Lone Star (43 page)

“As it turned out,” he continued, “not far enough away. Because with the war still raging, the residents started digging up the surrounding areas in search of valuables possibly left on the bodies. They found only a few jewels, but they did exhume quite a large number of bodies, which, despite Himmler's orders, had remained in the earth. Presented with this evidence after the war, the Germans said bodies, what bodies? We don't know what you're talking about. Ask the damn Ukrainians. We know the place as a sand quarry. Poles and Jews worked in the quarry for our war effort. The rest we have no idea about. That's what they continued to say for many years, and some people believed it, even though the Soviets who had marched through here in July 1944 and the war correspondents who accompanied them wrote unbelievable things about what they had found in the earth. Most of these writings have not been translated into English.”

“So how do you know this?” Blake asked.

“A few bilinguals with classified clearance translated many documents to get to the truth.”

“But how do
you
know this?”

The guitar rose and fell on Johnny's shoulders. “I know some of the translators.”

Before Chloe had a chance to zero in on Johnny, to home in on his face and the words he had uttered, Hannah spoke. “I don't want to be here anymore,” she said. “I'm going to be sick.” And then she bent and was promptly sick on the sandy earth.

Everyone looked away.

Shortly afterward, they left.

“Wait,” said Yvette. “Johnny, can you take a picture of the five of us with Artie's camera? Guys, wait, come back!” she called to Brett, Denise, Dennis, and Artie. “Okay, Johnny? Otherwise, honest to God, no one will ever believe we were here.”

The four-kilometer walk back was interminable, but not quiet. Chloe and Mason and Hannah and Blake were quiet. But Brett and Yvette, Dennis and Denise, and Artie clucked and chatted nonstop about the fake clock and the fake directions to fake cities, about the pairs of shoes tied together by laces to make them easier to sort for the Germans, and about Artur Gold conducting his orchestral trio through one happy tune after another at the end of the long barrel of a German rifle. Artur Gold, who fiddled until he was gassed in 1943, a few months before Treblinka had shut its doors. They talked about the trains arriving from as far as Holland, France, Italy. To stop them from talking, a tired-looking Johnny told them stories about the trains in a soft voice.

“Denise, Yvette, listen to me, girls. The trains were very important. Without the trains, there is no question, there would've been fewer dead. The Germans knew this—they had been planning the final solution for years—which is why very early on, 1939 and the start of 1940, they moved all the Jews into ghettos near a robust rail system. Krakow, Warsaw, of course. Lublin. They exported them to the camps from as far as Greece and yes, Italy. The trains were all either freight wagons
or cattle cars. They weren't the luxury passenger liners Chloe and I rode from Vilnius to Warsaw.” He almost smiled, but not really. “Sometimes the trains had ten wagons, sometimes sixty. It's because of the trains I mention so often,” Johnny said, “that we know how many millions died in the camps. Because the Germans, as it turned out, didn't keep accurate record books on the deaths of the Jews.”

“Go figure,” Blake said.

“Yes!” As if Blake and Johnny had shared a secret joke. “Of all the things they liked to record, how many people they gassed was far down the list. But the Polish State Railway kept records. About sixteen hundred trains were commandeered by the Germans, who ran the Polish railroad from 1941 to the end of 1944. Sixteen hundred trains in about eleven hundred days. That's how they counted them. The trains had to be filled to capacity. There was no point in bringing only a half-full train to Treblinka. So sometimes the trains sat in the rail yards, waiting for more ‘shipment,' as they called it, to be loaded on. With minimal food and water, many people died on the trains before they got to the camps—and that was also the point. Anyone whom the ghettos and the trains didn't kill, the death camps finished. The shortest train travel was from Bialystok, fifty kilometers away. The longest was from Korfu in Greece. It took eighteen days. By the time the doors on the train from Korfu opened in Belzec, all seven thousand people on that train were dead.” Johnny stared at Chloe with ineffable emotion. “That's why I like riding the trains today,” he said. “Despite all the inconveniences. I remind myself of what it means to be alive and ride the train, ride it to life, to Barcelona, to Paris, to Trieste, instead of to Lublin, to Auschwitz, to Lodz.”

He fell quiet. Mason took Chloe's hand. Blake had his arm around exhausted Hannah. Denise and Yvette started arguing about how much was sixteen hundred trains times three thousand people times eleven hundred days. Brett and Dennis joined in, helping them multiply.

