Apart from the bed, the only other furnishing, in the corner by the door, is a metal wastebasket. The wastebasket is a thing for children, blue and yellow with a cartoon dog cavorting in a field of daisies. Landsman stares at it for a long time, thinking about nothing, thinking about children’s garbage and dogs in cartoons. The obscure unease that Pluto has always inspired, a dog owned by a mouse, daily confronted with the mutational horror of Goofy. An invisible gas clouds his thoughts, exhaust from a bus left parked with its engine running in the middle of his brain.
Landsman crouches by the cot for another minute or so, collecting himself like a beggar chasing scattered dimes along the sidewalk. Then he drags the cot to the door and sits down on it. In a way that is both methodical and wild, he begins to kick at the door with his bare heels. It’s a hollow steel door, and it makes a thunderous sound when kicked that’s pleasant for a moment, but then the pleasure palls. Next Landsman tries loud and repeated cries of “Help me, I cut myself and I’m bleeding!” He yells until he is hoarse and kicks until his feet throb. At last he gets tired of kicking and yelling. He needs to urinate. Badly. He looks at the trash can and then at the door. It might be the traces of the “drug in his system, or the hatred he feels for that tiny room in which his sister passed her last night on earth, and for the men who chained him still in underwear to it. Maybe all his enraged yelling has engendered an actual rage. But the idea of being obliged to piss into a Shnapish the Dog wastebasket makes Landsman angry.
He drags the bed over to the window, and shoves the blinds rattling to one side. The windowpane is pebbled glass. Ripples of a green and gray world set in a heavy steel frame. At one time-maybe until very recently there was a latch, but his thoughtful hosts have removed it. Now there is only one way to get the window open. Landsman goes for the wastebasket, dragging the cot back and forth behind him like a handy symbol. He raises the wastebasket, takes aim, and hurls it against the pebbled glass of the tall window. It bounces off and flies back at Landsman, striking him squarely in the forehead. A moment later, he tastes blood for the second time that day as it trickles down his cheek to the corner of his lips.
“Shnapish, you bastard,” he says.
He shoves the cot all the way over against the long wall and then, working with his free hand, tips the mattress off the cot frame. He stands the mattress against the opposite wall. He grabs hold of the cot frame on either side and, lifting from the knees, heaves it up off the ground. He stands there a moment, holding the rickety frame parallel to his body. He wavers under the sudden weight, which is not great but taxes his strength all the same. He takes a step backward, lowers his head, and drives the cot frame through the window. Green lawn and fog blow into Landsman’s dazzled vision. Trees, crows, hovering hornets of broken glass, the gun-barrel-gray waters of the strait, a bright white float plane trimmed in red. Then the cot frame jerks free of Landsman’s grasp and leaps through gaping glass fangs out into the morning.
As a kid in school, Landsman received good marks in physics. Newtonian mechanics, bodies at rest and in motion, actions and reactions, gravity and mass. He found more sense in physics than in anything else they ever tried to teach him. An idea like momentum, for example, the tendency of a body in motion to stay in motion. So maybe Landsman should not be quite so surprised when the cot frame does not content itself with shattering the window. There is a sharp, joint-popping tug on the bones of his shoulder, and he is seized again by the nameless emotion he felt when he tried to climb aboard Mrs. Shpilman’s moving limousine: the sudden awareness, like an inverse satori, that he has made a grave if not fatal error.
This is Landsman’s luck: He lands in a pile of snow.
It’s a furtive, die-hard patch tucked deep into the shadow on the north side of the barracks. The only snow visible in the entire compound, and Landsman falls right into it. His jaws snap together, making each tooth ring out with its own pure tone as the impact of his ass against the ground conducts its Newtonian business with the rest of his skeleton.
He lifts his head up out of the snow. Cold air flows over the back of his neck. For the first time since taking wing, he remarks on the fact that he is freezing. He stands up, his jaw still chiming. Snow streaks his back like welts raised by a wire lash. He lurches and staggers to the left under the weight of the cot frame. It offers to help him sit down again in the snow. Sink into it, plunge his sore head into the cold, clean pile of snow. Close his eyes. Relax.
Just then he hears a soft scrape of soles coming from around the corner of the building, a pair of erasers rubbing away the marks of their own passage. A flawed gait, the extra hop and shuffle of a man with a limp. Landsman takes hold of the cot frame and hoists it, then backs up against the shingled side of the barracks. When he sees one hiking boot, the tweed cuff of Fligler’s trouser leg, he thrusts the cot frame out. As Fligler rounds the corner, the steel edge of the cot frame catches him full in the face. A red hand of blood spreads its fingers across Fligler’s cheeks and forehead. His cane flies up in the air and strikes the pavement with a marimba note. The cot frame, as if shy without its best friend, drags Landsman along with it, onto Fligler, in a heap. The smell of Fligler’s blood fills Landsman’s nostrils. Landsman scrambles to his feet, grabbing with his free hand for the sholem in Fligler’s slack fingers.
He raises the automatic, contemplating shooting the man on the ground with a certain black willingness. Then he glances toward the main house, five hundred feet away. Several dark shapes are moving behind the French doors on this side. The door flies open, and the hole-mouthed pans of big young yids in suits fill the doorway. Landsman envies them their youthful capacity for wonder but still raises the gun in their direction. They duck and pull back, and in their parting, a tall, slim, fair-haired man stands revealed. The new arrival, fresh from the hold of his bright white floatplane. The hair is really something, like a flare of sunlight on a sheet of steel. Penguins on his sweater, baggy corduroy pants. For an instant the man in the penguin sweater frowns at Landsman, looking confused. Then somebody drags him back from the doorway as Landsman tries to take aim.
The cuff digs into Landsman’s wrist, sharp enough to abrade the flesh. He changes his aim, pointing the gun at his own left arm. He squeezes off a single careful shot, and the handcuff slides free, a bangle at his wrist. Landsman lowers the bed frame to the ground with an air of mild regret, as if it’s the body of a bumbling but loyal family retainer who has served the Landsmans well. Then he takes off into the woods toward a gap in the trees. There must be at least twenty young healthy Jews running after him, shouting, cursing, giving orders. For the first minute he expects to see the branching lightning of a bullet in his brain and to go down underneath the slow roll of its thunder. But there is nothing; they must have been given orders not to shoot.
The last thing he wants is any hint of a mess.
Landsman finds himself running along a dirt road, neat and well maintained, marked with red reflectors on metal stakes. He remembers the distant patch of green that he caught sight of from the air, beyond the forest, dotted with piles of snow. He figures this path must lead there. It must lead, at any rate, somewhere.