His fingers became sticky.
He had to crawl inside the soot-smelling little building attached to the big oven and smokehouse; he groped around in the honey-sweet darkness and soon found the small recess.
He was already making plans; he could not imagine ever giving this paper box to anyone.
Council members had raised the possibility of beating all the cats to death, down to the last one. Some people did this without official authorization because it gave them meat to feed their raging dogs, going mad with hunger. It’s not simple to kill a cat. It must be bludgeoned on the head to daze it; then, having a firm grip on its hind legs, one must keep knocking its head against the chopping block or house wall or anything else until not even a sigh comes out of its mouth.
Then it is dead.
He became almost cheerful at the thought that he would never give it back to anyone; he was very satisfied with himself; the hell with all my relatives, I’ll come up with a story.
He had to push back the sticky drying racks carefully and see to it that under every second rack the tray would slide into its proper place. As if his escape had freed him from something whose weight he had not acknowledged until now; or rather, because of the paper box, the seriousness of the situation now made some sense, retroactively. No matter what happened, the gold promised a future.
In those days, farms on the periphery of the town had no electricity, but the flames in the fireplace gave ample light.
Sitting in the dark, looking into the flames and thinking about the hidden box, fright seeped back into him, filled him to the brim and strained his chest.
I’m a deserter, I’m taking part in a mass desertion, and to whom would he have to account for this.
Nobody could stop the prisoners, either, who at the news of the evacuation managed to hide somewhere and now were coming out of hiding; and maybe a few broke out of the burning barracks and could crawl, driven mad by thirst, as far as the next corpse.
In the infernal noise and chaos accompanying the evacuation command, the guards could not maintain order without shooting at least two dozen people dead, though according to Himmler’s last instruction of the day no harm should come to any prisoner. But instead of taking them out to the fields behind the camp, where in long ditches corpses dug out of earlier mass graves had been burning for weeks, they carelessly left the new bodies to their fate. And these corpses, dangerous prey for man and beast, now lay around everywhere on the camp’s open areas and empty roads.
The flammable human colloid gathered in the ditches, fat and marrow arranged in fine layers according to their relative density; at night, the religion teacher or the retired banker watched as fires burst to life with fat and flames flaring up from the depths.
With their glow, fires lit up the low-growing forest, which still somewhat concealed the camp from unwanted and unauthorized eyes.
Searching for anything potable, the living were roaming about or, hardly differing from the corpses, lying about in the smell of burning hair and scorched nails.
Although they felt no hunger, they had an obsessive image of some moisture that must be found in the fibers of dead muscles.
He was surprised to have hit on this unexpected idea.
On tree branches, icy dew collected every dawn. On the mossy partitions of the barracks, fog settled every evening. Some moisture could be sucked from the moss, the branches could be licked, but there was no water anywhere. They could anticipate how sweetly moisture would spread all over their tongues.
Because the electricity had not been cut off, nobody made it across the gate or fences alive.
In such a short time and in such cold, flesh would not dry out, that’s what he thought to himself too.
A boy a little older than he, crouching by the wall of one barracks, was trying to figure out how to cut the electricity in the fence, how to create a short circuit. Because beyond the electrified barbed wire the Niers river rolled lazily along, its waters strained clean by its sandy bed. He stared at this boy, in his heart feeling great warmth toward him while they discussed the electricity, but he had no idea from where he might have known him. He looked at him from afar, from close up, but he didn’t dare ask, because he was afraid of being mistaken and then it would become clear that he was the victim of a terrible delusion.
Maybe they should dig out one of the fence’s supporting poles, which, with its weight, would yank out or snap the electrified wire.
While they were talking, he seemed to have heard the gurgling of water near the grassy shore.
But even for that, they needed a spade, a shovel, anything.
They’ll dig with their ten fingers.
And then he couldn’t stand it anymore and asked.
No, not him, it’s possible that he knew not him but his twin brother, the one who burned to death along with the others, answered the older boy, but his twin brother wouldn’t have survived anyway, he was getting so damp for weeks but was unable to urinate, and when he succeeded a little, just imagine, he peed blood.
They should get up and go look for something. They won’t get anywhere sitting around here making plans.
The continuation he dreamed the next night. Everything remained the same. The misty grayness was the same. Although he knew he was dreaming, his mind did not spare him, it allowed the sticky smell of flesh to cross the spreading smoke; the nearby gurgling of the slowly flowing Niers remained the only hope.
He was amazed that in the meantime the boy, who unfortunately was not his twin brother, managed to create a short circuit, and only a lone church candle placed on the long shiny walnut table illuminated the Pfeilen council chamber. When anyone raised his voice, every word reverberated loudly under the dark brick vaults.
All sorts of familiar things.
Throughout the centuries, council members had grown accustomed to the echo in the council chamber; they certainly took it into account in their speeches, but now none of them wanted to hear his own voice multiplied or magnified many times over. Rather softer, as soft as possible, soft so that the unavoidable would be no weightier than necessary.
The burning ditches must be extinguished, covered over. The bodies left behind must be buried.
But nothing happened the way they discussed it in softer-than-soft tones, or in the way the secretary, in thrifty phrases, noted it down.
Early the next morning about fifty people gathered on the square in front of the city hall. Besides the four councillors and the secretary, all in the upper age bracket, there were hardly any adult men among them.
At the same time, at the edge of the Niersbroek apple orchard, three ungainly figures appeared, their heads wobbling on long bare necks as they walked.
He knew they were Hungarians, like their three forgotten bicycles.
The light stripes of their clothes and caps flashed among the low, wet tree trunks, velvety with gentle moss. They looked pitiful, not the way they would look later, in the movies, and they were aware of this. At their slightest move, foul smells poured from their mouths, their bodies, and their rags; they couldn’t ignore it. This peaceful late winter seemed unreal, as did the smells, the forest, the trees, and the fact that in this external world probably nothing had changed. One of them fell back to urinate behind a tree; this boy, familiar from somewhere, or maybe the twin brother of the one who stayed alive, leaned his forehead against the tree and also on his heavy, sharpened stake cut from an oak tree; each of the other two men had one just like it.
These two immediately took cover behind the drying shed.