Running With Ivan, page 10
But how could I possibly tell him that? He’d think I’d gone mad. Completely mad.
‘The school carnival,’ I mumbled instead. ‘I want to be ready for it.’
The day of the school athletics carnival was sunny and warm. At my old school we’d held our carnivals at a sports centre, but Banks High had its own running track. It was a turf track and I liked running on it. But now, as I stood on the line, waiting for the start of the 800-metre race, I was overcome with an attack of nerves.
When the starting pistol fired, I froze, panic coursing through me. Go, I told myself, go. And finally I did. I pushed through the panic, but the damage was done. I’d already lost ground. And when, towards the end of the first lap, I still wasn’t at the front, I felt the confidence drain out of me.
That’s when I heard a familiar voice. ‘You can do it, Leo. You can still do it.’
It was George, his voice high with excitement as he screamed out to me. ‘Faster, Leo,’ he yelled, ‘faster.’
As I approached the start of the second lap, I pushed harder and once I was heading up to the final straight — my teeth gritted, my legs on fire — these were the words that buoyed me, spurring me on as, one by one, I overtook the runners ahead of me.
And although George wasn’t at the zone carnival the following week, his words stayed with me — no, more than that, they echoed inside me — as I waited for the race to begin.
You can do it, I told myself, you can do it.
This time, I ran harder than ever I had, furiously chasing down those other runners. And when, with a rush of exhilaration, I crossed the finishing line, there was no one in front of me. Not one person.
The house was empty when I let myself in. My muscles had begun to ache, so I ran myself a bath. I made it hot and filled the water so high it lapped at the rim of the bathtub. Tilting my head back, I let myself relax and by the time I finally got out, the water was cold. Once I’d dried off, I pulled on a pair of tracksuit pants, my sneakers and a T-shirt.
I was alone in the bedroom when Julia popped her head in, home early from work. ‘How was zone?’ she asked.
I shrugged, suddenly shy.
‘Come on,’ she said, ‘out with it.’
‘Good,’ I said softly.
She lifted an eyebrow. ‘Good, that’s it?’
A bubble of pride rose up inside me. ‘First,’ I admitted. ‘I came first.’
Her eyes widened as she started to smile. ‘First? Did you say first?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, smiling back at her. ‘I did.’
We’d just sat down for dinner when Dad came home. Slipping in beside me, he gave me a wink. ‘So, champ, how did you go?’
I shrugged. ‘Not bad.’
‘What do you mean, not bad?’
‘Come on,’ said Julia, her voice half stern, half joking, ‘tell him.’
I felt my face flush. ‘First,’ I mumbled.
‘First, against all those other runners?’ My dad looked at me in astonishment. ‘First,’ he said again, almost to himself this time. Then his voice rose. ‘You know, I wouldn’t have picked you for a runner. No one in our family could run to save themselves.’
‘Mum could,’ I said softly. ‘Mum could run.’ It was true: at school, she’d even won prizes.
Dad went quiet, so quiet I wished I hadn’t said anything at all. ‘You’re right,’ he said finally, ‘she could run. I’d forgotten.’
‘First,’ he repeated. ‘Fancy that.’
After dinner, Julia and Dad left the three of us — Troy, Cooper and me — to clean up the kitchen.
My dad winked at us. ‘Use it as a bit of bonding time,’ he said. Since we’d been living at Julia’s house, he’d been adding a wink to just about everything he said. I really hated it. ‘Just be normal,’ I wanted to hiss at him. ‘Just be normal again.’ But when I kept quiet, he gave another wink: my own special wink this time. I tried not to grimace.
‘First,’ mimicked Cooper as soon as Julia and Dad were out of earshot. ‘You think that makes you some sort of superhero, do you?’
He was stacking an unrinsed, unscraped dinner plate into the dishwasher. ‘Didn’t see you at zone,’ I wanted to snap back.
‘That’s going to clog up the filter,’ I said instead.
Cooper gave me the finger. ‘What are you going to do about it, go and dob to Pete?’
I winced. Pete? It’s Peter, not Pete. I wanted to scream. I didn’t though. I just stayed quiet, like I always did.
