Twins’ Father was too good to critique the marks she left, as poor as they were, but he took his own knife and neatly reinscribed her message, and after he was finished with this task, he took up her pack and waved for her to join our procession.
“My friends,” she wondered. “What of them?” And he looked at the women who’d returned to their trees, all of them so varied in age and suffering, and indicated that they should join us too. All he asked, he said, was that they record their facts on his list, to facilitate his communication with any authorities who might question our passage.
The women sprang from the trees and it was then that we saw that each trunk they had leaned against bore a message, a name, a plea. They would have covered the whole forest with the words if they were able. The face of Twins’ Father — this had to be one of the few times I saw it become so overwhelmed with sadness while he was awake, outside the grip of one of his nightmares. But I watched him steady himself and pass about his list, and soon enough, the women fell to the rear of our march. They tried to mother us, and we did our best to resist their attentions politely.
We already had mothers, we wanted to say.
I thought of mine every second. I thought of her, and I begged her and Zayde to show me Someone’s face. But neither responded. Had death forced them to abandon me? Or were they now so worried for my future that they couldn’t bring themselves to rejoice in my survival? My fingers searched my face; they tried to know it so they could know Someone’s too, but all they found were wounds, and two eyes that had seen too much.
We walked beside swarms of refugees. Face after face, body after body, all of them alive and searching, and not a single one of them mine. Was who I searched for already dead? I asked the sun and the sun told me to ask the moon — it claimed that the moon had taken the responsibility of answering inquiries with ugly potential. The sun was quite squirmy on this issue, I thought. It turned its back on me. And then a darkness lowered itself onto my eyes. The darkness was Peter’s hand, attempting protection.
“Don’t look!” Peter instructed. He was pushing my wheelbarrow at the time. I shrugged off the shield of his touch. I wanted to see what he saw. It sounded like horror. And there it was—
The body lay up the road, in a ditch. It was not a whole body.
“I told you not to look,” Peter said.
“It is her,” I whispered.
“It will never be her,” Peter said. And to prove it, he defied Miri’s instructions and veered close to the ditch so that I could peer at this corpse.
I did not know if it was male or female. I had no notion of its age — it was faceless and scalpless, and someone had cut off its legs so as to repossess its boots. That’s what Peter told me when he saw that I refused to avert my gaze. He said that the Soviets had superior boots, and whenever the Wehrmacht found them, they took these boots for themselves in the most desecrating way possible.
“So, you see,” he assured me, “it can’t be your Someone. Your Someone would never have such boots.”
I tried to find comfort in this. I could not. Did this mean that Someone was out in this winter with thin shoes?
“Look ahead, only ahead!” Twins’ Father warned us.
“What does she look like?” I asked Peter as we left the body behind.
“She looked like you.”
“I don’t know what I look like.”
“I bet you look like your mother,” Peter said. “Do you remember what your mother looked like?”
I couldn’t remember, not really. I decided that this would be another question to save for the moon. Its approach was nearing. I would ask it at any moment, even though I suspected that its answer was the same for all of us: We looked like death, one person after another; we were whittled and drawn, our eyes had sunk into our skulls, and the features that had once defined us had fled. Whether we would live long enough to be returned to our true selves — this seemed the greater question, and it followed me until we found our next shelter.
That night, we came upon a stone structure in the woods. It was too small to be a house and too large to be a shack. Inside, there was a constellation of teeth on the floor, and four narrow beds of marble. These marble beds had lids too, but only one remained closed. The other three gaped with empty blackness.
“Tombs,” Twins’ Father said before thinking better of it.
This structure was meant to house the dead. But three tombs had been overturned. Whether their disruption was the work of a fellow refugee or a pillager seeking to rob corpses of finery, we couldn’t know. The yellow jawbone that had been tossed to the corner of the structure said nothing of this history. It sat, bereft of teeth, a silent, fossilized witness.
Though we were not its usual guests, this house of the dead did just as well to shelter the likes of us. Twins’ Father cleared the emptied tombs of leaves and debris. They could fit a pair of children each. Peter stretched out on the lid of the fourth tomb and yawned. From the cradle of my barrow at the open door I watched the moon rise, answerless. Outside, a light snow fell and shook, like tiny white fists in the sky.
Day Three
A train ambled us a mere three miles toward Krakow. I looked out the window and saw roads filled with refugees, farmers returning home, Red Army soldiers slinking to unknowns. The frosty fields were scarred with the tread of tanks, and then we found ourselves in some untouched place, a row of intact farmhouses, as blocky and white as sugar cubes. Just as these farmhouses appeared, the tracks ended. We were forced to pile out, and as soon as all were accounted for by Twins’ Father, we were confronted by a fierce pillar of a Soviet soldier, his face sweaty with enthusiasm.
“Pigs!” this soldier shouted. “Pigs!” He waved his arms about in a frightful manner. One of the arms held a long rifle. His face was gray and his eyes were like red-blue sores or loose buttons fallen from a coat. He kept repeating that word as our ragged troop advanced.
“Pigs!” he insisted. “Stop, pigs.”
Twins’ Father brought our procession to a halt. A rare fright overcame him — he looked as if he were about to fold in on himself and collapse. Have we come so far just to end like this? his face seemed to say. He began to approach the man with one hand outstretched, offering his list, which shook more in his grasp than any wind could shake it. But the soldier didn’t even pause to look at the many names; he just raised his rifle to his shoulder and took aim. Children ducked behind smaller children. Miri’s hands quivered atop the wheelbarrow handles. The eye of the soldier’s rifle was our sole focus. We stared it down until the shot rang out, a shot that veered to the left of the road.
A pair of massive hogs, spotty beasts round as barrels, their snouts white with foam, were hurtling toward us, full of grunts and confrontations. The soldier’s rifle struck them down, first at the forelegs, and then at the temples, and we watched their immense bodies sink to the snow with the moans and whimpers of tiny babies.
We were accustomed to blood-snow. The blood shouldn’t have shocked our troop. But the confrontation dislodged something within us, because many began to cry in that silent way that captivity had taught them. The children shuddered and quaked, and then Sophia, a tiny four-year-old known for her queenly stores of dignity, collapsed in an uncharacteristic heap and wailed for us all. The soldier gave her a confused look — shouldn’t a hungry girl be pleased by this bounty? He put down his gun, nodded at the kills in a self-congratulatory fashion, and shook Twins’ Father’s hand, and yes, we ate well that night, children and adults, without a thought to any law above the grumbles of our stomachs, but I could not forget the panic in those animals’ eyes, not even as I comforted my hunger with their flesh.