He sat for fifteen minutes more, then said, “Let’s get over to the house. Looks deserted. Maybe we could get some food and be on our way into the woods on the other side of the house.”
“Whose getting ants in their pants now?” O’Brien said.
Two Hawks did not reply. He rose and took the switchblade from his pocket and stuck it between the front of his belt and his belly. He walked on ahead of O’Brien, who seemed reluctant to leave the imagined safety of the woods. Before Two Hawks had gone ten yards, O’Brien had run up to him.
“Take it easy,” Two Hawks said. “Act as if you had every right to be here. Anybody seeing us from a long ways off might not think anything about it if we’re casual.”
There was a ditch between the edge of the field and the road. They leaped across the little stream in its bottom and walked across the dirt road. The ground was wet but not muddy, as rf it had rained a few days ago. There were deep ruts, however, that looked like wagon tracks. And there were tracks of cattle and piles of excrement.
“No horses,” Two Hawks said to himself. O’Brien said, “What?” But Two Hawks had opened the wooden gate and was ahead of him. He noticed that the hinges were also of wood, secured to the gate by wooden pins. The grass in the yard was short, kept so by several sheep with very fat tails. These raised their heads and then shied away but uttered no baas. Two Hawks wondered if they had vocal cords; it seemed unlikely that normal sheep would have been silent during the long time he had listened in the woods.
Now he could hear the clucking of hens from behind the house and the snort of some large animals in the barn. The house itself was built in the shape of an L with the long part of the leader facing the road. There was no porch. Big thick logs, the interstices between them chinked up by a whitish substance, formed the structure of the house. The roof was thatched.
On the smooth wood of the door was painted a crude representation of an eagle. Above it was painted a large open blue eye over which was a black X.
Two Hawks raised the wooden latch that locked the door and pushed in. He had no chance to follow his plan to walk boldly in. At that moment, a woman walked around the corner of the house. She gasped and stood still, staring at them with large brown eyes. Her brown skin turned pale.
Two Hawks smiled at her and greeted her in what he hoped was passable Rumanian. He had tried to gain some fluency in the language from a fellow officer of Rumanian descent while stationed in Tobruk, but he had not had time to master more than a few stock phrases and the names of some common items.
The woman looked puzzled, said something in an unfamiliar tongue, and then walked towards them. She had a rather pretty face, although her shape was a little too squat and her legs too thick for Two Hawks’ taste. Her hair was blue-black, parted in the middle and plastered down with some sort of oil. Two braided pigtails hung down her back. She wore a necklace of red and tightly coiled seashells, an open-necked blouse of blue cotton, a wide belt of leather with a copper clasp, and a skirt of bright red cotton. It reached to her ankles. Her feet were bare and smeared with dirt, mud, and what looked like chicken excrement. A real peasant, thought Two Hawks. But if she’s friendly, that’s all that counts.
He tried some more Rumanian, got nowhere, and switched to German. She replied in the same guttural language she had used before. Although it did not sound Slavic to him, he spoke in Bulgarian. His knowledge of this was even more limited than his Rumanian. She evidently did not understand this either. However, she spoke the third time in a different speech than her first. This resembled Slavic; he tried again with Bulgarian, then with Russian, and Hungarian. She only shrugged and repeated the phrase. After hearing several more repetitions, Two Hawks understood that she was doing as he was, that is, trying out a foreign language of which she knew very little.
But when she saw that Two Hawks did not understand a word of it, she seemed to be relieved. She even smiled at him and then fell back into the first tongue she had used.
Two Hawks frowned. There was something familiar about it. Almost, he could catch a word here and there. Almost, but not quite.
He said to O’Brien, “We’ll have to try sign language. I...”
He stopped; obviously alarmed, she was pointing past him. He turned just in time to catch the flash of sun from the metal of a vehicle through the trees. The forest was thin by the road, and he could see across another field, perhaps three hundred yards long, to a row of trees at right angles to him. This must line the road, which either turned there or was crossed by another road.
“Somebody coming in a car,” he said. “We’d better take off. We’ll have to trust this girl or else take her with us. And if we do that, we may have to kill her. In which case, we might as well do it now.”
“No!” O’Brien said. “What the hell...!”
“Don’t worry,” Two Hawks said. “If we’re captured, we might just end up in a prison camp. But if we kill the girl, we might get executed as common criminals.”
The woman placed a hand on his wrist and pulled him towards the corner of the house while she gestured with the other hand and talked swiftly. It was evident that she wanted to take them away from the approaching vehicle or perhaps hide them.
Two Hawks shrugged and decided that there was little else to do. If they took to the woods, they would soon be captured. There just was not enough forest in which to hide.
They followed the woman around the corner and to the back of the house. She led them inside, to the kitchen. There was a huge stone fireplace with a log fire and a large iron pot on a tripod above the fire. A savory odor rose from the simmering contents. Two Hawks had little time to examine the kitchen; the woman lifted a trapdoor from the middle of the bare wooden floor and gestured to them to go on down. Two Hawks did not like the idea of placing himself and O’Brien in a position from which he could not escape. But he either could do that or take to the woods, and he had already rejected that if something else was offered. He went down a flight of ten steps with the Irishman close behind him. The trapdoor was shut, and they were in complete darkness.
3
Above them came the sound of something scraping across the floor. The woman was hiding the trapdoor with furniture. Two Hawks took out his flashlight and examined the room. His nose had already told him that there were strips of garlic and sausage and other food hanging from the roughly hewn beams above. There was a door close by; he pushed this open and then turned off the light. Enough light came through several chinks in the log wall of the house above for him to see. The large chamber was lined with shelves on which sat dust-covered glass jars. These contained preserved fruits, vegetables, and jellies. On the floor beneath the shelves were piles of junk; stuff the owner had not been able to throw away or else considered worth repairing some day. One item that particularly caught his attention was a large wooden mask, broken off at one corner. To examine it closer, he turned on his flashlight. It portrayed the face of a demon or a monster, painted in garish scarlet, purple, and a dead-white.
“I don’t like being down here, Lieutenant,” O’Brien said. He came close to Two Hawks as if he found comfort in the proximity. Although it was cool in the dark cellar, the Irishman was sweating. He stank of fear.
Then he said, “There’s something funny as hell about all this. I meant to ask you, but I thought maybe you’d think I’d cracked. Did you feel as if you were being, well, sort of twisted. I got a sickish feeling, just before that German showed up. I thought I’d been hit at first. Then things got too exciting to think about it. But when we was back in the woods, sitting there, I got the same feeling. Only not so strong. Just feeling that there was something a lot more wrong than being shot down and hiding away from the krauts.”