In the Workshop
BENJAMIN, WE MUST SPEAK.”
He’s getting out of his car when she appears in the shadows. She can hear the sudden gulp, the intake of air. She may have startled him, but her arrival can’t be a surprise. The Memler will have been to him long ahead of her, and someone will have told him of her own disappearance from the proving grounds.
She knows she’s not public news: she’s read newspapers along her travel route, sometimes heard news on the radio in various bus stations across the Southwest. But she’s vanished from a secure weapons facility; the Memler has told the Americans that she’s a Russian spy. Unless they imagine she was eaten by a bear, they will be looking for her.
It’s taken her a week to get here. The first day, when she climbed down the mountain, she hitchhiked. She figured she had until noon before they realized she was missing and sent out an alarm. She found a ride to Las Vegas, and then went by Greyhound to Albuquerque.
She’s been the hare in front of the hounds for most of the last thirteen years, so she’s adept at hitching along back roads, or hoisting herself into an open boxcar on a slow-moving freight. Away from the proving grounds she even relaxes at times. No soldiers stopping buses, poking through hay, looking for a Jew on the run. Americans are friendly, by and large, even trusting.
A woman in a small Texas town tells Martina she’s known hard times herself, goes into her kitchen for an apple and a sandwich of bread and drippings. The fat on the bread: Sofie Herschel’s nursery, the prism on the floor, flashes through Martina’s head, makes her momentarily weak: Sofie, the nursery, her mother, her daughter, the light itself have all been stolen from her. The Texas woman gives her sugary iced tea to revive her, takes her into the house to lie down on an old sofa that smells of cats and buttered popcorn.
In St. Louis, she mingles with the crowds at the bus depot, buying a boxed lunch, lingering at the women’s toilet, stopping on the benches in the waiting room to pore over an abandoned paper. No one is paying attention. She buys a ticket and finds a seat near the rear exit, wide awake at every stop on the route. The bus rolls into downtown Chicago at nine in the morning.
A nickel in a phone booth gets her the information that Professor Dzornen is in Chicago but is spending the day at the Argonne lab. No, she won’t leave a message, she’ll call again tomorrow.
She rides a bus from the center of the city to the neighborhood around the University of Chicago where Benjamin Dzornen has bought a house, a mansion, she thinks when she walks over to look at it.
She imagines ringing the bell in the middle of the morning, of seeing Ilse Dzornen’s shock giving way to fury: You were supposed to be dead.
There’s no record of a Martina Saginor’s arrival in America: she had found passage to the States on a passport plucked from a purse in a crowded Vienna train station. Martina spent a week in Vienna on her long route from Moldova to America. She hoped her daughter might have returned looking for her. None of the refugee aid societies had any trace of K?the Saginor, in England or in Austria. Vienna was in ruins, bleak, hunger-filled, mother, aunts, cousins, all dead, nothing to keep Martina, and so she continued west, found a way to get passage on a ship in Lisbon bound for Montreal, slipped across the border to America, to Chicago, to Nevada. How adept she’s become at crossing borders.
She’s sure Benjamin never told Ilse about her arrival fifteen months ago, how stunned he was. His shocked face, his stammer: you survived, anyway, that’s good.
Yes, I survived, by luck first: our train to Sobibor Concentration Camp broke down, we were herded off in the snow, many shot, but the snow was falling thick. I fled to the woods and survived somehow, with partisans, with farmers, until the war’s end found me in Moldova and then detention in paranoid Stalin’s camps and finally the long foot journey across the mountains back to Austria.
What did she want? he asked. My life, my physics, a job, a real job, but he bundled her off to Nevada. So quickly that she was on a train with a security pass before she had spent a night in Chicago. His hollow promise that this was temporary while he found a real place for her.