I was beginning to feel hungry, but I didn’t dare bring the subject up yet. None of us had dared mention it since we left this morning. My stomach ached. Sometimes, when I turned my head too quickly, I felt dizzy. It must have been the same for Emmerich and Bauer.
There was a wood, about two hundred yards away, on the other side of the field, white with frost and really quite beautiful. Emmerich looked at it for a while, and even though we saw no smoke rising and though the snow between here and there was smooth and unmarked, something about it seemed to attract him. Then suddenly he went into the field and began walking across it without saying a word to us.
‘Off for a piss?’ Bauer joked.
Emmerich paid him no heed. He kept walking away from us. Sometimes the snow held his weight, sometimes it yielded and Emmerich sank up to his knees in it.
‘What’s got into him?’ Bauer asked. ‘Where’s he going?’
We watched him and waited. We thought he was going to come back. We waited a long time. Two hundred yards is a long way in the snow. Emmerich was struggling to move forward. But he was moving forward — he was moving away from us — and from where we stood, it looked as if he was leaving us. When he had almost reached the edge of the woods, we grudgingly followed his tracks. Bauer moaned out loud, and I moaned in my head. Even where the snow had not yet yielded, it did so under Bauer’s weight, and he was walking in front of me. So we crossed the whole field up to our knees in snow. We entered the wood, where we walked another dozen yards before finding Emmerich.
He was crouched in front of the entrance to a hole. He had one hand on a chimney which was barely raised above the ground. It was made from real flue bricks. The snow had melted around it, revealing a circle of dead leaves, pine needles and old, faded scraps of paper.
Bauer and I were so surprised that we needed a moment to ourselves. We contemplated Emmerich’s discovery in silence.
Then, patting the flue brick, Emmerich said, ‘Look at that. Pretty clever.’
‘Well, not that clever really,’ I said, ‘seeing as we found it.’
‘I’m talking about the idea. That’s what is clever.’
‘Sure, it’s a clever idea. But if it had been me, I’d have dug something further from the field, deeper inside the woods.’
Emmerich nodded his agreement. It was strange, but we were whispering.
‘How did you find it?’ Bauer asked, looking back at the white, unmarked field, towards the path that we’d taken. ‘You couldn’t see anything from back there.’
‘You could, a little bit. There was less frost on the trees, because of the rising heat.’
Bauer and I looked up at the trees.
We waited for a long time after that. I looked at the chimney that rose above the ground and the circle of melted snow around it. The silence was so profound, it seemed that if we leaned close enough to the narrow entrance in the earth, we might be able to hear breathing down there.
Finally, we called out. Only once, and not very loud. The holes, we knew, were not deep. There were never any tunnels branching out from the main part. He came out soon afterwards, using his elbows, made slow and clumsy by the layers of clothing he was wearing. The top layer, the one we could see, was a town coat with a lined collar. It was misshapen, as if inflated by all the layers underneath.
He stood up and immediately put his hands in the air. We heard nothing — not a word of protest. As if he’d been expecting it. We didn’t see anything in his eyes either — no fear, no despair. We could hardly even hear him breathing through his headscarf. All we could see of his face were his eyes beneath his woolly hat. They were ringed with dirt and fatigue, but not enough to hide his youth. Despite the tiredness they showed, they still shone with life.
In that silence, which was almost the same as the silence before we had called him out, we looked at him and smiled behind our scarves. We had been walking since daybreak without believing this would happen, and now Emmerich’s sharp eyes had brought him to us. I looked once again at the entrance to the hole, and wondered what had led him to hide here, so close to the edge of the woods, rather than deeper inside them. And I would never know the answer, because I couldn’t see how to ask him that question through gestures, nor how he could reply to me.
I signalled for him to lower his hands. Pointing at the entrance to the hole, and using his hands, Bauer asked him if there were any others down there. He shook his head to say no, and we believed him. We did not doubt his word at all.
The sound of wingbeats made us all look up, even the Jew. Frost fell from the trees while a grey shape flew between the branches and vanished. ‘It must have been there all this time,’ said Bauer.
‘We should get out of here too,’ said Emmerich.
Until this point, I had stayed crouching in front of the entrance. Now, I stood up. The cold, which I had forgotten, returned, seeping into my back and my legs. The Jew took a step backwards to let me pass. I was so close to him that I noticed a snowflake embroidered on his hat. I looked away and walked, first in line, towards the forest’s edge. I didn’t know if Emmerich or Bauer had seen the snowflake. I didn’t want them to see it now and to start feeling sorry for me.
It was not to make them feel sorry for me that I had, once and once only, told them about this weakness of mine. It was just to tell them, to lighten, momentarily, the weight and sadness I felt whenever I saw that kind of thing — like an embroidered snowflake — on a piece of clothing.
~ ~ ~
WE WENT BACK across the field. Standing on the path, Bauer and I looked over at the forest again. It didn’t jump out at you — the difference was subtle — but it was true that there was less frost on the trees above the hole.
While we were doing this, Emmerich retrieved the map from inside his coat. He spread it out on the snow. We tried to see where the sun was in the sky, although at this time of day it didn’t really indicate west or east. We could just about make it out behind the clouds. We turned the map around so that the cardinal points were in the right positions and we were facing north.
It was difficult to work out where we were. Bauer looked for the frozen pond on the map. If we found that, he thought, we would be able to orient ourselves. ‘No way have they put that on the map,’ I said. But he looked for it anyway. By chance, we recognised the crossroads where we’d chosen to go south as a joke. We began to understand where we were, and that, if we continued on this path, we would make a loop. We would reach the crossroads more quickly that way than by returning the way we had come.
Emmerich folded up the map, put it back in his pocket, buttoned up his coat, and off we went.
The Jew walked in front, in the old tracks that had frozen. He had fur mittens, better than our gloves. I estimated the thickness of the fur and imagined how warm they must be inside. Then I realised he had his hands above his head again. I told him he could lower them. He understood that I was talking to him, but not what I was saying. He turned around and opened his eyes wide. Using my hands, I signalled to him that he could lower his, and this time he understood.
We were no longer allowed to kill them where we found them, unless an officer was present to vouch for the fact. These days, we had to bring them back. Because it had happened a few times in our company that certain soldiers had come back claiming to have killed them, but afterwards, under Lieutenant Graaf’s questioning, it had emerged that either they had not really found any or, if they did find some, they had lost their nerve and let them escape into the forest. In the same way, that day — Emmerich, Bauer and I — we might, without Emmerich’s sharp eyes, have gone back to the company at nightfall and sworn on our lives anything we liked. That we’d shot two of them, for instance. How would they know if we were telling the truth? So that was why our commander had been obliged to tell us that we couldn’t do it like that any more, and that we always had to bring them back.