My feet burned up through my legs as the heat from my body tipped into fever.
One moment I would dream of a butcher’s stall at the fresh market. Lamb meat, marbled white and deep purple with fat; slabs of tongue; skinned hares looking ready to leap off the table; and the fat, pink quarters of capons. I’d imagine all that meat on a spigot over my fire and feel hunger clawing at the lining of my stomach. But the next moment I’d imagine a young girl with an oozing hole in her throat, red liquid gullies running over her bare chest where her fingers wrote across her abdomen in blood, smearing out her last words.
When lucid, I studied my maps, considering all the ways to escape or get caught. My finger ran over every route until my eyes blurred and the colors bled together. I imagined the oceans flooding the land and emptying themselves, so that everything switched places, making people move to the newly dried space without any infrastructure they’d created on land. The map would have the water and land inversed, leaving a large, hulking landmass, some Pangaea before the shift and break of continents. That new mass would do fine for starting humanity all over again.
I’d heard of cave paintings in France, and wanted to etch some new creature into the wall. In the subterranean dank, I could try to mimic the silhouette of Thump-Drag my brother drew, could chisel and scratch my primal markings upon the stone as my friend Ludo had done, but add my own name. Jacob Koopman. Charioteer.
In the dark these grand and crazy thoughts kept me busy, away from the one thought I couldn’t shake, which was that I was close to giving up, that my spirit was flagging. There was no getting to where I really wanted, a return to my life before the war. In the dark cave, with the falling snow shadowed by the night, I felt like a ghost, hovering in some purgatory.
In the cave I followed the instructions for my Benzedrine and Horlicks malted milk tablets which could be used as a meal. I used my water-purifying kit to get drinking water from the stream. I kept changing my socks, which I knew was important, yet I still couldn’t feel my toes. Each night they blackened a shade darker. I held them close to the fire to try to cull forth any feeling but once got too close and burned the soles of my feet.
It was still unusually cold, but along the stream, where some of the snow melted off, were arrowhead plants, which the Irish called the antifamine herb. The large leaves had been frozen solid. I cut through the leaves on top with my dagger and followed the root down to the tuberous, potatolike bulb.
I fished in the stream and caught several eels to fry in my mess kit, I stomped on the mice caught in the gaze of my flashlight at the back part of the cave and boiled mice meat and dandelions, along with other roots I’d dug around for to make a stew. I found a dead raven whose chest had been hollowed out by what looked like a small vermin before it froze. There were specks of crystalized meat inside of it. I pulled the last of the feathers loose and brought the terrible-looking thing to the cave and boiled it in a pot. A toxic layer of sputum floated to the top, which I dumped out at the lip of the cave, and then I drank the awful soup, desperately needing some energy, beyond fear of some parasitic death. But I threw it all up. Once, I boiled raw snails for several minutes and sucked out their slimy insides, in order to save my canned foods. Though when I boiled rhubarb leaves dug out from under the snow, they got me sick, and I threw up for hours, which made my ulcer burn like hot coals and gave me delirious dreams.
In my half-sleep I dozed on and off, waking covered in sweat or shaking from the cold. The fire died down and instinct took over as I ferreted around the cave in a fever-induced stupor, tossing more wood on and piling some close to me so I could stay under my tarp. Hours went by like this. That desperate, spine-tingling feeling of being utterly alone made me curl up, and at the worst part of the night I began to hallucinate. I saw all the power line poles stretching across Europe like I was above them in a plane, but when I swooped in low, each one had a crucified child nailed into the wood. They yelled from pole to pole to one another and their awful cries spread everywhere.
Then I daydreamed of a shadowy world at the feet of two giants fighting above me. Each giant held a poisonous snake in his left hand, and they tried to stick the snake out toward the other giant to make the snake bite. I rolled to avoid their footfalls. I couldn’t make out their faces, only the shadow of their movements, and they fought all night until a giant’s sole descended on me, darkening the world in one quick snap, and I woke, sweating and fearful of a new dark beyond the cave.
21
The sun came up, and it was light, and when it descended it was dark and colder. Those two facts became my clock, my calendar. I became submammalian in that way. Then, on my eleventh day in the cave, there was the sound of sticks crunching outside. I tossed the blanket off, reached for the Luger in my pack, stepped away from the fire, kicked a heap of dirt at the flame, and leaned into the darkness against the wall. There was a stone jutting out that I rested my arms on to aim the muzzle at the cave’s opening. My finger wrapped the trigger. My eyes focused in the dim light from the opening.
Someone’s head peeked into the cave and then pulled back. Then they took another look and pulled back again before the dark figure stepped away from the shadows and was backlit by the sunlight. I aimed the gun at the person’s chest and eyed my pack, sitting on the dirt next to my blankets and tarp. Without my pack of supplies and documents, there would be no changing names, no crossing borders through camps, no paying for food and ship’s passage. Without those possibilities, I didn’t know what the dimensions of my own life were—how wide, how long it could be, what say I was to have in any of it.
The stranger at the mouth of the cave took a step forward and waved a hand. “Come here,” a woman’s voice said in Dutch.
It was the first human voice I’d heard in what felt like an unimaginable amount of time. My forearms dug into the rock to keep me from dropping to my knees and wailing. Then a small, darkened figure stepped into the light. A child scuttled toward the woman and hid behind her legs. Their combined shadow looked like the lumbering shadow of Thump-Drag.
“Hello,” the woman called into the darkened cave. Her voice was tentative and trembled in my ears. “Hello,” she called again. She walked closer to the weakened fire and the slight firelight caught the gaunt angles of both their faces. She was young, and it was a little girl with her. Both wore the same dark blue jackets with little yellow stars on them that the massacred people at the mine wore.
“Look at this,” the woman said and bent over my bag. When the girl went to open it, I stepped out of the shadow.