‘But if the wind gets up,’ I added, ‘we should go back before dark. Never mind what the others think.’
Bauer sighed that Graaf would kill us if we did that. Half-resigned, half-cheerfully, I said: ‘Not as fast as the wind would.’
~ ~ ~
IT WAS LONG past daybreak. Finally, we decided to do what our commander had let us leave in order to do. Out of gratitude, more than anything. We felt indebted to him for having allowed us to escape the shootings. So it was time to pay back for what he’d given us. But deep down, we didn’t believe it would happen. We didn’t expect to find any. Only the gratitude we felt to our commander drove us on to try.
Graaf didn’t understand this kind of thing. He didn’t know that we could have been better soldiers. He thought that by ringing the iron, he could make us work the way he wanted. But the truth was that, at the slightest opportunity, we did things wrongly, and we were always seeking to get out of the work. When he looked at us, he did not see: ‘Give us a little and we’ll give you back a lot.’ It was no more difficult than that. But, as he saw nothing, Graaf gave nothing — apart from blows on the iron for no real reason at all.
We needed to head towards the woods, towards the forest. In winter, that was the only place they had a chance of surviving, and we of finding them. There was no point searching the Poles’ houses any more. The few they’d been hiding had already been caught.
We needed to leave the road now, follow tractor paths and search the forest. There would be no risk of falling in frozen potholes there, but we would certainly sink deeper in the snow. What we gained in stability we would lose in tiredness.
So we took smaller paths. When they led us through woods, we looked between the trees. We searched the air for smoke. Sometimes we went to take a closer look at tracks or something that had caught our eyes between the trees, then afterwards we retraced our steps. The crust of snow gave way beneath our feet, and occasionally we tripped. It’s difficult to walk in snow.
We came to a hill, and from there we saw some very clear, deep tracks. They might have been from last night, or the night before, or the night before that. It was impossible to guess how old they were. But in the end, that didn’t matter anyway because they went on too far for us to follow. They descended towards a vast plain, utterly white and bare all the way to the horizon. We tried to follow those tracks with our eyes for a while, and then we forgot about them.
But we stayed on the hill. It was time for a smoke. We removed our gloves, and the race against the cold began again. But I had the impression it wasn’t as harsh as before. I said to Emmerich and Bauer that it was maybe a bit less cold, that it felt two or three degrees warmer. Bauer lifted his nose and nodded tentatively to acknowledge that this might be true.
We put our gloves back on and we smoked. I didn’t dare look at Emmerich. We had not got any further with his problem. I looked at Bauer. Buried in snow up to his knees, he was sitting on the snow crust, which held under his weight, and turned away from the plain. He looked like he was sitting on a chair whose legs had disappeared in the earth. Emmerich seemed less worried than he had earlier. He’d taken off his helmet. His wool balaclava was so tight that it made his face look gaunt. He seemed older. But I would probably have looked older to him too, if I’d taken off my helmet.
Bauer said, ‘Apart from getting frostbite, what could happen to us here?’
He was referring to Emmerich’s son, of course, and the conversation we’d had before. It seemed a strange idea to bring that back up, even if he was trying to help. I examined Emmerich’s face to see if Bauer’s words had sunk him back into his worries, then I signalled to Bauer that there was no point talking about this again. He nodded to show he’d understood, and began looking around. Then, talking about all the wild animal tracks that ran over each other in the snow, he said: ‘There must be a lot going on here at night.’
In a peaceful voice, smiling, Emmerich murmured, ‘For me too, there’s a lot going on at night.’
‘You run in the snow at night?’ Bauer asked him.
‘A little bit, yeah,’ said Emmerich.
Bauer turned and pointed out the human tracks that crossed the plain all the way to the horizon, and asked: ‘So it was you who did that?’
‘Maybe so,’ Emmerich replied, smiling again.
Then he nodded to himself. The balaclava really did make his face look strange. But when he smiled, he didn’t look so old any more.
As Emmerich had brought the subject up, I lost my head for a second, forgetting that dreams are better kept to yourself, and I said, ‘I was on a tram last night.’
Emmerich and Bauer studied me, their expressions asking me silently what on earth I was talking about. ‘You two as well,’ I replied. ‘All three of us were there.’
Bauer shook his head. ‘I don’t remember that.’
Emmerich looked up at the sky and said, ‘If only that were possible, taking a tram at night. We could go and eat somewhere, then come back to sleep in the gymnasium.’
Sitting on his snow chair, Bauer asked, ‘Why come back to the gymnasium?’
Emmerich and I agreed with him.
Then we talked about it some more.
I had been right: the cold was less severe than before. To finish our cigarettes, we took off a glove each, and it was less painful than it had been by the frozen pond.
Now Emmerich looked like he was thinking about my tram. I didn’t know where it was taking him. He stared at me while he took a drag on his cigarette, which was now so small that I had the feeling he would end up swallowing it.
I inhaled everything I could from mine, too, and gave Emmerich a look that meant I was lending him my tram so he could go and eat somewhere. He didn’t understand, of course. It’s not easy to give someone a nonexistent tram.
And again, in that moment, if I’d lifted my eyes to the horizon — I mean, again, if it had been possible to see as far as that warm Galician spring — I would have seen Emmerich looking even older than he did now with his balaclava, leaning against the pillar of the bridge. And everything Bauer and I had managed to do, it was almost nothing. The only courage we’d shown was in not turning our eyes away while he panted and spat. But we were so upset, we did not have the courage to touch him or talk to him. And as soon as we stood up, Bauer and I, the mild spring rain began to fall, and we heard it, that rain, on the deck of the bridge. And the two grey curtains it made on either side of us closed us in with Emmerich, with his now dead body and his haggard face, and I knew that we should say a prayer or something. But Bauer looked at me and I looked at Bauer because we no longer dared look at Emmerich and all the blood he’d lost. And for a long time afterwards, to ease my mind, I told myself that the spring rain falling above and beside us, making such a din, had spoken for us. Because, that day in Galicia, someone should have spoken.
~ ~ ~
WE CAME DOWN from the hill where we had smoked. Bauer whined like a dog that he should never have sat down in the snow, that he felt cold all over now. Emmerich told him to stop, though he said it lightly, not really meaning it. Bauer yelled at us that he’d decided to whine until dark. We found another road and stayed on it for a while. It was a relief not to sink into snow at every step. On the whole, we preferred the frozen potholes, even if they were dangerous.
But eventually we had to go back to the tractor paths that wound their way through snowy woodland.
Just before midday, we stopped to get our breath back and rest our limbs. Bauer looked at the sky and thought he could tell that the weather was going to change, that it would be even colder tomorrow. But I didn’t believe him.