“Oh my God,” Blake said. “Will they never shut up?”

“Not yesterday,” Johnny said. “Not today. So I'm thinking no.”

He turned to them all and walked backwards.

“You're right, Denise, to keep multiplying the numbers,” Johnny said. “You're trying to find a mathematical explanation for the thing that's impossible to think about and impossible not to think about. But you won't. Nothing in math or history equals it. Nothing comes close. You can't even really talk about it without reducing it with pale words and woeful arithmetic. Both are inadequate. If you're an atheist, it almost makes sense what happened. This is just the way it is, the unbelievers reason. Such is the merciless barbarity of the world. But if you believe in God, the slaughter of innocents, young and old, is harder to rationalize. What words do you use to reconcile an all-loving, all-powerful God with the burning pits and the gas chambers and the trains? It's almost enough proof for the doubters that God indeed may be powerless, or indifferent, or nonexistent.” Johnny waved his hand to the hidden field, to the gathering pines. “Love isn't at the heart of it. The absence of love, the absence of God is at the heart of it. But even so, it remains an unanswerable mystery. Sometimes there is just no explaining the devastating things that happen.”

Chloe knew this firsthand to be true, her own small house still recovering from the holocaust of just one extinguished life.

Denise and Yvette clucked in solemn agreement with Johnny, and then resumed multiplying the parenthetical before adding it to the next algebraic equation. To force them to fall quiet, Johnny took the guitar off his shoulders and handed the black case to Chloe to carry. He started strumming and singing a lilting waltz melody. It was so beautiful that Chloe couldn't help herself, she started to cry.

“What song is that?” she asked, surreptitiously wiping her face, hoping no one would see, not even Mason walking next to her.

“The ‘Polish Tango,'” Johnny replied. “Do you like it?”

“It's by Artur Gold!” Yvette exclaimed, rushing up to them. “Johnny, that's wonderful. How do you know this song? It's one of his most famous, most beautiful melodies. We were just talking about him.”

“Yes, Yvette, I know.”

“Can you play any of his others? He had so many.”

They surrounded Johnny. “Can you play ‘Chodz na Prage'?” Artie asked. “It means ‘Come to Prague.' The melody is played as a trumpet call in the Prague section of Warsaw every day at noon, to this day.” He smiled tearfully. “My Arlene knew a lot about Artur Gold. She liked that he and I shared a name.”

Johnny nodded, continuing to strum. One two and three. One two and three. All Chloe wanted was to hear him sing. That's what she told herself was all she wanted.

“Yes, the Germans took their music very seriously.” He spoke in a lilting voice, almost like singing. “And Kurt Franz, the camp commander, ordered that the entire orchestra, which later included dancers and singers, be in full dress, as if at a ball. The men wore starched long white frock coats with blue collars and blue lapels. They put on white shirts, patent-leather shoes, and dark pressed pants. After supper, the Germans liked to hear German songs, but during the day when the sky was smoky black and the wind carried the smell of charred and rotting flesh, Artur played well-known Polish evergreens by the fake train station. He played the song I just sang, the ‘Polish Tango,' which is my favorite. It's also called, ‘It's Not Your Fault That My Heart Is Asleep.'” Johnny paused as he strummed the chorus, walking on one side of Chloe, while Mason flanked her on the other. From the periphery Chloe glimpsed a small smile on Johnny's somber face. Then he stopped smiling. “At the bequest of the commander, Artur Gold also composed ‘The Treblinka Song,'” Johnny said. “That one has never been recorded, but thanks to a helpful former gestapo officer who had served here and was interviewed in secret for the documentary
Shoah,
we have the
rousing melody and lyrics of that song permanently on record.” He began to sing in march time, a Germanic ONEandtwo:

“Wir wollen weiter, weiter leisten

bis dass das kleine Glück uns einmal winkt.

Hurrah!”

“What does it mean?” Chloe asked.

“We want to work, more, more, MORE until the little fortune finally greets us, hurrah!”

The professional tourists fell back, continuing to debrief and assess. They walked in nonstop babble, while Johnny dolorously sang the tango in another tongue, his voice tearing Chloe up and binding her back together.

“Ty ne winna chto me serce spi.”

