The Orphan's Tale. Pam Jenoff
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They couldn’t have possibly noticed one baby missing amid so many. They were pointing, though, from the boxcar door I left open in my haste to my telltale footprints in the snow.
I ran desperately into the station toward the closet where I slept. At the back of the closet there was a rickety ladder leading to the attic. As I reached for it, my foot tangled around a threadbare blanket on the floor. Shaking it off, I started to climb the ladder. But I had only one arm to hold on and I slipped from the second rung, nearly dropping the baby, whose wail rang out, threatening to expose us.
Recovering, I started upward again. The voices grew louder, broken by a sharp bark. I reached the attic, a space with a low ceiling smelling of dead rodents and mold. I hurried through the tangle of empty boxes toward the lone window. My nails ripped as I pried it open. A blast of icy air smacked my face. I leaned forward and put my head through the window, but it was too small. I could not make it past my shoulders.
Below I heard the guards, inside the building now. I pushed the baby quickly through the window and placed him on the sloping, snow-covered roof that overhung the station platform. I steadied him there, praying he did not roll downward or cry out from the iciness against his skin.
I closed the window and hurried down the attic steps, grabbing my broom. As I walked out of the closet, I nearly slammed into one of the guards.
“Guten abend...” I stammered, forcing myself to meet his eyes. He did not respond, but stared at me piercingly.
“Entschuldigen Sie, bitte.” Excusing myself, I walked around the guard, feeling his eyes on me, bracing for his command to stop. I slipped outside and pretended to sweep the coal-tinged snow from the platform until I was sure he wasn’t watching me. Then I raced around the side of the station, staying close to the shadow of the building. I looked up at the low roof, searching for a foothold to reach it. Finding none, I climbed the drainpipe, iciness soaking through my torn tights. As I neared the top, my arms burned. I reached up, praying that the infant was still there. But my fingers closed around emptiness.
My stomach dropped. Had the Germans found the baby? I stretched again, arms straining farther and finding a bit of cloth. I pulled on it, trying to draw the child toward me. But he rolled past my fingertips. I reached for him frantically, grabbing the edge of the cloth diaper just before he fell.
I drew him close to me and scampered down, nearly slipping myself as I struggled to hold on with one hand. At last I reached the ground and tucked the baby securely in my coat. But the Germans were just around the corner, their voices close and angry. Not daring to linger another second, I ran, footsteps breaking the smoothness of snow.
* * *
Hours have passed since I fled the station. I don’t know how many, only that it is deepest night and snowing again, the sky a muted gray. Or it would have been, if I could look up. The storm has grown heavier, though, sharp bits of ice cutting at my eyes and forcing me to tuck my chin once more. I’d gone in the direction away from the hills and toward the shelter of the woods, but the ground that appeared flat in the distance rolls and dips, straining my legs. I cling instead to a smoother path that runs too close to the edge of the forest. I glance nervously at the narrow road that runs parallel to the trees. So far it has thankfully remained deserted.
In the endless blanket of white I imagine our tiny farm, close to the Dutch coast, the air thick with salt and chilled by the North Sea, where I lived with only my parents. Though we had been spared from the air raids that had brought Rotterdam to rubble, occupation had come down hard. The Germans had focused on defending the coastal towns, mining the beaches so we could no longer walk them and billeting soldiers everywhere—which is how I met the one who fathered my child.
He hadn’t forced me. If he had, or if I had pretended it, my parents might have been more forgiving. He had not even tried during the fortnight he stayed at our farm, though I could tell from the long looks across the table that he wanted to. His tall, broad-shouldered presence had been too large in the close cottage space, a piece of furniture that did not fit. We all breathed a sigh of relief once he had been moved to new quarters. But he returned, bringing a half-dozen fresh eggs like we hadn’t seen since before the war, and later chocolate to thank us. I was weary—the war had been raging since I was twelve, taking all of the dances and normal things I might have known as a teenager with it. For the first time with the soldier, not much more than a boy himself, it seemed like I stood out.
So when he came to me in the night, slipping through the back door and into my cold, narrow bed, I’d felt chosen, and excited by his touch—a man so much more certain than the fumbling boys I’d known at school. I didn’t see the uniform, with the same insignia that the SS marching Steffi Klein away had worn. He was just a soldier who had been conscripted into the army. Not one of them. My memories of our one night together are hazy, like a half-forgotten dream of desire and then pain that caused me to cover my own mouth so my parents wouldn’t hear my cry. It was over just as quickly, leaving me with a longing not quite fulfilled and a sense that there should have been more to it.
Then he was gone. The German did not come around again and two days later I learned that his unit had moved on. I knew then I had made a mistake. It wasn’t until about a month later that I realized how serious my mistake had been.
The end came without warning on a spring day warmer than most. Morning sun bathed our seaside village of Scheveningen and gulls called to one another above the inlet. Lying in my bed, it had almost been possible to forget about the war for a few minutes.
Then my bedroom door swung open and the knowledge of the truth raged in my father’s bulging eyes. “Out!”
I stared at him in disbelief. How could he possibly have known? I had told no one. I had not expected to be able to keep it a secret forever, but surely for another month or so, long enough to figure out what to do. Mama, who had walked in while I was dressing a few days earlier, must have seen the slight curve of my stomach. The rest, the timing of when the German had been with us, would not have been so very hard to figure out.
Papa was proud and staunchly Dutch, with a limp from the Great War to prove it. My affair with the German was the greatest betrayal. Surely, though, he did not mean for me, his only daughter and just sixteen, to leave. But the same man who had once laced my boots and carried me on his shoulders now unrelentingly held the door open for me to walk through a final time.
I braced for him to strike me or berate me further, but he simply pointed to the door. “Go.” His eyes did not meet mine.
“No!” Mama cried as I went. There was no strength behind her voice, though. As she ran after me, my heart lifted. Perhaps just this once she would stand up to him and fight for me. Instead she just pressed the money she had tucked away into my palm. I waited for her to embrace me.
She did not.
A horn whistles long and low in the distance. I duck behind a tree as a train appears from the same direction we’d come, snaking a path through the field of white. Though I can’t be sure, from a far distance there is a train car that looks exactly like the one from which I pulled the baby. Headed east, like the other trains of Jews. Babies taken, as my own had been, but from families with two parents who loved, wanted them. Stifling a cry, I step from the trees, wanting to run after it and take other children as I had this one. But the baby’s body sinks warm and heavy in my arms, the lone life I have saved.
Saved—at least for now. Behind the receding train, the sky is lightening to gray in the east. It will be dawn soon and we are still too close to the station. The police could come at any moment. Snow falls heavy, soaking my thin coat and reaching the child beneath it. We must keep going. I push deeper into the woods, out of sight. The air is still with that silence that only snow can bring. My feet are icy bricks now, legs weary. I am weak from the little I’ve eaten in my months at the station and my mouth is dry with thirst. There is nothing beyond the trees but endless white. I try to remember from my journey to the girls’ home months earlier how far it is to the next village. But even if we make it there, no one will risk his own life to shelter us.
I switch the baby to my other hip, brushing the snow from his forehead. How long has it been since he last ate?