As soon as the kitchen was done, I was out of there. Heading through the garage, I let myself back into my hideaway. Each time, I’d enter with a sense of hopefulness. This time it will work, I’d tell myself. This time the music box will play. But over and over again, I’d be disappointed. The key wouldn’t turn. It simply wouldn’t. Annoyed and in despair, I’d flop down on the beanbag and stare at the music box, so sparkling, so beautiful, but useless now, completely useless.
The state of the room had also started to bother me. It was so bare and the bright fluorescent lighting made it even more stark and unwelcoming. So that evening I made a decision. If I couldn’t make the music box work, I could at least fix up the room a bit.
I went back into the garage and over to the pile of storage boxes, checking each label until I found the box I needed: the one marked Camping. I dragged it back into the room, closed the door, opened the box and looked inside.
It was all in there: all the gear we’d take camping. Mostly we’d go during the school holidays but sometimes we’d camp out for the weekend. I loved everything about it: putting up the tent and sleeping in it, cooking dinner on the camp stove, building a fire at night. So I’d been sad — really sad — when it got too difficult for Mum and we had to stop going.
Now, as I pulled out my blow-up mattress and pump, my blow-up pillow, my sleeping bag and my lamp, a mixture of emotions flowed through me — happiness, sadness, wistfulness, all scrambled together.
Then I gave myself a shake. The mattress isn’t going to inflate itself.
That’s what my dad used to say, so that’s what I told myself now. Blinking away the tears that had begun to fill my eyes, I pressed down on the pump and watched the mattress fill with air. The pillow I blew up myself, like a balloon. Edging the mattress into the far corner of the room, I laid the pillow on top of it, covering them both with my sleeping bag and placing my camping lamp on the floor beside them. When I stretched out on the mattress, I felt a soft surge of pleasure.
Mum would have been pleased, too; I was sure of it.
‘Wouldn’t it be more fun in a tent?’ she’d have asked me, a smile lighting her face: the same smile that lit up the photos on the metal shelves in front of me.
But as I stared at them now — those pictures of my laughing mum — a fresh wave of sadness crept over me. Then it was more than sadness. Then it was anger and frustration too: because I was powerless to do a thing, to change anything, to save anyone. And all the while, there was her music box, taunting me with its silence, mocking me for being so hopeless, so pathetic.
That’s when I lost it. That’s when a fury took over me: a fury so strong I wanted to grab that music box, throw it to the ground and watch it break.
So I snatched it from the shelf, swung it above my head and prepared to hurl it as hard as I could.
But I didn’t. I didn’t throw it down. For as I held it in my hands, I heard a noise. A note had escaped from it. Just one note. Just one tiny note. It was enough, though, to quicken my pulse and set my heart racing.
Nervously, gingerly, I put my thumb and index finger on the winding key and gave it a push. It moved! It actually moved. Then it turned, five times, ten, fifteen, twenty times. And still it kept turning. Twenty-five times, thirty times, but even then it wouldn’t stop. It turned forty times before it refused to move any further.
That’s when the music started to play. For a moment, I just stood there, transfixed, before, shaking myself, I returned the music box to its shelf and hurried to the door. ‘Ivan,’ I called out, my eyes closed in anticipation as I pushed the door open, ‘I’m coming.’
14
When I opened my eyes, I felt a surge of excitement. The garage was gone: it had completely disappeared.
I’d done it! I was back. Finally, I was back.
Looking around me, I frowned. Back where, exactly?
I wasn’t in the wardrobe and I wasn’t in Ivan’s house. I wasn’t in a house at all. Instead, I’d stepped onto a train. I was in an old-fashioned train carriage with rows and rows of red leather seats. All the seats were taken and there were people standing in the aisles. And although it wasn’t cold, they were all wearing overcoats — and every overcoat I could see had a yellow star sewn on the front of it.
The train door slammed behind me. When I turned to the sound of it, I saw two soldiers on the platform. They wore black uniforms with lightning stripes on their collars, stripes that formed the letters ‘SS’.
