The Next Train to Paris

He sits in front of the girl at the malt shop in West Berlin. It is a beautiful place, with plenty of bright neon bleeding, a black-and-white tiled floor, and a big fat jukebox in the corner that plays mostly Elvis Presley songs. In 1955 West Germany, just like in America, Elvis is King. He wears a worn black leather jacket and a white t-shirt and his hair is slicked-back and greased to the hilt, just like Elvis. 

Outside sits his gleaming ’42 Indian Scout, which he had bought from a junker named Fritz and fixed up himself with what little he made as a courier while in college. The bike was left over from the American military who have controlled the city since the war has been over. The olive drab had been painted over with a glossy cherry-red, giving it an entirely new life. 

His legs move under the table, nervous and excited to the music of “Hound Dog.” Elvis belts out the tune through loud and sometimes scratchy speakers. She wears a conservative blue dress and smiles at him across two malts and the remainder of a plate of fries. There are crumbs of what were grilled-cheese sandwiches, and a chunk of a pickle on her plate, the juice of one on his. She has a silver scar on her face that runs jagged down her tender cheek, like an interrupted lightning bolt. It doesn’t take away from her beauty, though. It makes her unique for she alone bears that complimentary mark. She stares into an empty malt glass and he knows where she has gone. He goes there, too, only she doesn’t know he goes with her.

“This is our fourth date,” she says suddenly crashing back to West Berlin, smiling in the untainted way that she does. Her teeth are not completely perfect, but are charming in their slight flaw, the curve of her incisors and the uneven length of the upper row that is set back in a little. She is petite, and her lips are full and often chapped because she bites them when she is nervous, which is often. She doesn’t wear makeup, nor need she. 

“And so,” she says, “I think it would be proper if we were to take a walk. Alone. There are things I need to tell you, Christofer, that I don’t think Elvis should hear.”

“Sure,” he agrees. “Would you like to take a ride on my motorbike, finally?”

She laughs. “I don’t feel that I have the nerve, yet.”

“Surely, it doesn’t require nerve, Ema. Merely, desire.”

“I have desire for many things that I don’t yet do.”

“As do I, in kind,” he replies grinning.

“But you would.”

He hesitates, then answers honestly. “Yes. I would. I have no doubt about you at all.”

“Don’t take my hesitation for doubt, please,” she says. “The only doubt I have is in myself.” 

“You should have no doubt in yourself. But I know.”

“Do you?”

“I do,” he answers firmly. He looks into her eyes and pushes the plate aside. Nervously, she takes a last slurp of her malt, which is mostly whipped cream.

“Let’s go, Christofer.”

“Now?”

“Yes. I must tell you things.”

Christofer pays the check and the couple head out the door. The bell jingles and they pass a couple American GI’s coming in who nod and thank him in sloppy German for holding the door for them. He nods back and smiles. Such little interactions are very meaningful to him. Perhaps, he considers, the war is truly over and no one will hold any ill-will against the other side. And life, maybe, can be beautiful again. 

He passes his motorbike and dares to reach down and hold her hand. It is cold out and their breaths make plumes of smoke from their mouths as though they are smoking cigars. His grandfather used to tell him that is the soul coming and going from the body. It comes back until you die. All things die, he told Christofer with a peaceful smile. But not all things live.

It is well into November. Much too cold for a walk, but he doesn’t care. He holds her hand and that is all the warmth he needs. Then he notices the girl shivering, so he takes off his jacket and puts it across her shoulders, leaving himself with only his white t-shirt. She tries to refuse it, but it is pointless, she knows. Christofer has been insistent in his kindness since the day they met.

“A walk wasn’t such a good idea, it seems,” she says shivering, smiling at him. She has big brown eyes and flowing hair. It wasn’t how he remembered her from so long ago, but it was how he had always envisioned her. 

