.”

She didn’t answer.

“I heard you screaming.” He looked at a spot on the door behind her head, as though to give her privacy. “From my ladder.” He turned and pointed to the big house past the cottages.

“Come in, why don’t you?” she said quietly.

“No.” He dropped his gaze back down to her.

“All right,” she said, and sank into one of the chairs, leaving him standing above her.

“You were frightened.” He meant it as a question, she realized. And nodded. And pointed him into the other chair.

“It was a dream. A nightmare.”

“From Germany?”

“What?”

“You were in Europe,” he said. “That’s what they are saying in town.”

She nodded.

He sat down abruptly in the chair beside her.

“Did you just get out of Germany?” Frankie said quietly, her eyes on him.

“Austria,” he nodded. “In April.”

The worn fabric of his coat caught the afternoon sun in its sheen. His hands shoved in his pockets, bent forward, he might have been any one of the men who had leaned in to her microphone and said his name. He was so familiar, just then; he seemed more real than anyone she’d met since coming home.

She reached to touch the sleeve of his coat. “Come,” she said to him. “I want you to hear something.”

Without waiting to see if he followed, Frankie stood up and went inside, took the last disk off the gramophone, and searched through the pile to find the one with Thomas on it. Then she flicked the knob and the disk jerked and began to turn, slowly, forward. She hooked her pinky under the arm of the needle and nudged it carefully over and set it down toward the middle of the side.

Her voice came across first.
“Speak here,”
she said,
“speak into the machine.”

There was a space on the recording where Frankie had nodded in answer. His voice came through a little stronger, as though he’d moved closer.
“I am Thomas Kleinmann. I come from Austria,”
and he cleared his throat, “
in the mountains a
—”

Otto had come inside and stood in the doorway. The two of them listened to Thomas’s voice all the way to the end, Otto still standing, and when the disk ran out, Otto came all the way in, dropping his hat on the chair. He went over to Frankie, where he stopped, looking at the gramophone.

“There are more?”

She nodded. He sat down. Carefully, she flipped the disk to the other side and set the needle down. Then she brought the bottle and two glasses and sank down onto the sofa, and they listened past the second disk into the third and then the fourth. When the second side of that one finished, Otto stood, polite as a parson, lifting the arm off the disk, and replaced it with the next. And then the next.

I am not making these people up, Frankie thought, as voice after voice filled the room. Here we are. Here.
I am Marta
, a woman was saying.
I have just left Gurs.

Otto bolted out of his chair, lifted the needle, and set it gently down again, and the woman’s voice slurred out and caught itself, speeding forward in nearly flawless English—
I am Marta. I have just left Gurs.

Her voice stopped.

Thank you,
Frankie’s voice slid out.

Otto didn’t move. He stared at the disk going around and around, his head bowed, his hands hanging loose from the ends of his sleeves.

Frankie switched the knob on the machine to stop the disk, her heart pounding.

“My wife,” he said finally. “She is there. At Gurs.”

ACROSS THE TWO short lawns, where she stood in her kitchen window, Emma dropped her hand. She had been about to knock. She had watched the two of them in the chairs, staring at the water in front of them, talking. She had watched long enough to want to break in, and she had lifted her hand when the woman had reached out and touched Otto, and now he looked as though he might break down. And the woman had not taken her hand from his arm. Emma felt a knock inside her, so strong and so sudden, it was like a visitation, like an angel come to say
Now
. She caught her breath. The woman filled her with a vague uneasy dread, sitting over there with her long legs and her scarf and sunglasses; now the two of them, their heads tipped toward each other, not speaking, seemed to her like the pictures of angels weeping, one in an overcoat, the other in a blouse, overlooking, understanding what was coming. What was coming to her.

Her eye rested on the framed photograph on the windowsill of her father standing behind her mother who was sitting in a chair, holding her. She reached toward it and picked it up. There
had
been someone who held her, someone who watched over her—here was the proof. She looked at the faces of her parents, turned away from the camera—and from her now—staring instead at their baby. She took a long breath. Beside the photograph of Will, taken at his graduation from medical school, she set her own down again. She turned the frames slightly toward each other, as though to introduce them. She looked back up. But the angels had left the porch.

