A Train of Thought

“Do you mind?”

I startled awake to see her standing in the aisle, arms full. She indicated with her chin the seat that I was, in my half-sleep stupor, still sprawled across.

“Sorry,” I mumbled and struggled to sit up. Between the rude awakening and the jostling of the train, it wasn’t easy. I touched the back of my skull and winced at an egg-sized bump.

“Rough night?” she asked, her red lips forming a slight smile.

“Sorry,” I said again.

She clutched hatboxes in both hands, five round cardboard boxes with fancy braided rope handles. I thought she looked like one of those one-man bands you see on street corners playing for tips, only gorgeous. Evidently, I was staring.

“Oh for goodness sake,” she said and awkwardly squeezed past me to get to the window seat, bumping me, possibly on purpose, with four out of five of those hat boxes.

She wore heels but still needed to stand on tip toes to reach the metal luggage rack above our seats. She managed to put two boxes up before I snapped to.

“Allow me,” I said and attempted to rise only to fall back onto the seat again with a plop. My head spun.

She ignored me and slid the third and fourth boxes onto the rack into what was, technically I supposed, my luggage space. But I didn’t seem to have luggage. No suitcase, no brief case. I patted the front pocket of my suit. No wallet either! I frantically searched my front trouser pockets, raised my backside for the back pockets. Not so much as a train ticket to my name. Wait, what was my name? Where was I headed? What in the hell was going on?

The woman smoothed her jacket and the back of her matching pencil skirt, before taking the seat beside me. She arranged the fifth hatbox on her lap, and primly crossed her white gloved hands over the top.

“Are the hats bothering you?” she asked.

I was staring again.

“No, sorry,” I apologized a third time. “It’s just that, there are so many of them, so many hats.”

“And?”

“And you have only one head,” I said.

“Well, aren’t you observant,” she laughed and adjusted the hat on her head. It was red felt and she wore it at a jaunty angle like cover models on the newsstand magazine.

She dressed like a gal who worked in an office in the city. Maybe she was an assistant in Berlin, a secretary for some big shot in the Friedrichstrasse skyscraper. But there was something jittery and theatrical about her. I wanted to ask her where we were headed when she pulled out a paperback and made a show of reading it. I took the hint.

We sat side by side in silence, speeding toward I knew not where. Trees whizzed past. Fields. Herds of cows. I saw the occasional village. Nothing unusual, I supposed, but nothing familiar either. I waited to ask the conductor. None came. It was all disorienting. I figured I’d head back toward the lavatory, look for a friendly fellow, and explain the situation: I’d dozed off and worried I’d missed my stop.

Still woozy, I rose slowly to my feet. The train jerked. I bear hugged the seat backs of the row in front of me and was about to apologize before I realized the row was unoccupied. The row behind us was also empty. I looked up and down and across the aisle. There were very few passengers in the entire car, though, oddly, the luggage racks held trunks, duffle bags and even cardboard boxes.

“You okay,” the woman asked.

Even though I clearly was not okay, I nodded and gently lowered myself back to my seat. I turned and looked directly into her deep brown eyes.

“Have we met before?” I asked.

“Oh for Pete’s sake, is that your pickup line? No wonder you don’t have a girlfriend,” she smirked.

“I don’t? I mean, you and I are not . . .,” I stuttered, then came confidently to my own defense. “The car is nearly empty.”

My words sounded vaguely threatening and I hurried to clarify.

“What I mean is, you could have taken any number of seats, but you chose to sit beside me.”

“I did,” she said and we left it at that.

A grove of white birch trees flickered past the train window. I felt queasy so closed my eyes to the scrolling scenery, to the rocking rattling car, to the many-hatted woman.

I must have really tied one on the night before. I couldn’t remember the night before. I couldn’t remember the day before. I had no recollection of any kind of before, for that matter, only this moment on this train, rocking on the tracks feeling awful.

The train clacked along for I don’t know how long. I may have fallen back to sleep. I’m not sure because, awake or asleep, I felt the same dread, as if I were trapped inside an eerie dream that wouldn’t end. Time past.

“Get ready,” she said. “We’re almost there.”

“Okay,” I said. So I was traveling with her? The train showed no sign of slowing but I trusted she knew our stop. I had to trust her.

“Open the window,” she ordered.

I didn’t argue. Perhaps she felt nauseous, too. Maybe it wasn’t a hangover I suffered but something contagious. The window stuck. The tracks were curved so that I could see the engine and front cars speeding toward a trestle over some kind of ravine.

“Hurry!” she said urgently.

I worried she was about to get sick all over the car and smacked the left latch of the window with the side of my fist twice, hard. Finally it gave. With great effort, I slid the glass down until it was fully opened.

Wind whipped through the car. The train clacked louder and faster on the tracks. My tie flapped into my face.

