The Madagaskar Plan (29 page)

Her brother hugged her fiercely, his embrace so consuming that she couldn’t free her arms to hold him. It was like being gripped by a skeleton. Madeleine sensed that he had recognized her from the start and was playing a game.

He released her, the laughter gone. “Why are you here?” he demanded. “You should be in Britain, safe as the king.” He’d been angry that she fled abroad and he had not. He bombarded her with questions, his breath rank with tooth decay.

“The king died last year,” she replied stupidly. “There’s going to be a queen.” Her brain felt cracked—how could she explain everything that had happened to her?

Buried in the detail of Eden’s Evacuation Bill to remove the British Jews was a queasy subclause that covered mixed marriages. The simplest solution was a shotgun annulment that led to deportation. Those who chose to stay married had to obtain a licence for their spouses. Any offspring were subjected to strict conjugal guidelines: no child of a Jewish parent could marry another part-Jew; nor could their children or grandchildren. Thus, within three generations the problem would cease to exist (as defined by the Nuremberg Laws). The lawyers in Germania fumed until Hitler was reported to have said they should “turn a blind eye to certain little irregularities.” He wouldn’t fall into the trap of starting a world war over a handful of defilers. Before Madeleine was flown to Tana, Lyall and Russell made her sign the divorce papers Cranley had prepared. The ink removed her legal protection.

“I was deported,” she said. It was all she could manage.

“What about your husband? Why didn’t you move to America? You were rich.”

She shook her head.

“You should at least have been sent to the Western Sector.”

“I was. Antzu.”

“Then what are you doing on the train?” Every question sounded like an accusation.

Jacoba appeared at her shoulder; she had been admiring the horses. “I told you, the Line of Fates! It brought you together.”

“Who’s she?”

“My friend.”

“I’m going to Antzu,” said Jacoba. “Back to civilization.”

“Good. You can take Leni with you.” Abner had always presumed to tell her what to do: the tyranny of the younger brother. “If you walk through the night you’ll be there by tomorrow.”

“No,” said Madeleine.

Her brother made a scornful tutting noise. “Don’t tell me you’re joining the rebellion. Leni, you were never a fighter.” During their clashes at home, no matter how viciously she struck him, Abner remained unscratched; the slightest thump in return and her skin was mauve. “Stay with your friend,” he said.

“I’m not going to Antzu!”

“It’s the safest place on this island—”

“Ben-Ze’ev doesn’t think so.”

“That’s just propaganda, to make the Poles think we have it as bad as they do—to get them to fight. We need their numbers. But you’ve got a chance they never will.” He unhooked his glasses and looked at her with naked eyes. “I still don’t understand why you were on the train. If we hadn’t ambushed it, you’d have ended up in the Sofia Reservation.”

“I was in the hospital—”

“You’re ill?”

“They took my clothes, my papers … everything. Afterward, I couldn’t speak.”

The shock of the birth had made her mute. When she was discharged, her voice was still dead. She stood in the office of a Hauptsturmführer who demanded to know what sector she was from, where her documents were. Her unblinking, rag-doll silence incensed him. He bent her over his desk, loosened the buckle of his belt; she didn’t care what he did. She counted six lashes, none of them provoking a single murmur. All sensation had narrowed to the knife point of a single image: Cranley examining the blood on his handkerchief as she was led away. Before the seventh blow, the Hauptsturmführer was tear-stricken, babbling on about the pressure he was under, the things they made him do, how much he missed his wife and daughters. He scribbled a chit and thrust it at her. A lorry drive, then a train journey, and she was at the abattoir. Of the days before that—the tests and probing, her weeping, unsuckled breasts—she refused to think.

“I’m going back there,” she said, unshakable. “To Mandritsara.”

“It’s in the Sofia Reservation,” replied her brother. “What the Nazis call a ‘special treatment facility.’” His tone became kinder. “I’ve just found you, Madeleine. I don’t want to lose you again.”

“I was pregnant. They stole my babies.”

“Then they’re already dead.”

He was so matter-of-fact that she wanted to slap him. Madeleine searched his eyes, refusing to believe him, and for the first time she realized that her younger brother had known too much death for it to startle him.

“The doctor said they were good specimens. He wouldn’t kill them.”