“No. It was a perfect idea. It was your idea, Ema. And, you know, after a while, I get tired of American rock’n’roll and malts” He lies. He never gets tired of American rock’n’roll and malts.

She smiles again and buries herself into his chest. His face is in her hair, which smells to him like a cherry tree he remembers as a boy, well before the war. The tree was on his grandfather’s property, but it is gone now, as is his grandfather, and his father. His mother lives in a studio apartment and stares out a window as though someday everyone will come home. So much was gone. The war had taken so much from everyone. 

And standing there in front of a pond in a park that was created by bombs, where there are only four brave ducks swirling about on the water as though confused by the cold, she speaks to him, her face in his chest as though speaking directly to his heart. 

“The Shoah, Christofer. I was number 171166 in Auschwitz. It is on my arm, which is why I always wear sleeves. I haven’t spoken of it in 10 years. I am 25, but I feel like a little girl in many ways, as though I stopped aging when I walked through those gates. I was broken. My family was murdered by human indifference, but I survived, at least in some respects. I was beaten and tortured and have blocked so much of it out, but it is so much a part of me that I knew I must tell you someday if ever we were to be anything more than two consistent strangers in a malt shop making eyes.” 

She tries to laugh a little with tears in her eyes as she looks up at him for approval to go further. He smiles back to say go on. “You remember when we first saw each other. You stared at me like a fool.”

“I am a fool for you, Ema.”

“Oh, so terrible you are in all your corny charm, like from an American comic book. Do you mean what you say? What you have written to me? That we should leave and go to America. To New York City?”

“Yes. Which is why I insist we speak English.”

“But how? How will we make it there in America?”

“I have some money set aside and I have earned a degree in architecture since the war from the university. I can get a good job there. Better than here even. We can have a family. Kids, Ema!”

“I would like that very much.”

“Then let’s go. Why should we wait? We can be on the next train to Paris, then to America. We could be ice skating in New York City by December. Cutting down a perfect tree and decorating a home for Christmas with popcorn strands and lights. All the trimmings. Making a beautiful baby.”

“You dream too big for me. It just cannot be. I am broken and never will be whole. You should find another girl to put your dreams into.”

“You are my dream, Ema. I have no more dreams than you. And if not with you, then I have no desire to dream.”

“I died with my momma and papa and my little brothers in the Shoah. I have nothing in me left.”

“You do! I will put my love in you and we will have a family and name our children in honor of yours. Each son, the name of one of your brothers, the eldest after your father. A girl named after your mother. You survived for a purpose! To live! Your momma and papa wouldn’t want you to die each day until you finally die of your sorrows.”

“I hate myself for living, Christofer.” She shivers and squeezes him tighter.

“Never say that. What room you make for hate is less you have for love.”

“I don’t remember it all. I only remember parts," she confesses. "I remember some of the faces, but not all. But sometimes they come to me in dreams. And twice, I have seen those faces walking down the street here in this Berlin. The men who assaulted me. I told the lawyers that seek them and they said they arrested them. They are being picked up every day, they tell me. One by one. I read about them in the paper. I have so much hate for them!”

“Hate leaves no room for love.” He holds her and she begins to sob. The ducks splash the green water with their wings and fly away loudly and an old man walking a dog, some kind of small terrier, passes, paying the couple no mind. The dog sniffs at Christofer’s pantleg until the owner curses it in German and jerks its leash harshly to resume their course. 

“I can’t change the past, Ema. If I could, I would change it for you. I would have protected you and your family.” She looks up at him and smiles and then she gets lost in his eyes, but her smile fades. There is something in his eyes that she sees. And she stares, just as she stared at the empty glass in the malt shop. 

“I have to go,” she cries abruptly. She breaks from him and takes off his jacket and tosses it to the ground as she stumbles back towards home. Her home is in the care of a wealthy aunt and uncle who have ties to some of the most influential figures in West Berlin, particularly the lawyers and organizations dedicated to bringing ex-Nazis who worked in the camps to justice, at least the ones without the money to buy freedom and exemption from the moral prosecution. 

