Checking in her compact to ensure she wasn’t being followed, Eva went to the line of boxes and quickly found the locker. She removed the permits, ensuring her black fur stole and hat covered her face. In their place she left the brownie camera and four reels of Braille correspondence concerning her recent meetings. In the ladies toilets she handed the key back to the operative who was pouting into a mirror re-adjusting her make-up.
Before she boarded the train, Eva placed the hat and stole in a refuse bin. From her handbag she produced a beret and brightly coloured neck scarf, making sure she mixed with porters, milling passengers and the clouds of steam billowing from the locomotive.
Once settled into her compartment, she began to relax momentarily. She tipped the steward, ensuring she was not to be disturbed, and showed him her racial papers with Goebbels' stamp on them. He saluted straight- armed and promised her a peaceful journey, thrilled to be dealing with someone so close to the Reich's most powerful men. It was an early morning departure and not fully booked, mostly businessmen reading newspapers, but worryingly with a few SS, Gestapo and German Army officers dotted about the aisles.
On more than one occasion she was stopped in the Pullman lounge and her papers requested with a polite smile. Once they saw Goebbels signature clearing her racial status, they blanched and moved on from her with the briefest of salutes.
She sat alone at a pre-reserved table in the dining car and smoked, watching the countryside slip by, drinking coffee and reflecting. As the German countryside transformed into the Polish countryside, she watched the shimmering sunset across the fields and farms, glinting off farm machinery, buildings, streams and lakes. Whole communities passed her, some stopping from their labours to watch the steam train rush clattering past them.
She retired to bed. Beneath her pillow she kept a small thin stiletto in its sheath. Also, as a precaution, she jammed her overnight bag against the door. Being a light sleeper it would give her time to react if someone was to try to force the door.
Her grandfather’s house looked derelict, the facade and gardens in poor repair. She realised she hadn’t been home in two years. The neighbouring houses were pristine but his house itself reflected the demeanour of its occupant. Henk Molenaar shuffled to the door and opened it. Eva was taken aback. Her once tall, robust grandfather was now stooped and bedraggled. She could smell a blend of body odour, tobacco and whiskey upon him.
‘Oh Dziadzio,’ she whispered as he held out his arms. His bones seemed to be pushing out through his skin, his shirt and his cardigan. He summoned a smile from inside his beard. ‘Eva, my dear, what a surprise.’ His voice was a rasping whisper. ‘I was about to make some coffee.’
She guided him into the kitchen where unwashed pots, pans and crockery lay strewn across the counters and sink. He lit a cigarette, a racking cough arising from his lungs. Absently he spat on the floor. Agneska would have given him a reproachful look, but her absence was felt throughout the house.
Eva felt immense guilt for not having attended the funeral six months earlier while she tried to remain a cold dispassionate spy. Old cobwebs hung from window panes. The curtains had remained open since the funeral, and the windows were grimy. Henk had grown a beard in mourning. It sat about his face and chest unevenly, stained with tobacco around the mouth and nostrils. In the afternoon light, his skin looked seer, his eyes white balls with pinprick irises.
Opening every window, Eva cleaned the kitchen, swept the stone floor, and washed and laundered every piece of clothing and bedding. Then she ran a bath and tenderly bathed the old man, letting him sleep as she sat by the bed, reading to him and holding his hand. In the fading light, he seemed transparent on the pillow. She thought she could detect its intricate lacework beneath his features as his breathing came in short gasps.
‘Why didn’t you contact me, Grampy?’ she whispered, but understood after Aga’s death he had ceased living, enduring a lingering death that was taking longer than expected. Talking to neighbours, they told her that he rebuffed them at every opportunity. They eyed her suspiciously, this beautiful woman abandoning her family, her blood, then reappearing near the old man’s death.
She had organised to meet her cousins in St Mary’s Basilica in Krakow that afternoon, so she wrapped herself in Aga’s old great coat. It was dusty and still carried about it the faintest whiff of her favourite scent. A wave of nostalgia brought a smile to her face as she arranged a headscarf about her head and caught the bus to the city.