I knew about those letters. I knew about the SS. They were Nazi soldiers.
There was movement then, enough to make me lurch and nearly lose my balance. Reaching out to steady myself, I grabbed on to one of the people in front of me. He swung around, frowning.
‘Ivan,’ I said, a smile stretching over my face. ‘Ivan, it’s me!’
He smiled then, too: a small, wry smile. ‘So it is.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I wanted to say, ‘I’m sorry I left you there. I tried to come back to you.’ But the words wouldn’t come.
‘How on earth did you manage to get on the train?’ he asked me. ‘Didn’t anyone ask to see your documents?’
I shook my head. ‘I didn’t see anyone at all. I just stepped onto the train.’
‘Seriously? Just like that?’
I didn’t answer.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked him instead.
‘To Theresienstadt,’ he told me. ‘At least, that’s what the Germans are calling it. Before they came, it was Terezín. It’s an old fortress town.’
A fortress town. That didn’t sound so bad. It even sounded a bit exciting. ‘Why are they taking everyone there?’
‘Because we’re Jewish and Adolf Hitler thinks we should be kept away from everyone else.’
‘But why?’
Ivan lowered his voice. ‘So they can send us away on a transport like this and the bastards can steal our houses.’
I looked at him in horror. ‘What, even yours?’
‘Especially mine, I’d imagine.’
A picture of Ivan’s house — and with it, Ivan’s father — flashed through my mind. Guilt engulfed me yet again. ‘What happened to your dad?’ I asked, my voice very soft.
He didn’t answer. He just stared at me. He stared so hard I began to squirm. ‘What is it about you?’ he asked slowly. ‘Why do you just turn up like this?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, my voice rising. ‘I never know where I’ll end up. I — well, I just find myself there.’
But Ivan didn’t even seem to be listening. ‘It’s been months now,’ he said, his voice low, ‘and I’ve heard nothing from my father. Nothing at all. Maybe he’s already there, in Theresienstadt. Who knows? No one seems to have any idea.’
I looked up in surprise. Only months, not years this time.
Why was that, I wondered. Why should so little time have passed between this visit and the last one? Was there some logic to it, or was there no logic at all? Perplexed now, I fell silent.
Beside me, Ivan had gone quiet too, his head lowered, his body still. Then he glanced up again, surprise on his face, as though he’d forgotten I was still there. ‘Good God, Leo,’ he said, with a grimace, ‘what on earth are you wearing? You look like a tramp.’
I followed his gaze. So my tracksuit pants could do with a wash. My T-shirt was clean enough, though.
But Ivan was horrified. ‘Have you no pride at all?’ he chastised me. ‘You’re going to need something decent to wear.’
Beside him was a large suitcase with a brown leather duffel bag resting on top of it. Splattered across the duffel bag in thick white paint were the letters Db and the number 43. When I looked at the suitcase, the same number and letters were painted on it too.
‘What’s with the paint?’ I asked.
‘It’s my identification number. Db, that’s the name of the transport, and forty-three is my number. We were told to label our luggage in case it went missing.’
Reaching into his duffel bag, he pulled out a pair of trousers and a shirt and handed them to me. ‘Wear these,’ he said.
I just stared at him. ‘You can’t expect me to change here, in front of everyone?’
He gave an impatient grunt. ‘Not here, you fool. In the toilets.’ He tipped his head towards the end of the carriage. ‘Good luck getting through, though.’
Curling past people and luggage blocking the path, I manoeuvred my way down the aisle towards the toilet. Once inside the small cubicle, I tried to be quick. Instead of stripping my clothes off, I put Ivan’s straight over them.
Ivan wasn’t impressed when I returned. ‘My beautiful clothes and you still look a mess.’
I felt a jolt of irritation. The shirt was too long and the trousers were too big. Of course I wasn’t going to look great.
We’d been travelling for over an hour before the train came to a halt. When I looked out the window, I saw we were at a train station: Bauschowitz Station. A man in the aisle beside us shook his head, muttering something I couldn’t understand.
‘What’s he saying?’ I whispered to Ivan.