“Ema!” he calls out to her. “Tomorrow! Meet me tomorrow!” He chases after her and catches up to her, grabbing her arms more harshly than he had wished. “Please!” he pleads. “Meet me tomorrow? Please!”

Her eyes go cold and her face is blank looking back at him, but she agrees by shaking her head, then she cries more as she breaks away once again. “I am sorry,” she calls out as she runs for home. “I am very sorry!”

Tomorrow comes with more gray clouds and snow and he waits nervously in the malt shop a half hour before their usual meeting time. Someone plays “Sh-Boom” by The Crew-Cuts. And they sing Life can be a dream, sweetheart, just as she walks in. He smiles, the good kind of nervous, with all the butterflies, and with the worry in his heart that she wouldn’t show, allayed.  

She is wearing a black dress and though still beautiful, she looks like someone going to a funeral. She is burying her dead today, she resolved getting dressed. At the time she dressed, he was on his motorbike, smiling at the prospect of seeing her again. The cold wind whipping his face like frozen nails. She was resolute upon burying her past, and being strong, as she carefully tied the black ribbons in her hair. 

He stands to greet her and she promptly sits. A bouquet of flowers in yellow paper sit on the table between them and he says they are for her and she smiles and nods her head but doesn’t say thank you in any language. A waitress brings her what he has ordered for her. A double chocolate malt with extra whipped cream and two cherries. She sits down without hardly saying hello. She looks tired and worn. She is wearing makeup, which accents her beauty, but makes her look foreign to him. Like a stranger, even.
  
“Tell me, Christofer. Who are you?” 

He doesn’t reply immediately. The leather of his jacket groans as he sits back then forward again. “You know who I am, Ema. I have not lied to you.”

“Yes,” she replies coldly. “But omission is a lie. I do know you. I remember your face. When we took our walk yesterday. I looked up and saw you in that gray light. And I remembered you quite well.”

Christofer bows his head. He knows what is coming. He is fated to the perception of her memories and her subsequent judgment.
 
Oh, life could be a dream. If I could take you up in paradise up above…

“Tell me,” she begs him softly, her voice cracking, “that yours is not the face I remember. The first face I saw in Auschwitz as they unloaded us from the train. I looked up at you and saw in your eyes hope.” She begins to cry. A tear races down her cheek parallel to the scar. “I thought that it might not be the hell it was rumored to be, but that it would indeed prove itself to be. I smiled at you! You smiled back at me!”

“I was in love with you then as I am now. At first sight.”

“Liar!” She slams her fist on the table. Everyone turns to look at the couple. A fork rattles off the table. Her sadness from yesterday has been replaced by the fury of pain. 

“Please let me explain,” he implores. 

She takes a breath and apologizes to the people with only a glance. They reluctantly look away and go about their business. 

Christofer explains, “I was 16 and sent to Auschwitz because my father didn’t want me to serve in the war as he had served in the first. He knew some people in the party and, well, that is where I was sent. It was 7 June 1944. You came in July. The eighth, I believe. The horror of it was,” he pauses for a breath, closes his eyes, and shakes his head, “unimaginable unless you were there and witnessed it. I cannot fathom what you endured form your perspective as the horror from mine was beyond belief itself. To do so much evil and to murder women and children. It was like living in a slaughterhouse, only the animals were human-beings.”

“You people stopped seeing us as human-beings!”

“You people? That is what the Nazi preach. A philosophy of you people. I didn’t ever stop seeing anyone as a human-being. We spoke a few dozen times, I hope that you recall that. We talked about school. I was a kid as well and you told me you hoped to perfect your English and to skate in New York someday. It was then that we decided to speak English only, which most of the others didn’t understand. And when we couldn’t speak, we looked at each other. We spoke with our eyes.”