It's not your fault that my heart is asleep.

Nothing was asleep on Chloe and it was all Johnny's fault. Johnny, you make all things, even the unbearable ones, a little bit better.

Oh my God, I love him, she thought, clutching his guitar case because she no longer carried the roses he had given her. I love him. What am I going to do?

After four kilometers of black railroad ties and acoustic intimacy, they finally walked out of the woods to the Treblinka train station sign, placed there as a historic marker of the unquiet mass grave to which they had just borne witness. That's where they had left Emil and his van. By the sign.

The sign was there. Neither Emil nor his van was there.

That's when Brett and Yvette and Dennis and Denise and Artie finally shut up.

F
OR A FEW SECONDS, THEY STOOD MUTE LIKE DOLLS, TRYING
to process. No one could infer the immediate meaning of Emil's stark absence. Chloe certainly couldn't. So she rejected meaning in favor of facile explanations of others.

“Maybe he went to get some food.”

Vigorously, she nodded.

“He must have been hungry, poor guy,” Denise said. “He's been sitting waiting for us for nearly four hours.”

Nodded, nodded.

“Or he really needed to use the bathroom,” said Hannah. “I know how he feels.”

Yes, that was certainly true, nodded Chloe.

“He went to find a phone.”

Assent.

“He went to get gas.”

Possibly.

“Maybe he had told us to meet him somewhere else, and we forgot?”

Not likely, but not impossible.

“He'll be right back.”

Of course he will.

They waited.

Eventually Hannah wailed in frustration. “I need to sit down,” she said. “I'm not feeling well.” Blake propped her up
on a broken stump, a remnant from an old rotted fence. Artie and Brett and Dennis paced, away from the women, talking quietly. Chloe would've liked to know what they were saying. They looked a bit grim. Mason put his arm around Chloe. “You all right?”

She thought he meant about the current situation they found themselves in, but Mason waved to the far and nebulous forest, as if nothing concerned him but what they had just seen.

After a few seconds of inarticulate nodding, Chloe spun around in a perplexed carousel to look for the answers in Johnny. Weren't in him the answers to all things? What was he doing? Maybe his actions could tell her where Emil was.

He stood some distance away from them. He didn't look down the road, or at the four young people or at the five older people. Cigarette dangling from his mouth, guitar dangling on his back, Johnny was engrossed in the train schedule.

“What do you think?” Chloe said to Mason, pointing at Johnny. On her back was his black guitar case. “Should we be worried?”

“Nah,” Mason said. “We don't know what he's looking up.” He kissed her cheek. “Could be the schedule of his trains to Italy. Isn't that where he's going next? Let's not draw any conclusions.”

“Really? None?”

“Chloe, Emil wouldn't just leave us here,” Mason said. “Why would he do that? Besides, all of our stuff is on his bus.” He stopped speaking for emphasis. Or maybe he just stopped speaking. He paled slightly.

They were on an empty stretch of land in the middle of a desolate plain of pines and brush, a hasty escape away from the glade filled with a million murdered souls, and Emil was nowhere to be found. A shivering Chloe, no matter how much she didn't want to, began to draw some conclusions.

There was an unreal feel to it. The excuses waned. The gazes fell to the ground.

Johnny put away his timetable book and approached them. “There's a six o'clock train out of Malkinia Gorna,” he said. “It's three kilometers down the road. It's not even five yet. If we hurry, we can make it. We
will
make it. Because if we miss it, the next train is not until nine, and we don't want to be stuck here for three hours. There's nothing to do and nowhere to eat. And it's going to get dark.” He said the last thing with a stress that Chloe didn't need pointed out to her. There were no streetlamps, no houses, no roadside markets. When it got dark, it would get
dark
. And they were a cry away from the killing field. When Hannah cried out, Chloe thought it was because Hannah understood the urgency.

“I can't walk another three miles!” Hannah cried. “I just can't.”

“It's not three miles,” said Johnny. “It's three kilometers.”

“Yeah, yeah. Why can't we just wait for Emil? How far could he have gone?”

Johnny didn't say.

“Let's wait,” Hannah said, not budging. “He'll be back, won't he?”

Johnny wouldn't say.

But now the older group got vocal.

“You're not answering, Johnny.”

“Where's Emil, Johnny?”

