The Last Train Out
When a single stamp turns a citizen into a stranger
They gave us four hours to decide what a life was worth carrying.
By the time the notice came, I had already lived in that house for fifty-three years.
I had watered the fig tree in the courtyard, and I had buried two dogs beneath it.
Now a young officer stood in the doorway, holding a list I was not permitted to read.
My wife packed in silence, folding shirts as though could restore some order to the world.
I have thought about that silence more often than about anything the officer said.
We took the linen, a few photographs, and the small brass clock that had belonged to her mother.
Everything else remained exactly where it had always been, waiting for people who would never come.
The station smelled of coal and of the bread that a woman was selling from a covered basket.
I remember that smell more clearly than I remember the faces of the men who watched us go.
Memory, I have since learned, keeps the strangest things and lets the important ones slip away.
The train was already crowded when we found the last two seats near a broken window.
A cold came through the glass, and my wife pretended not to feel it.
As the wheels began to turn, I did something I have never entirely forgiven myself for.
I did not look back at the city, because I was afraid that looking would break me.
So my last image of home is not the but the dirty floor of a railway .
Other passengers spoke in low voices, as if the wrong word might still be overheard.
An old man beside me held a birdcage on his knees, though the cage was empty.
When I asked him about it, he said only that the bird had known better than to come.
For a long time I did not understand him, and now I understand him completely.
The border came at dawn, marked by nothing more than a striped pole and two tired soldiers.
They stamped our papers without looking at us, as though we had already ceased to be persons.
Beyond that pole the fields looked , the same grass, the same sky.
Yet I knew that something had changed that could never be changed back.
I had become, in the space of a single , a man without a country.
My wife took my hand and said, very quietly, that we were still here, and that it was enough.
She was wrong, of course, but I have spent the rest of my life trying to make her right.
The train moved on into a country that did not know my name, and would not learn it for years.