“I remember now,” she gasps suddenly as though revived from death. “And yes, I was an ice skater before Auschwitz!”

“You are an ice skater now. In February of 45, I brought you a pair of skates from my grandfather’s store and I took you out to the frozen pond that was behind the camp. We snuck away through a hole I cut in the fence several months before. We could have escaped, but you wouldn’t leave your family, Ema. We couldn’t take them with us. They were already dead, but you spoke of them as though they were still alive and I hadn’t the heart to try to convince you they were gone. So, I resigned that we were going to die and I wanted you to skate one more time in this life and I wanted to watch you.

“And so you put on the skates and you skated and I sat on the frozen bank, fearful of getting caught until you began to move and it was as though you moved in my soul as you did on the ice. I couldn’t take my eyes off you as you did. I didn’t hear the dog until it was too late. It attacked you on the ice. I ran out and slid across that ice to get to you and I killed him with my knife, but they shot me, in the shoulder. When I got to you, the dog had already bitten your face, which is how you have that scar.”

She exhales and cries, looking into his eyes which are full of tears that don’t fall.

“I can only remember laying there on the ice, bleeding," he says, "looking up at the gray sky and the snowflakes that fell. It was peaceful somehow. But hearing the sound of their boots on the cracking ice, they stole that peace away from me. Then there were planes, allied bombers overhead, and the earth began shake. They took you back inside and threw you in a hole to die. They took your clothes and skates. 

"They took me back and locked me up. I was to be executed, but my father, again, spared me of that. I lay in an infirmary and the commandant visited me and asked what I had been doing and why I had been doing it. And I said what I had been doing was being in love because I hadn’t any hate in me and I refused to give myself to it because it is so much better to love.”

Ema put her hands over her face. 

Hello, hello again, sh-boom and hopin’ we’ll meet again, boom!

“I couldn’t save your family, Ema. They had typhus. There was nothing I could do, though I thought of it every day, how I could load us all up in a truck and just drive. You know? Just plow through those damn iron gates and never look back behind us. They would have killed us all. So, every day I brought you food in my pockets and I gave it to you. I knew the war would end and I hoped everything would go back to the way it was before when it did. It wasn’t much food, but it was what I could get. I never ate more than I could give you.

“I never saw you after the day you skated. Until here in the malt shop, last week. Ten years. I can’t tell you what that was like. I knew it was you. It wasn’t the scar, or your lips, it was your eyes. I saw it when you stepped off that train and it never went away.”

“What did you see?” she implores.

“My life. Love! It made me sad because I knew what they would subject you to. I had seen enough and before I saw your brown eyes, I was going numb. But your eyes put love into my soul again. Replaced what had been stolen from me. And your eyes never lost that place and that is where I go so not to think or to remember anything terrible anymore.” 

Life could be a dream. Life could be a dream, sh-boom!

She cried more emphatically than before, tearing napkins form the napkin holder and daubing her rouged cheeks. The mascara on her eyes ran. Her gold eyeshadow faded, or was accidentally wiped away. 

“I remember now, the food! You put it in a green handkerchief and I would pass the empty handkerchief back to you without saying a word, but I said thank you every time in my mind and in my heart. I remember skating, too. My legs were weak, but I remember jumping and not falling and sometimes at night I hear the sound of those skates on that ice. Then I hear the dog and the gunshot. And the sight of you falling. I remember,” she sobs. "I remember!"

“Don’t cry. Let’s leave, Ema. Let’s go to New York. We can be happy - ”

“Oh, no, Christofer! I can’t! We can’t! I’ve ruined it now.”

“You can! We can go now! Nothing is ruined. You remember now and we can be happy!”

“No,” she cries, controlling herself so not to make another scene. But no one can hear her over Fats Domino wailing, “Ain't It A Shame.” 