“What kind of driver splits at precisely the time he's supposed to stay put?”

“You did tell him three hours. Why isn't he here?”

“You think he got tired of waiting and left?”

“I don't know,” Johnny said.

“He ought to be fired for doing that!”

“Yes, I'll be sure never to hire him again,” said Johnny. “But in the meantime, we really should go. Come on, Hannah.”

“Wait,” Denise said, as if she just remembered the important part. “What about our things?”

Johnny's back was to her. “What things?”

“What do you mean, what things, Johnny?” Denise was shrill. “Like, our everything!”

“Denise is right,” Dennis said. “We left our backpacks, our cameras on the bus.”

Now Blake spoke in a dull voice. “Backpacks with our journals.”

“Backpacks with all my money!” That was Hannah. She struggled up. The initial shock was wearing off for everyone. Even Mason had turned white. His mouth clamped together. “He'll be right back, Johnny, right?” Mason said. “We have to get our backpacks. We simply have to.”

“Money? Forget money.” That was Yvette. The hand wringing had started. The quicksilver fury was only a breath away. “He has our passports!”

Chloe thought Mason seemed oddly quiet. He didn't even nod in agreement. He still looked white.

“Yes,” Artie said. “Our passports. Which means we won't be able to leave Warsaw, travel anywhere, leave the hotel, exchange money,
go home
.”

Now, suddenly, Hannah wasn't the only one crying. Yvette and Denise joined in.

“We have cash in our bag!” Denise said. “Seventy-seven dollars.”

Dennis comforted her with his arm. “Don't worry,” he said. “The passports are more important.”

“Seventy-seven dollars?” said Chloe. “I had Moody's fifteen hundred dollars in my backpack.” In panic she stared at Mason, at Blake.

“I had all of my own money in mine,” Hannah said. “Two hundred dollars.”

The boys didn't say how much of their own spending cash they had brought. Mason spoke in a shaky voice. “He'll come back. Right, Johnny? Any minute he'll be back.”

Blake glared at his brother, at Chloe—and at Johnny, and said nothing.

The girls and boys had left all their valuables in their backpacks on the bus. Johnny had specifically told them there was no museum shop and nothing to buy. He'd been right about that. So they left everything. Their passports, their Eurail tickets, their money, Chloe's makeup, the favorite Dior lipstick she got as a birthday gift, Rock-n-Roll red, her favorite green cashmere cardigan, their journals. The daily recollections of the things that mattered most, all in their packs, all in Emil's vanished van.

It was about three seconds, maybe four, before seven of the nine people turned on Johnny. Hannah just sat, staring vacantly down the highway, her stone face like the concrete road. And Chloe couldn't find a place in her heart to turn on Johnny. Give her time, maybe, but time with him was one thing she didn't have.

“Who is this Emil, Johnny?”

“Did he take off with our stuff?”

“Is he a thief?”

“What did you do to us?”

“We trusted you completely. What's happening? Tell us!”

And then from Blake: “How come
your
backpack is on your back, Johnny? Why didn't you leave yours on the bus, too, like us?”

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sang the Greek chorus.

Johnny didn't step away from their furious accusations. He faced them head on as he had faced the homeless man in Sestokai. He barely even blinked. “It's going to be fine,” he said. “I promise you. But we need to get back to Warsaw. Emil is an airport-shuttle driver, and he probably got an emergency call. So don't worry. I know where he lives. I'll get your things back. It's just a misunderstanding. But we must catch the train.”

“Why would he take our things?”

“I'm sure he didn't take them. He ran to another job.”

“Are you sure about that?” Blake said.

“Reasonably sure,” replied Johnny, gesturing to Hannah to get up. “We have to hurry.”

“Why? If your friend's just on an airport run and it's all a big mix-up, why the urgency to rush back to Warsaw?”

“Do you want to get your things back sooner rather than later?”

Everyone but Blake agreed that sooner was best.

“Then let's go. Blake, get your girlfriend up.”

“Don't tell me what to do,” Blake muttered, stretching out his hand to Hannah.

“Johnny, is this some kind of a hustle job?” Yvette asked. “Were we robbed? Tell us. Is he going to sell our passports and cameras on the black market?”

“You give him too much credit. He's a lummox, not a fox.”

