The giant tangle of bodies was so very human, yet the least human thing I’d ever seen. When the family rounded the mound and came into view, they hugged one another, but not one made a sound. They clutched one another as they were led to the pit. A soldier sat on the lip of the pit with his feet dangling off the side. In his lap he held a trench sweeper, a Maschingengewehr 42 machine gun. He was smoking a cigarette.
Once they saw what was ahead of them they all stopped. Soldiers pushed at their backs but they leaned away from the pit. Then a man with skinny legs and wire-rim glasses walked down the steps. He must have known he would be trapped in there forever. I waited for him to crouch down or try to scramble up the walls like a crab in a bucket, but instead he looked upward, away from what he stood on, and stayed perfectly still. The girls were pushed forward, and the rest of the group followed down the clay stairs into the pit. They were the first stark naked women I’d ever seen. The men walking down behind them seemed to be holding back tears. Even from as far back as I was in the woods, I saw how their flesh raised in goose pimples, and the old woman’s body shivered around the toddler’s chubby backside. The child’s little foot hung loose and kicked at the woman’s puff of gray pubic hair. When they were all in the pit, had walked, tripped over, and then stood on the pile of dead bodies, one of the daughters from the family pointed to herself and looked at the man with the gun and said, “Twenty-three years old,” in German.
The man holding the gun pointed the tip of the gun at himself. “Me too,” he said. Then he aimed the barrel at her and sang her a verse from “Lili Marlene,” the same song I’d sung along to with all the soldiers at the training camp in Kiel.
Time would come for roll call, time for us to part,
Darling I’d caress you and press you to my heart,
And there ‘neath that far off lantern light,
I’d hold you tight, we’d kiss good-night,
My Lili of the lamplight, my own Lili Marlene
When he finished his verse, he aimed, leaned back to brace himself against the gun, and opened fire. Flames shot from the muzzle, and the muscles in his arm shook against the recoil. The lyrics echoing up the mountainside were chased off by the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire. The people in the pit fell in a bloody mist. Most were still. Some twitched. The girl who yelled her age was not quite dead. She’d been shot in the stomach and legs. Her back draped across her family members, her chest heaved upward as if trying to expel the bullets, and her head rocked obscenely back and forth, rolling over the collarbone of a dead man who bled from the throat.
Another truckload of naked men and women turned the corner and walked to the mound.
I felt the sudden sense of the world shifting, of morals and laws and civilized human behavior kicked loose. I lay down at the base of the tree. At that moment more than any other since I lost him, I wished Edwin was with me. I wanted him to see this, to look close enough that he could capture the moment in paint or charcoal so others could see. If others could see this, I felt, there would be no more allowing it to continue. I crawled on my hands and knees up the hillside, deeper into the woods so the soldiers wouldn’t see me. There was another chorus of gunfire behind me. From the sound of the gun, the executioner had moved the muzzle from right to left and then back. It sickened me that I knew that. The cracking sounds echoed off the dirt mound and pushed on my back as I crawled.
When I could stand up without seeing the mounds of dirt through the trees I started to run. As I sprinted through the woods, taking long, panicked strides, more shots rang out, like a stone skipping across a river.
As I ran I couldn’t stop imagining what lay beneath the snow at that mine camp. What other atrocities had been buried. What other lives had been packed tight beneath the earth. The tangle of folded bodies swelled in my mind. Limbs and digits running like roots through the dirt, stretching out and linking hand to hand, until some bucking jointed monster would dig itself out of this landscape of the damned and proclaim what a foul method it had been laid down by.
I couldn’t let go of the image of the soldier’s feet dangling off the edge of the pit. Hundreds of people in that pit beneath him, and it was only about two-thirds full. That the executioner seemed so casual sent an anxious nausea through my body and I wanted to vomit again. How would I navigate my way to safety? How, without any papers, could my father have been able to sneak through such a web of evil happenings?
Bare branches of alders and elms curved over my head. The straps of my pack dug into my shoulders. There was a salty, dry taste in my mouth. I didn’t want to hear birds or airplanes or any other sound beyond my own heart and lungs drumming in my ears, drowning out the thoughts of the blood-covered people I’d seen in the pit, of how I, with the push of a single button, had easily killed more people than that.
20
From what Uncle Martin said, I had to move well west of Belgium to search out a boat to England, and if not there, southwest through Spain, and on to Africa, though North Africa was probably no safer. I kept thinking of Ottawa as a haven and the word became a three-step mantra as I walked.
Ot-ta-wa.
Ot-ta-wa.
I had sewn the identification papers and money Martin gave me into the lining of my backpack. In the right pocket of my jacket were my German navy ID card and the papers attributing the Knight’s Cross to me. Those papers had my real name, height, hair, and eye color, and were signed by the commander of my naval brigade, Major Oldif. In my left pocket were the identification papers of a German SS officer named Dieter Adenauer, and Dieter’s orders to report to Brussels. In my left pants pocket were Herbert Yarborough’s papers and his small, black barter kit with the three gold coins, and three empty slots where the rings I’d given to Pauwel once sat. I prayed that if the time came, I’d pull the correct version of my life out of the right pocket.
I spent a day limping through the woods. At best, I blundered through this odyssey in a controlled panic. And all that time, regardless of how paranoid of getting caught I was, I still had the feeling of chasing someone, like blood was calling to blood. I kept imagining some tall, dark figure ahead of me, but every time I got close, he slipped farther away. All night I ran and all night I got no closer. At times it was easy to imagine being on a rescue mission, hunting my father or still seeking out my brother, calling his name out over and over.
When it was dark, my feet froze through again. The stale bread burned my ulcers. Inside my body was burning, and outside, I was freezing. I remembered reading in one of my father’s history books about fifteen-thousand captured Bulgarian prisoners taken by the emperor Basil of Byzantine. As a warning to never attack him again, he blinded ninety-nine out of every one hundred of the men by taking out both their eyes. The remaining men had one of their eyes taken out so they could lead the rest home. That awful march was in my head, walking into that white nothingness, like I’d wandered off from my one-eyed guide and was lost in a country full of barbarisms.
The snow kept falling.
I was tired but lying down meant freezing through.
My feet burned.
Ot-ta-wa.