Abner reached for her. “I’m sorry, Madeleine. Men with the fight of Samson are taken there and never return.” His tone remained flat. “We hear stories of experiments, people injected with malaria, typhus. Drugs they use on us like we’re lab rats—”

Madeleine covered her ears as though she were a child and howled. “How can you tell me this?”

“To stop you from going. To spare you.” His voice swelled, then caught. “The b-best you can hope is they were too young to know w-what was happening.”

There was a cry from the train: “Abner!” On the roof, one of the Vanilla Jews pointed toward the ridge of the valley. Silhouetted against the rain clouds was a line of men in pith helmets carrying rifles.

“The Jupo,” said her brother, hooking his glasses on. “We need to move.”

“What?”

“Police.”

“But they’re Jews.”

“Yes.”

“So why do we have to go?”

The Jüdische Polizei (Jupo) had been instituted by the SS, its role to maintain everyday public order and badger the resistance groups.

“Stay here,” said Abner. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He grinned, revealing a glimpse of rotten teeth. “I’m so glad I found you, Leni.”

Once he was gone, Madeleine strode toward the open grass and peaks in the distance. The sun was dipping in the sky.

Jacoba caught up with her, tugging her sleeve until she stopped. “Your brother’s right. He’s only trying to save you.”

“My children are alive. I know it.” She rubbed the nape of her neck, that spot Burton loved to nip. “Neither of you can stop me.”

“At least say good-bye. I never had that chance with my daughter. What if you never see him again?”

The Vanilla Jews bustled around them, preparing to move out. Through the gaps between the cattle trucks, Madeleine saw a procession being led away toward Zimety by men on horseback; at the rear Danuta and the few other children were skipping along. Madeleine thought of the newsreels she’d seen of Soviet Jews being marched to Siberia: human lines five, ten miles long, trudging endlessly east. Halifax had said no British Jew need suffer that wretchedness.

“Ben-Ze’ev is sending me to Antzu,” said Abner when he returned. He was carrying a rifle, a knapsack, and water bottles, his hair tied in a ponytail. “The Jewish Council needs to know that more of us are being sent to the reservations. They can’t ignore it anymore.”

“Jacoba can keep you company,” replied Madeleine sourly. “She’s keen to get back to her job at the stables.”

“Leni, please, we don’t have time to argue. The train’s about to be blown. That will bring more police.”

“But they’re Jews—what does it matter?”

He started marching her away. “Last time we came across them, it ended in blood. The Jupo wants to confiscate our weapons, hand us over to the Nazis.”

The locomotive exploded.

On the ridge, a cry went up from the Jewish Police. They streamed down the slope as if charging into battle, before being overtaken by mounted officers. The horses were wild and half-starved; the ground thundered with hooves. Madeleine and Abner fled in the opposite direction, wet grass whipping their knees. Jacoba couldn’t match their speed; Madeleine had to keep slowing to encourage her.

Soon the three of them were alone in a dark emerald landscape beneath bulging clouds. The air was hot and asphyxiating. Apart from the chill of the hospital ward, Madeleine had no recollection of being cold since she’d arrived in Madagaskar. She yearned for cooler weather, like the long, freeing walks she and Burton used to take on the Suffolk coast when the sea vanished in hoary mists and the only sound was the crunch of their boots in the shingle. Or hiking in the Tyrol with her father when she was a girl; every year he took her on a trip alone. They drank in the mountain air, walked in silence for hours, Madeleine comforted by his solid pace and the tick-tock of his thoughts, even if he rarely voiced them. Abner fumed because he wasn’t invited. When she returned home, she found buttons missing from her blouses, her secret tin of sweets depleted.

A question settled among her memories, one she should have asked earlier. “Abner,” she said quietly, “what about our parents?”

His hand was clamped around his jaw. “Only now do you think of them.” He shouldered his rifle and began to roll up a sleeve. “Papa’s gone to America.”

“And left the rest of you?”

A miserable snort. “One of our expressions. He died on the crossing. No illness, nothing from the guards. He woke one morning and had … given up. Just empty eyes and barely a whisper for us.” His grief sounded fresh. “Three days later, they dropped him in the sea, somewhere off Südwest Afrika.”

She felt Jacoba take her hand and was grateful for her sweaty palm. “Mutti?”