Johnny started walking. Doggedly they followed him. He was almost jogging. No one could keep up, not the men, not the women. He was five hundred paces ahead of them on a road with no shoulder, occasional cars whizzing by, while they trailed behind, too out of breath to even gossip about him. Perhaps that was the point.

But Mason did tell Chloe some things he had overheard earlier that morning, an exchange between Johnny and Emil about money, that now seemed a lot more important.

They barely made the train. Johnny had to hold the doors open, buy everyone's tickets, slip the conductor some money to wait. “So
he
still has money,” Blake said under his breath.

There was a drunken party (of course) in the compartment next to theirs, making it difficult to talk, or think, or figure anything out. The train was lurchy, stopped every kilometer at a new station, took forever to pull out, moved slowly, and was unbearably hot.

On the train, the suppositions, the phenomenal conjectures, the wild imaginings about Emil's character, purpose, and nefarious connection to Johnny kept them all jarred on adrenaline.

Nine of them fit into one compartment. Hannah sat on Blake's lap. Johnny, the tenth, went elsewhere. I'll find another seat, he
said, and vanished. I'll see you on the other side. Did he say that or did Chloe wish he had said that?

After an hour of heavy gossip—with Mason and Chloe not volunteering what Mason had heard about Johnny's financial straits—Blake said there was a good chance they'd never see Johnny again. “Who's to say they both weren't in on it? One tells us to leave all our stuff behind. The other one runs off. Johnny jumps off the train, they meet up and split the loot. We'll never see him again, I guarantee it.” Blake spoke with corrosive glee, as if the loss of their money and prized possessions and passports, the ruination of their entire trip, would be worth it if they never saw that boy again. And this was after his taking them through the fields of Treblinka—as if this most astounding thing had meant nothing. Chloe would rather spend a night in the blackout of Malkinia Gorna than have what Blake said be true.

“Do you really think it could be true?” Denise asked.

“It's the most likely scenario.”

“Blake, don't say that. Please.” A frightened Chloe. “You don't really think he could've robbed us. Wise up, will you?” She shot up. “I'll be right back.”

“Mason, go with her,” Blake said. “There are drunks on the train.”

“I'll be fine, Mase,” said Chloe. “Stay. I'll go the other way from the drunks.” But she would walk toward the drunks and into a tar pit of moonshine until she found him. Blake couldn't be right about him. He simply couldn't. Churning with anxiety, balancing through the narrow corridor, holding the rails, pitching from side to side, she walked and peered into every compartment.

She found him in the food lounge. He was smoking, drinking a beer, staring out the window. He looked worried and forlorn. All Chloe felt was deep relief. Nothing else mattered. He was here. Blake was wrong.

“Johnny.”

“Chloe,” he said. “Sit. So, what are they saying?”

She sat down, heavy hearted, full hearted. As if Johnny's mess was Chloe's mess, too, and not on the receiving end, but on the Bonnie and Clyde end. This is how perfectly lawful women dived into lawlessness, Chloe thought without regret. They were ambushed in the middle of Poland, and were glad for it.

“Come back to our compartment, Johnny,” she said. “Everyone's afraid you ditched us. Please come back. Set their minds at ease.”

“Who's everyone? Blake?” Johnny smirked. “First, I'm the odd guy out. No room for me. But also, I don't want to sit in the compartment with you when I know you need to trash talk me. Blake needs to cool off. Or he's bound to say something we'll all regret, and then where will we be? Trapped in a tiny compartment, and no way out.” He shook his head.

“Is there a way out?” Chloe herself didn't see it.

“Depends on what you're talking about.”

“Anything. Everything.”

“No,” he said. Sliding his hand across the table, he took hold of her balled-up hand.

They sat for a few minutes in silence, struggling through their labored breathing.

Chloe told him about what Mason had caught of Johnny's conversation with Emil. “Does this have anything to do with that?”

“I don't know.” Johnny sighed.

“You told us to leave our stuff behind, and it all got pinched.”

“It looks bad, I agree.”

“Does it look bad because it
is
bad, or does it just look bad?”

He released his gentle hold on her fist. “It is bad,” said Johnny.

She fought the impulse to throw her hands to her face. All her life with her mother she fought the impulse to facepalm and she fought it off successfully now, thanks to all that practice.

“Don't worry,” he said. “I'll make it right.”