‘He said it’s not Bauschowitz, it’s bohušovice, and that the Germans are bastards for trying to change it. They’re renaming everything.’
When the train doors opened, I saw soldiers on the platform; they shouted at us to get off the train, and quickly. Once we were off, they shouted at us again — this time to start walking.
Ivan was shocked. ‘I can’t believe they’re making us walk there.’
It was a long walk, made harder by the weight of Ivan’s luggage — I carried the duffel bag while he dragged the suitcase — and it was such a relief to finally get there. Theresienstadt was just as Ivan had described — a town surrounded by walls: a fortress town. We entered through an archway and were directed into a room with a long row of tables pushed together. Ahead of us, a line of people were waiting in a queue.
When we reached the front of the line, I did as I was asked: I slid the duffel bag onto one of the tables. Because the suitcase was so much heavier, Ivan and I hauled it up together. Behind the table stood a man who, without a word, began to unzip Ivan’s duffel bag and riffle through it. He didn’t zip the bag up again when he was finished, just pushed it back to me before he turned to open Ivan’s suitcase. This time, he was more thorough. Digging his way into Ivan’s folded clothes, he felt each corner of the suitcase before pulling out a drawstring bag. Once he’d loosened the bag, he upended it. Out tumbled rings, cufflinks, brooches, bracelets. Scooping them all up, the man dropped them into his pocket. Then he closed the suitcase and, pointing to a far door, waved Ivan on.
I hurried after him. We were outside now, standing on a cobbled road. ‘Did you see what he did? He stole it. All of it.’
Ivan didn’t answer me, and then I understood why: an SS officer was standing close by, a group of boys clustered around him. In a loud, expressionless voice, he read out a list of names. Only one of them meant anything to me: Ivan Mandl. Hearing it made me flinch. I flinched again when the SS officer ordered Ivan to join the group. Some of the boys were clearly younger than me while others appeared older than Ivan. I followed them all to a building that looked like a school. It had double doors with large curved windows on the ground floor and, on the second level, a row of square windows that looked onto a park. Covering the park was an enormous circus tent.
The SS officer herded us all into the building, past a wide wooden staircase and into a long hallway with lots of doors leading off it. As I watched, the far door opened and a man stepped out: a man with a yellow star sewn onto his shirt pocket. He had a friendly face and, when the SS officer left, he grinned at me. Following him out into the hallway were two other men, also with yellow stars sewn onto their shirts. Neither of them smiled, but the one who’d grinned began to read out a list of names. Each time a name was called, a boy would lift his hand and be sent to stand with one of the two other men. When the names had all been read out, those two men each led a group of boys up the stairs.
That left six of us still waiting in the hallway. With a tilt of his head, that friendly man motioned us up the stairs and into a room crowded with bunk beds. Instead of double bunks, the room had triples, the top bunk so high it almost touched the ceiling. Most of the beds already had bags or suitcases on them.
I snuck a look at Ivan. If we’d been at school camp, I’d be running to save myself a middle bunk. Here no one moved. They were all listening to the man who’d brought us here. His name was Emil, he told us, and he was the supervisor of the room — Room 11 — which was a room for boys, mostly from Czechoslovakia, but also from Germany. And because German was the language everyone knew, this was the language we’d all be speaking in Room 11.
A boy called out, his voice loud and angry. I couldn’t understand a word he said.
Emil could. ‘The German language is not to blame for what has happened,’ he replied. ‘There are German boys here in our building; there are German boys who will be sleeping in this room with you. They are not to blame for this situation. They are simply here with the rest of us, because they are also Jewish. The German we speak here in Room 11 will never be Hitler’s German. It will instead be the German of Goethe and also of Schiller, who reminds us that “happy is he who learns to bear what he cannot change”. Good advice, I would say, even today.’
‘Who’s Schiller?’ I whispered to Ivan.
He gave me a withering look. ‘A poet.’
There were six new boys, Emil was telling us now, and eleven free bunks. The free bunks hadn’t been allocated so it was going to be a race to get one after all, and I really didn’t want to be stuck on a top bunk. Beginning to panic, I spun around, trying to work out which bunks were still free.