“She’s still alive.”

“Did she ever forgive me?”

“She talks about you all the time:
Madeleine was such a good daughter, so clever to leave for England—let’s be thankful one of us is safe
.”

“When I arrived in Antzu, I spent weeks searching for her, for all of you. I knocked on every door in town.”

“Even if you’d tried the Ark, you wouldn’t have found us. After the first uprising, we left for Zimety; it was safer. She’s there with Leah.” Madeleine’s elder sister.

“How are they?”

“Mutti’s old, sick. She has malaria. Leah got married, here in Madagaskar. It was a happy day—for once you could forget the rain and mosquitoes and Nazis.” He smiled at a memory.

Madeleine thought of her lonely wedding. To avoid being overwhelmed by guests on the groom’s side, Jared had made it a small affair—though she suspected it was to save their embarrassment as much as hers.

“And baby Samuel?”

“He joined the Vanillas after me. Grew to be a fine man.” Abner’s voice wavered. “Also gone to America, a few months ago, on a raid. One of the first martyrs of the new rebellion. See for yourself.”

He finished rolling up his sleeve and offered her his forearm. At the wrist was a tattooed number: 6112195. Above it were a series of other digits, eight in total, crudely inked on the skin. Abner pointed to the last one, which was laced with scabs. “That’s Samuel.”

“I don’t understand.”

“A tradition among the Vanillas. Each time a comrade falls, one of us adds his number to our own, so they’re not forgotten. We’re walking memorials. A day will come when we mark every number in stone.”

“Who are the others?”

“Men who fought for a better future.” He sounded so pious.

Madeleine stared at the list of numbers on his arm. During her first months in London, she wrote to her parents every week and received curt replies. Then the letters from Vienna stopped. For years afterward, she tried to find out what had happened. She didn’t know where her family was on Himmler’s Barbarossa date, whether they had been shipped to Madagaskar or Siberia. No one could help at the Red Cross; the Foreign Office rebutted her and the lines of other Jews with painstaking indifference, before the refugee department was transferred to the Colonial Office. She beseeched and complained her way through tiers of officials, till her tenacity brought her to the office of Jared Cranley. He was so considerate, insisted that she have a cup of tea and a biscuit while they chatted, paid no attention to her shabby dress. By then her search was habitual; it filled the few lonely hours when she wasn’t working. She was resigned to the belief that her mother and father, brothers and sister were dead—or, if not burned or buried, as out of reach as her childhood. Madeleine had mourned them long ago, said Kaddish for eleven months—for herself, not God—then taken a pair of scissors to the ends of her hair.

Hearing their fates now, she experienced the shallow, passing sadness of someone else’s tragedy, as if reading death notices in a newspaper. Her heart was too full of grief for Burton and the twins to accommodate any more.

She stopped walking and touched her brother’s arm. “Which one’s Papa?”

“He died before we were numbered. Globus brought that in. One of his ‘innovations’ to control the population. I keep Father here.” Abner patted his chest. “You broke his heart when you left.”

“You broke mine when you stayed. We could have gone to New York. All of us. As a family.”

“The world closed its doors, remember?” His voice became mild, sly. “Mutti would never forgive me if I added your number. Don’t go to Mandritsara, Leni.”

She showed him her unmarked wrist. “I don’t have one.”

“How come?”

Madeleine shrugged, then said, “You can’t stop me.” She stepped away from him.

“And what are you going to do after?” He spoke in the same mocking, cross tone from their childhood, as though the privations of Madagaskar had changed nothing. “Swim to England?”

“Hush now,” soothed Jacoba.

“You’re going to swim with her?”

“No. But let the girl have some hope.”

Suddenly Madeleine wanted to be alone. The oppressive script of family life, softened in her memory by separation, was in full voice again. When she’d first arrived in London, she’d sometimes thought it wasn’t only Hitler she’d fled.

Abner lowered his gun, not aiming it at her but allowing the muzzle to float in her direction. She ignored him, took a bearing from the fading sun, and determinedly walked away. As if a switch had been flicked, it began to rain.

“Where are you going?” he called after her. When she didn’t reply he shouted, “Silly girl! You’re heading in the wrong direction.”

“Mandritsara’s north.”