“You will help the old man? Help him out of this damned country. I’ll go now. Wait to the count of twenty, then follow me.”
He left. I counted to twenty, got up from my seat, walked after him to the rear of the car. I found him waiting on the trestle between the two cars.
He said, “Kurt Neumann in Pisek. You remember that?”
“I’ll remember.”
“I cannot stop the train. They would remember. I can go to the front, talk with the engineer. I can pretend to see something on the track and he will slow down to twenty kilometers an hour. When the train slows you will jump. You understand?”
“I understand.”
“Good.” He hesitated. Then he straightened up sharply, and his right arm swung upward and his heels clicked sharply together.
“Heil Hitler!”
The words were sharp and clear over the roar of the train. I brought up my own hand in the familiar salute, met his eyes with mine, echoed his words.
“Heil Hitler!”
Chapter 2
When the telephone rang to begin it all, I was sitting at my desk typing up the last few pages of an eight-page report which Diane Blumberg would submit as her term paper in Shakespearean Tragedy. The paper was one I’d originally written several years ago for an NYU student. Since then it had made appearances at Barnard, Adelphi, and Fordham, and now Miss Blumberg would add Hofstra to the list. It was one of my favorites, built upon the thesis that Hamlet was intended by its author as a comedy, a sort of farcical satire upon the earlier Elizabethan tragedy-of-blood cliché. The neurotically indecisive Hamlet, the accidental murder of the buffoon Polonius, the manner in which revenge is constantly thwarted by Hamlet’s own incompetence – these and other elements combined to make a legitimate if unconvincing case for my argument. Highly original! An unlikely but engaging viewpoint. A-, the instructor at NYU had written. I’d dearly love to see the play performed as a comedy, said a professor at Adelphi, who’d given the author of record an A. Barnard and Fordham gave the paper a B, the former musing that the student didn’t seriously mean all of this, do you? and the latter offering jesuitical disputation but giving grudging praise to the originality and logical organization of the argument.