43.
ON THE TRAIN TO ANGOULÊME, HE STARED OUT THE WINDOW, hardly seeing the landscape. Having risen at five, he arrived at the Gare Montparnasse in time for an early train. But even after he bought his ticket he thought maybe he should turn back, postpone this trip until he had gathered himself. He had no idea what he should say or do when he saw Annette. Nightmare newsreels ran though his mind. Piles of skeleton people, bulldozers coming toward them, one or two arms waving feebly. A young girl and her mother, shrunken and curled. He saw skeleton people stuffed in bunks, skeleton people dressed in stripes. He saw gaping mouths. In a sealed room vapors hissed from the ceiling.
He knew so little—mainly headlines and film clips, the shocking revelations at the end of the war. Gold teeth and fillings yanked and stockpiled. Adolf Eichmann. Himmler. Barbed wire. The open pits, the bulldozers, the poison-spitting showers, the monstrous ovens. How did she ever survive?
He carried a copy of Le Monde but did not read it. Next to him a middle-aged woman with a feather in her hat was reading a paperback. Across the aisle were two teenagers, an amorous couple jumpy with the freshness of physical attraction. A dozen or so smartly dressed people were returning from Paris, laden with packages, exchanging tales of museums and theaters. Marshall’s mind emptied them out, emptied out the rough plush seats, turning the car into a slow, creaky thing with slats on the sides to allow livestock to breathe. In this car he positioned how many? A hundred? Two hundred? Standing pressed together, unable to move. Darkness. His mind relentlessly measured out the space. Two hundred, three hundred?
He looked out at the scenery flashing by. The farmland was lush and green—patterned fields with artfully drawn hedgerows. It seemed so calm and orderly. When he rode the night train from Paris to Toulouse in the spring of 1944, he saw at dawn the vacant fields, tinged mint green, and he was sad that the farmers had to grow food for their enemy, not their own people. He thought he remembered feeling this. But maybe not. His thoughts then centered on saving his own hide—staying quiet, keeping a wary eye on the German soldiers on the train, steeling himself to show no surprise if there was a loud noise. He was supposed to be a deaf-mute. He remembered how he had hidden his head behind a newspaper. He dozed and pretended to doze. Another airman was at the rear of the car. They were to have no contact, pass no signals. Robert was in the front of the car, and another girl guide, who seemed a bit older than Annette, rode in the car behind. The other airmen in the group were scattered throughout the train.
Now the conductor operated on Marshall’s ticket. The station of Tours was already being called, and the train would arrive in Angoulême soon. For a moment, Marshall saw in the conductor the outline of a German officer asking for his papers.
Monique said Annette might talk if he asked, but he didn’t know whether he should. It was time he did something right, he thought, but he didn’t know what that was.