She yanked the lid off the hatbox on her lap, reached inside and pulled out, not a hat but a green metal box, secured with a substantial combination lock. It obviously contained something quite precious and valuable, and then it made sense to me, the way she’d kept her hands on it the entire ride. Suddenly, she rose, pushed me aside, and tossed the green box out the window just before we reached the trestle.

I was shocked. I stood, mouth agape, the wind drying out my tongue and teeth until she yelled at me again.

“Get the hat box!”

I did as I was told. She yanked off its lid and pulled out a second metal box. I half expected her to toss it, too.

Instead, she pulled the decorative pin from the hat. It immediately blew off her head and out the open window. She made a futile effort to grab it, cursed, and then refocused on the box in her lap. Using the hatpin, she popped the lock. Inside were dozens of pieces of paper, documents and passports, stacked and tied together. She jabbed the pin into the armrest between our chairs and thrust half the packets into my hands.

“You start on this end,” she said. “They’re in order.”

I didn’t understand until she grabbed the other packet and dashed down the train aisle to the last row and began quickly handing out passports to passengers. I did a double take. There were more passengers than I’d noticed before, parents with children. Had I slept through several stops? A woman in the third row stood to open a small steamer trunk on the floor and I stared in amazement as she retrieved a child, no more than five years old, with dark brows and pale blond hair. A second child, sweaty and pink-faced, stood beside her.

“You must call me Mama,” she told them.

The boy, wide eyed and whimpering, nodded.

“Mama,” he said obediently.

She grabbed three passports from me. Nodded thanks and arranged the two dazed children on either side of her.

I passed out more passports, most to adults, but also to a teenager who held a sleeping toddler while also trying to stuff an empty duffle bag with crumpled newspapers. I was trying to make sense of it all when a man with a reddish mustache winked at me.

My travel companion came rushing back up the aisle.

“Sit,” she ordered. “Now!”

This time I was alert enough to take the window seat so she did not have to squeeze past me. She told me to close the window, then grabbed a hat from one of the hat boxes, arranged it on her head, and expertly secured it with the hatpin she jabbed into the armrest. No sooner had she arranged her chapeau when the conductor walked through the gangway connection and opened the door to our car.

“Ticket,” he said to me.

I patted my pockets in a panic. Annoyed, the conductor addressed the entire car.

“To expedite the process, please have your passports and tickets ready.”

I was still searching my pockets when the woman sitting beside spoke up.

“Thank you for demonstrating why I do not trust you with our documents, my dear,” she said with a laugh. She handed all the necessary items to the conductor, then affectionately clasped my left hand in both of hers. I felt her slip a band around my ring finger.

“My husband is quite the absent-minded professor,” she said smiling coyly at the conductor, “brilliant but impractical.”

The man didn’t not respond. He compared our passport photos to our faces, and checked the names on our passports to the names on the tickets. Satisfied, he handed everything back to my friend and turned to the next row. It wasn’t until I saw his red armband with the defiled black cross cartwheeling in a white circle, that my memory began to return.

I almost wished it hadn’t.

As soon as I heard the door at the back of the car open and close again, certain the conductor had gone, I turned to the woman.

“We’re escaping to Zurich,” I said testing my hypothesis.

“We are Swiss,” she said firmly. “All of us here, we are Swiss. Remember that.”

The fog was lifting slowly. I recalled a secret network that smuggled Jewish children out of Germany with counterfeit documents. They sometimes bleached the children’s hair blond hair to look more Aryan and warned them not to respond to Hebrew commands Nazi officers might use to trick them. But the people running such rescue operations were brave and heroic. I felt neither.

“Am I Jewish,” I whispered.

She shook her head, “A triangle.”

I didn’t understand.

“They raided the Eldorado Club last night,” she said. “You were whacked on the head but your partner helped you escape.”

“Are you my partner,” I asked, twisting the gold wedding band on my finger.

“You really were whacked hard,” she said with a smile. “We can’t thank you enough for your generosity, the metal box.”

I didn’t understand.

“Bribe money. Sorry for shouting about the window but we had to make the drop before the trestle. Everything depended on it, everyone.”

“I understand,” I said. I was regaining mental clarity. I remembered that I came from a banking family. My two brothers and I had recently diversified investments and done quite well for ourselves. Three generations of bankers, three brothers — is that what she meant by triangle?

“A pink triangle for homosexuality,” she said. “Two SS officers at the club boasted they would personally drag you directly to the camps but Detlef, one of the dancers, convinced them it was a misunderstanding, convinced them with his own hard-earned money. Detlef managed to get your addled-brain aboard the train early this morning. You owe him your life.”

“Detlef,” I said, recalling the name of the red mustached man down the aisle who’d winked at me.

“He loves you,” she said.

And — whoosh — my heart filled with love and I knew, despite the horrors of the current political system, despite the atrocities of war, we would prevail. Love would prevail.