“You don’t understand,” she cries weakly. She composes herself and explains. “When I saw you yesterday, I remembered your face. But I didn’t remember all that I remember now. I just remembered you from when I stepped off the train. That you were a part of that Hell, and therefore, complicit in my mind. So I told my uncle, and he told the lawyer, and he called the men who are outside waiting for you. I’m so sorry, Christofer! I didn’t know!”

He exhales, but doesn’t reply. He looks out the window and two men in long gray coats that are grayer than the sky are standing there, smoking cigarettes. Nazi hunters, they call them for lack of anything better. There are plenty of Nazis in West Germany, but anyone who worked at a death camp and who isn’t wealthy and powerful in government are the only ones that get tried and hung. He then notices the two American GI’s who sit at the bar and drink malts and laugh about something. They are the same GI’s he held the door for the day before. He stares at their backs until she speaks. Their uniform coats are the color of his motorbike before he painted it.

“Why did you stay here and not leave for another place? It is dangerous for a person like you.”

“I had to find you. I didn’t know if you survived. The camp was liberated shortly after and I felt there was a good possibility you did. And even if it was false hope, it was hope, nonetheless, and that is how I survived. Dreaming I would see you again. I knew you were alive, in my heart. I didn’t know I would meet you here by accident. I had no choice, but to stay.”

“I can tell them I was wrong! That it wasn’t you! Refuse to testify.”

“They will know it was me, Ema. They have a list of names and they have matched photos with the names. If there is one thing the Nazis were, it was meticulous about records. There is nothing that can be done.”

“You can run,” she pleads. “I will run out and tell them you left out the back and you can run when they check!” 

“No. I don’t want to run without you. There is no point. I will face this.”

“I will go with you! I can meet you at the train station tomorrow at midnight. Please!” 

Christofer doesn’t reply. He sees the two bricks out the window and they are looking in at him in the determined and hateful way slaughterers look at pigs.  

“I am sorry,” she sobs. “I am sorry.”

He nods his head and smiles at her reaching across the table to touch her hand that lays there trembling. “It isn’t your fault. Don’t be sorry. I will go to the restroom and we can do that,” he says quickly. “Tomorrow at midnight. At the train station. I have a place we can stay and wait until the next train to Paris.”

“Yes,” she agrees eagerly. "Yes!" She leans over and kisses him quickly, as regretfully as Judas kissed Jesus, but full of hope that their plan will work. He then heads to the restroom and she bursts out the front, screaming that he ran out the back. The men run around the building as she hoped they would, and Christofer heads out the front, towards his motorbike. 

In his hurry to escape, he catches a glimpse of Ema around the side of the building, and he smiles at her, but as he does one of the GI’s who had heard her scream that he escaped, draws his sidearm and pulls the trigger twice.

Christofer looks down at the burning feeling in his stomach. A circle of red pools on the front of his white t-shirt, like the Nazi banner with the swastika melted in a black pool. He falls down on the sidewalk and Ema screams and runs to him. She cradles his head as he coughs up a stream of blood which runs across her arm.

Hearing the gunshots, the men come back around to the front and see them there. The GI’s stand around waiting for an explanation, figuring that he was some kind of war criminal. They get their confirmation from the two men in the long coats, who are still smoking cigarettes, blowing clouds of careless smoke.

“Nazi bastards. I thought I kilt enough of ’em for one lifetime,” the GI says, carefully putting away his gun.

“What’s one more?” the other jokes back. “One less evil sonofabitch in the world.” They go back into the malt shop to finish their drinks.

My tears fell like rain. Ain't that a shame. You're the one to blame.

“Scratch him off the list,” one of the men in the long coats says to the other. He tosses his cigarette down and stamps it out, then they both walk away without saying anything to Ema. 

An ambulance comes, but there will be no train to Paris. Her tears drop on his face and she apologizes to him again as she pets his head, but Christofer doesn’t hear her. He looks up and sees the gray sky and feels the ice below him. And all he can see in the clouds is her skating. He smiles as a tear falls down his cheek and then he exhales his soul.