For an hour, Emma watched out her window facing the cottage into which Otto had disappeared, as though whatever they did inside had somehow to do with her. As though, when they came out at last, they would come out with something for her.

But when the two of them did indeed emerge onto the little porch and Otto pointed out Emma’s own house to the woman, Emma was suddenly frightened. She turned from the window and hurried down the hall to the front of the house, meaning to close the door, meaning to lock it, to go upstairs and sit on the bed and let them pass her by.

They were already coming through the gate at the bottom of the garden and, seeing her frozen behind the screen door, Otto waved.

“Emma!” he cried.

Go away!
She wanted to shout back.
Go away.
Instead, she pushed open the screen door and stood watching the two of them come up the path toward her.

“Emma!” She had never seen Otto excited. “Emma, here is someone from over there. Here is someone who has been in France.”

“France?” Emma looked at Otto blankly and then shifted to the woman who seemed stalled there at the bottom of her stairs. She looked ill.

“She has been there. She has records.”

“Yes,” Frankie said, her mouth gone dry. “Well.”

“Tell Emma what you told me,” Otto said to her.

Emma looked down at him swiftly. “About what?”

“There was a release of refugees out of Gurs.” Frankie forced one word after the next. “Sometime last month.”

Otto nodded up at Emma, urgent. “Hear?”

Emma frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“My Anna is not at Gurs, perhaps.” Otto’s excitement made Frankie look away. “That is why she is not writing letters. She is not there. And Miss Bard says she has recorded some of these women. There may be Anna in her machine,” he pressed.

“Hello.” The woman at the bottom of Emma’s steps took a step closer. Her face was very white. “I am Frankie Bard.”

Emma halted. She had been about to take a step forward. Frankie Bard was the voice on the radio. Not a living body in a white blouse and narrow skirt, appearing like this, out of the blue.

“How can that be?”

“How can what be?”

“You’re over there.”

“I’m over here, now.”

Emma shivered.

All these months, when Frankie had pictured the doctor’s wife, had imagined bringing her his letter, she had seen herself standing before her and giving comfort to someone terribly in need. Instead, here she was standing at the bottom of the doctor’s stairs, facing a slight pregnant woman, whose stomach mounded from her small frame, like a matchgirl with a ball.

“When is your baby due?”

“Next month,” Emma answered, cautiously.

“I ought to go,” Frankie said quickly to no one in particular. “I am making you uncomfortable.”

“Not at all.” Emma flushed. “It’s just you have always been on the radio. My husband and I used to listen to you together. We used to talk about your stories,” she offered.

Frankie couldn’t move. All she had to do was open her mouth and look at Emma and say the words—
I know. I know you did. I met him. I spoke to him
—and she couldn’t. She could hardly breathe.

“The machine has people’s voices on it,” Otto broke in. “Emma, she can tell you what it’s like there. She can tell us—”

“Okay”—Emma reached down and put her hand on Otto’s sleeve—“okay, Otto. That’s enough.” She glanced down at the reporter who had crossed her arms tightly over her chest.

“Thank you, Miss Bard, I don’t intend to be rude, but you see, I don’t want to hear about it.” Her voice skated rapidly, high and light. “It doesn’t do me any good to hear about the attacks and the counterattacks, which Douglas bomber was lost where. I don’t want to know what he may be going through. I mean I do, but I don’t want—” She stopped. “I don’t want any more news, Miss Bard,” she finished quietly.

“Mrs. Fitch—”

“No.” Emma stopped the reporter. “My husband is gone. And for weeks, I’ve had nothing from him, no word about him.”

Frankie swallowed.

“So these days, I am concentrating,” Emma said softly, “very hard. Every day, I am concentrating on keeping him alive. I close my eyes, Miss Bard, and I imagine where he is, and I imagine the harm that might be coming toward him, and I imagine it backward, the wall rising up off of him where he is buried, the glass that may have found him, put back whole. And I imagine him safe”—her voice trembled—“and sound.”