A Meal in Winter Read online

  I watched the road, lowering my eyes to look out for potholes. Chance, bad luck, Emmerich’s concern and love for his son . . . I was thinking of all this at the same time. But if I had lifted my eyes, if I’d looked away from the road, I mean if it had been possible to see so far, I would have seen where chance lies, the precise location of Emmerich’s bad luck . . . I would have seen the bridge in Galicia. I would have seen Emmerich leaning against a pillar, eyes wide open in the warm Galician springtime. I would have heard him pant and spit, trying desperately to speak to us, to Bauer and me, both of us kneeling in front of him. But the blood was choking him, and Bauer and I didn’t know what to do with all that blood. And we didn’t know how to speak to Emmerich. We didn’t know how to do anything at all any more, as if the bullet had gone through us too, without making us bleed like Emmerich, but leaving us crippled, kneeling helplessly before him, useless and silent until the end.

  WE WALKED, FOR a long time. I ended up forgetting Emmerich’s son. I ended up thinking only about myself, and time passed differently. We went through another village, asleep like the other one except for one lit window and the smell of smoke.

  Sometimes I slipped, and bumped into Emmerich and Bauer. Their contact reassured me. Several minutes after having touched an arm or a shoulder, I still remembered it. I even still seemed to feel it physically.

  We came upon a frozen pond. It was the reeds that gave it away, because the ice was white, like the fields around it. It was quite big. On one bank, the wind had blown the snow into a high mound, sharp like the crest of a wave. In the middle of the pond, the frozen reeds indicated the direction the wind had been blowing on the day when everything froze. That day, someone had shoved a stick in the pond.

  Bauer told us to wait and went out on the pond. He’d taken his rifle off his shoulder and was using it like a walking stick, to keep his balance.

  Emmerich and I walked on the spot to keep warm. We watched Bauer move forward carefully on the ice.

  I sensed that we were slowly losing the feeling of happiness we’d had earlier at having escaped work. It wasn’t the same now. The day had barely begun, but already it stretched out long and difficult before us. By midday, we would be only halfway through it, whereas back with the company, work might be finished by then. But we couldn’t go back so soon, all the same. We would have to wait until nightfall. Because otherwise Lieutenant Graaf would say to us: ‘That’s too easy, you bastards. This is the last time we let you leave.’ From his point of view, he would be right. And the guys in the company would also be right, if they insulted us even more than Graaf did.

  If we wanted people to accept our returning early, after work was over, we would have to find some and bring them back. But as yet, we hadn’t even started looking. We’d hardly even thought about it.

  The only consolation I had left was that there was no wind. If it started up before evening, it would blow away all the relief I’d felt at having avoided work.

  Bauer had reached the middle of the pond. He took his rifle in both hands and started smashing the butt against the ice. Shards flew. Bauer kept on. He stopped for a moment and told us, ‘It’s frozen all the way to the bottom.’

  ‘What did you expect?’ Emmerich shouted.

  Bauer began again. I yelled to him: ‘So, give up. What’s the point?’

  He looked at me. I felt sure he was smiling behind his scarf. He looked happy. He didn’t care what we said. He kept hitting the ice, sending shards flying again. It made a snapping noise. Even from here, you could tell it was frozen all the way to the bottom. There was no need for further verification, if that was why he kept hitting the ice. Nevertheless, he continued. And he put his back into it.

  Just as I was about to tell him that he would break his rifle if he didn’t stop, Emmerich spoke to me quietly about his son, as if he hadn’t wanted Bauer to hear. ‘Bad things can happen to us anytime. And then his life would be ruined.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I murmured. ‘You’re right. We’ll find another solution.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Emmerich, relieved. ‘I’d prefer that.’

  ‘We’ll find something in the end.’

  ‘I worry I won’t manage it on my own.’

  ‘The three of us will give it some thought.’

  Emmerich looked at the sky. Not for long. Just long enough, it seemed, to acknowledge that there were three of us. Perhaps that was Emmerich’s consolation, at this particular moment. The helping hand we would give him. Mine was that there was no wind. As for Bauer, perhaps his was to stand in the middle of the pond and examine the thickness of the ice, for reasons that only he knew.

  I called him. Then I did it again, louder. It was time we were going. Because, even walking on the spot, Emmerich and I were having trouble staying warm. He came back, walking between the frozen reeds. He took care not to break a single one. He seemed happy about that too. Bauer was more than forty years old, yet he still wanted to make his way between reeds, and doing so made him smile behind his scarf.

  He leaped onto the path, and suddenly, out of nowhere, I regretted not having stopped at the lit window earlier to ask for warm milk.

  WE WENT ON, and soon afterwards I asked why we hadn’t thought to demand warm milk in the Polish village. Neither Bauer nor Emmerich could think of an answer. A strange silence followed, and in that silence I saw that they were dreaming about warm milk now, just like I was. They walked with that dream, and it weighed them down. I could almost hear Bauer talking to himself, even though Emmerich was walking between us. As for Emmerich, he tripped and had to hold on to my arm. Their warm milk dreams made mine less painful.

  We came to a crossroads and wondered if it wasn’t time to consult the map. But it was inside Emmerich’s coat, and opening his coat would be like taking an ice bath. In the end, we settled on a path that went south, joking that it would be less cold down there. A pale sun hung in the sky, as distant and useless, it seemed to us, as a coin trapped under thick ice.

  Solitary trees stood in the fields. Haystacks too, round and covered with snow, under the aluminium sky. We’d found some of them inside the haystacks during the spring. Not us in particular – Emmerich, Bauer and me – but we knew that some had been found. But there was no point digging in the snow today, in order to search for them. Who would hide in a haystack on a day as cold as this? And the cold had not begun yesterday.

  Suddenly Bauer said, ‘What if we don’t find any?’

  ‘What if we don’t?’ Emmerich asked.

  Bauer imitated the gait of an old man, struggling even more than we were on the road, and said, ‘How far do we go before heading back? How long will we stay out here?’

  ‘Let’s wait until dark, at least,’ Emmerich replied. ‘So it looks like we tried.’

  ‘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 o
nly 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.

  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 r
aised 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.