It was a cocktail party with notables—
professors and their mates—sipping
Muscadet, drinking Lowenbrau, even
a gin and tonic—and others, a physician
from the college clinic and me, a spouse
of a graduate student, awkward, out
of place. The physician took pity on me
and told me about the train, the one
he was supposed to take, the last
one to leave an occupied city where
Jews were being rounded up, street
by street, yellow triangle by yellow
triangle. He and his wife had tickets
and knew if they got out on that train,
by three pm, the iron rail would take
them to freedom. But their car broke
down. They had to walk, run suitcase
in hand, miles to the station. They arrived
to the grind of iron on iron, the whistle,
the train gone. He bartered—it cost him—
for tickets on the last train, a night train,
that, hours later with no guarantee,
they rode across a valley through
the pass into the mountains to freedom.
The train he was to take had been
stopped before the border. He stopped
too, eyed me, checking if I had heard him—
this elegant man who smoked a pipe,
who wore a beret and dressed in
a sporty Wooster suit—making sure
I had followed him from the car to
the disappointment to the train.
And I had. Then he began again to
tell me about the train he’d planned
to take, how it was halted by
Gestapo and all the Jews, passport
by passport, yellow triangle by yellow
triangle, were herded off the train,
marched to a hillside, mere shadows
in the evening light yet clearly visible
to those left on the train, and shot.
“He said, “Fate is fickle, no?”
I said, “You were lucky,” and touched
his jacket which was soft and smooth.
“No. Not luck,” he said. “Fate. It was destined.”
A week later, I heard he was in his office,
and stood to go to greet a patient
when he had a heart attack and fell,
his body at such an angle between the desk
and the door to make a perfect doorstop.
The door not budging, no one could
get in as he cried out, “Help. Help,”
until a custodian unhinged the door.
By then, the good doctor was dead. Witnesses
said, “What bad luck to die that way.”
I wanted to say—but didn’t, “Not luck”—
those wraiths on the hill—“It was destiny.”