The Basilica’s interior shimmered in the candlelight. An organ was playing quietly, its mellifluous sounds echoing about the vaulted ceiling. Eva recognised the piece as being by Bach as she spied her two cousins — both girls — Michaela and Silvia — peeping out beneath modest shawls kneeling in pews in the shadows just off the main apse.
Eva genuflected for the first time in years in front of Wit Stowsz’s grand altar, reflecting on whether there was a place for someone like her in heaven, before slipping in beside them without making eye contact. The altar was quiet, the host covered, and the altar boys and deans went about their solemn duties. There were a few people sitting and kneeling in afternoon meditation, mostly elderly, though, possibly parents praying to God in whispered prayers for their children’s future.
Eva quickly explained her plan to the girls. They were to leave the day after next and get themselves and their families to Gdansk and on to England. She handed over the documentation. Silvia noted they had the stamp of the German Eagle. Eva told them that the invasion was imminent. No-one was going to question these papers once the shooting started,
‘What about Grandpa?’ Eva asked, mindful that they were the only ones in the pews within earshot. Still she pitched her voice to the lowest whisper, looking furtively around. She thought she saw the figure of a man slip back into the shadows behind them.
‘He’s turned everyone’s help down,’ whispered Michaela. A strand of pure blonde hair fell over her eye and she angled her head so it would fall away, Eva thought she was a real beauty, a heart-breaker.
‘I’ll help him then. You two go. Go now and do not talk to anyone. Good luck.’ She kissed them both and left them without looking back. As she reached the last pew, she genuflected again, looking up at the cross and the exquisite stained glass windows, and asking God for the strength to endure the years to come.
Peering through the gloom, she could no longer see the girls and assumed they had slipped out through another door. She paused, checking and re-checking that no one had followed her, then left as silently as a ghost, walking through the market square, head down, scarf pulled tight about her, avoiding any eye contact.
No one seemed to realise what was going to happen, what horrors were about to befall them should Germany invade their country.
The stall holders were breaking down their pitches for the night and the square was beginning to clear. Eva felt as if she was a modern-day Cassandra and prayed to God that her family would believe her.
As she left she heard the mournful bugle call of the Hejnal from the Basilica. It was a sound she heard every night in her dreams, and would continue to do so until her dying day.
The house was quiet when she entered. She called out her grandfather’s name and made her way through every room searching for him. No lights were on. The old floorboards creaked under her steps as she ascended the staircase. The library was the last room past the bedrooms and a light shone underneath it. She looked in.
Henk Molenaar lay slumped at his desk, the lamplight washing his features white. Eva touched his arm and found it cold, she felt for a pulse in his neck and his wrist. Nothing. He was dead.
Eva gently kissed his cheeks and said her goodbyes, running her fingers through his hair. These past days it had regained its old sheen and texture. It felt like the hair of young man. He was smiling peacefully and his arm was held out across the desk, the fingers coiled as if holding someone else’s hand.
Eva climbed the ladder that swung across the shelves to the volume she was seeking. It was a large Bible, sturdily bound with a heavy hide cover and an extremely valuable illuminated codex.
Henk had told her it was an original Coptic Bible, possibly first century Roman, almost priceless. Moving about the house and through Henk’s writing desk, she located the house deeds. Every legal document was placed between the Bible's perfect ancient pages. She located his cashbox and removed all of the bank notes. She then went through Aga’s dusty unopened jewellery box. She found a diamond ring, and several gold bracelets and pearls. She put them all on, covering them with her dress.
Discovering her old bicycle, she rode to the train station, leaving the dead man behind in his favourite place. A man who had once gotten drunk with Rimbaud in Paris, fenced with Ezra Pound and debated with Freud was now at peace. At his favourite writing desk, he was holding his beloved Aga’s hand surrounded by his treasured tomes.
Eva was grieving, but she couldn’t show it. Her life as she had known it was gone. it was a sensation she
