“Look!” The two women followed Armand’s finger to a low oblong shape. “That must be the customhouse.”
They pushed through the snow faster, with Erna in the lead. They had nearly reached the low building when Erna pulled up short. She nodded her head, indicating something ahead of them to the right. It was a man. He was waving at them. He waved harder. Cautiously, they stepped closer, a footfall, then another, until he gestured at them to stop. With no words, he pointed toward the customhouse. He pantomimed guards on patrol, then shook his finger, no. He motioned them to come back tomorrow. They nodded big exaggerated nods to show they had understood. He turned away and melted off into the rapidly dimming afternoon.
“What do we do now?”
“We go to that barn, I guess.” Erna pulled out the scrap of paper their guides had used to sketch a map. “It should be down behind those rocks.” They followed it, but there was nothing there.
“Are you sure you went the right way?” Anna questioned.
“Positive. Besides, there’s a clearing here. It’s the logical place for a barn to be.”
They walked around the clearing, kicking away the snow, as if the barn might somehow be hidden under it. Erna walked over to what looked like a dead tree trunk and examined it. She kicked at it gently with her foot. Pieces crumbled away: black charcoal. “Looks like someone burned it down.”
A little bird of fear fluttered in them. The silence dilated; the night began to open its eyes; the mountain, hard and high, gathered snow. What do we do? None of them wanted to say that question aloud so they listened to the snow instead.
“We’ll have to go back to the customhouse,” Erna decided.
After an hour’s stumbling through the waning daylight, the three of them made it back. It was shut tight. They each felt their way around it, checking doors and windows, hoping against hope. The light was nearly gone when Armand felt a handle different from all the other ones he had tried. It moved. He wiggled it and pushed down, and it gave. His heart beat faster. It was open. It had to open. He pushed down again, and the door opened. A stench, like an unfriendly animal, slunk out and filled his nose. He reached into the inside pocket of his coat and found his matches, struck one, and peered in. He called out for Anna and Erna.
“Well,” he said, when they’d made their way to him. “It looks like they left the outhouse open.” He lit another match. “There’s even a cover on the latrine.”
“Will we all fit?” Anna asked.
“We have to.” Erna took off her bag and carried it inside. She set her bag down.
“If we stack them,” Armand pointed out, “we can keep them in here with us.” They all squeezed in, Armand last. He rested his bag on top of the others, fumbled it open, and pulled out a candle, which he lit.
“Anna, can you give me your watch?”
Anna pulled it off her wrist and handed it to him.
Armand held his thumb up to the candle, sliding it down the candle’s length and moving his lips as he counted thumb measurements. They all watched the flame, as if observation might encourage it to burn all night, as if its burning all night could keep them warmer.
Anna bunched up her toes in her shoes. She knew her shoes were wet; logically they were wet. She thought she was curling her toes. She couldn’t really feel them. They had hurt a lot, then nothing really, a low burning sort of hum—frostbite symptoms. She knew from her medical textbooks that if she took off her shoes, her toes would be white. Not that she would take off her shoes. She concentrated on the candle.
I considered that candle, too. The night in the outhouse was the first story my grandmother ever told me about her experiences during the war. And now that I thought about it, my grandfather had featured prominently, with his calculations of how long they could burn the candle each time they lit it, so it would last through the night. “Smart man,” I remembered Grandma saying.
The next morning, at first light, Erna found what looked like a path, and they struck out again. As they scrambled and lurched their way down the mountain, the snow turned to sleet, and finally to a steady, heavy rain.
Just as the sleet was turning liquid, and hitting their skin a little less sharply, Anna felt a change in the air. Someone. She looked up—at least in her telling of the story—and spotted a man in a dark, heavy coat walking toward them. Though my grandfather always had claimed that he was the one who spotted the passeur, I liked to think of Anna jabbing Erna, tugging at Armand’s sleeve, stopping them in their tracks with a barely audible “Look.”
No one ever told me whether they hesitated before making their way toward the man, advancing with their feet turned sideways so they wouldn’t slip in the mud, whether they fully considered that he might hold their fate in his hands.
When they got near enough to speak, they gave the code words they would have learned from the village priest, and the man nodded. “Where did you sleep? You can’t have hiked all night.”
When they explained, he whistled softly. “Lucky—you must have gotten there a few minutes after the border patrol knocked off. They closed the road through the pass yesterday afternoon. I saw the guards head home at sunset.” He led them to a primitive cabin used by herders when they grazed their cattle in the summer, which lay abandoned the rest of the year. When he lifted the latch they saw a number of other refugees huddled in near-darkness, including a mother holding a sleeping toddler in her lap. “I’ll be back around nightfall,” he announced to the group. “Everyone be ready.”
“There was a kitchen in the cabin with hard bread, hard cheese, and tea,” my grandmother recalled in an essay.
It seemed heaven. We were soaked to the skin, having marched under heavy rain. We were also dehydrated and starved. After drinking much tea and eating something, we stripped and Armand placed our clothes near the cast iron wood stove, which steamed outwardly while drying the wet clothes. We were assigned a big bed covered with a duvet, into which Erna and I crawled, to fall promptly asleep.
The rain swished and muttered and drummed around the cabin all through the day, and the other refugees slept or spoke in low voices among themselves; the mother occupied the toddler as best she could. Anna drifted in and out of sleep, dreaming that her feet belonged to someone else, that she had put them on backward, that she had left them in the bottom of a well.
Darkness crept into the cabin. Anna opened her eyes and saw the others moving around. It must be time to leave, she thought. She didn’t want to move from the warm spot she had created in the bed.
Everyone started when the smuggler opened the door to the cabin.
He looked from the assembled company to Erna and Anna in the bed. “Time to go,” he called out.
“I’m not leaving,” Erna asserted, calm and put together as always.