“That’s mine,” I said.
The woman screamed and the girl jumped back, mortified by my presence. The woman stared at the insignia on my jacket. The girl looked to be about six or seven. The woman, a few years on either side of thirty. Her eyes were the color of smoke, their centers as dark as polished coal.
“Please,” she said, and then was silent. She had wild, curly black hair. The little girl had straight brown hair and her little hands gripped the woman’s pants. Her eyelashes looked sealed together by crystalized snow and tears. “We saw the smoke from your fire,” she said. “We only wanted to get warm.”
The fire, my god. What a flagrant trail for someone to discover me.
“Who are you?” the woman asked.
“I’m a caveman.” Each looked at the other. “Where’d you come from?” I continued.
“Please don’t shoot us. We were on the bridge when we smelled smoke. It’s so cold outside, we had to look for where it came from to get warm.”
My gun remained leveled at them, so I dropped it down to my side.
“Sit by the fire,” I said. The woman pushed the child ahead of her, closer to the fire. She bent over the girl and lifted her bare hands to the flame. I walked to the mouth of the cave and stood in front of it. Blue ribbons of smoke drifted through sunlight. How stupid could I have been? What bigger flag could I have sent up?
“Where’d you come from?” I asked. The woman stared at me, glanced at my German uniform again, and shuddered at the sight.
“We’ll leave,” she said.
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
“You’re a soldier,” she said, and pointed at the gun.
The little girl’s bare hands hung red and raw in front of her. Both their shoes and pant legs were soaked and covered in ice and mud. I holstered the gun in the inner lining of my jacket. I’d have to leave soon now too if the fire sent up my location. But I didn’t want to leave the cave. I didn’t want this woman or the child to be here. I hated them for their presence. I wanted more than anything for the world to be empty, but here they were, their presence screaming that that could never be. Outside, the low storm clouds frosted everything. It was no place to wander without direction in mind.
“Are you alone?”
“Yes,” the woman said.
“Tell me where you came from,” I said. “I won’t hurt you. I’m a Dutchman. I won’t hurt you. Just tell me where you came from.”
“I’m from Amsterdam,” the woman said.
“How’d you get here?”
“Train.” The little girl hadn’t taken her eyes off me. They were as deep as the cave we stood in and the reflected firelight sounded out their depths.
“Where’s the train stop?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? How far is the station from here?” If the train stopped nearby, then this ravine was not as isolated as I’d hoped.
“We didn’t get off at a station.” She looked at me again. “We’ll leave,” she said.
Loneliness washed over me.
“When you’re warm,” I said.
My eyes moved down the woman’s jawline to her delicate neck.
The two of them sat next to the fire, and within ten minutes the child curled up and slept in the woman’s lap. Despite her obvious fear, her body succumbed to the warmth and what must have been utter exhaustion.
We sat next to the fire and were quiet for a long time, spending those strange, haunting hours in each other’s company. I hadn’t eaten yet that day and pangs of hunger flared in my gut. In my pack was eight days’ worth of meals if I ate only once a day. There was a part of me that didn’t want to pull out my food in front of these two, as I knew I’d have to share. But I was starving and ashamed for hoarding. I took out two servings of noodles and sauce with meat chunks and heated them by placing them close to the fire. The woman eyed the food the whole time. When the sauce bubbled, I handed one of them to her.
“Can you two share?” I said.
“Yes, of course. Thank you.” She dug her hand into the container and scooped out a finger full of hot noodles and shoved them in her mouth. She tried to cool it against her tongue, puffing out her cheeks and taking weird, sharp little breaths. Almost immediately her face flushed red. She scooped more of the food into her mouth, and then shook the girl awake. “Eat,” she said, and the girl, still half-sleeping, took the food from the woman’s fingertips. She chewed with her eyes closed and ate the rest of the food the woman fed her without fully waking. When she was done chewing, the woman moved the girl so she rested on the dirt next to the fire. The woman then ran her finger along the inside edge of the container, rubbing off the last bits of food and licking her finger clean of the red sauce.
She stood up and limped to the far corner of the wall. I hadn’t noticed her limp until then. She walked to the mud-covered blanket that had been frozen in the dirt and pulled it off the ground. There were camel crickets, potato bugs, and centipedes in the damp earth beneath it. When she shook it out, she laid it over the sleeping girl and wiped her own tears away.
That small, sad action made me feel so inhuman. I had only wanted to be far away from her, as looking at her and the girl showed me how stupid, awful, and miserable life in that cave really was.
The little one didn’t wake up and I continued to stoke the fire and sat by it in silence with the woman. The back of the cave smelled like damp rotting leaves, pewter, and cold air coming in from some opening that created a draft.
Somewhere out of the quiet, I asked her name.
She kept looking into the fire with some profound sadness. “Janna. This is Mevi.” She didn’t mention last names. I understood. Last names made associations with people who were not there, people she may not have known the whereabouts of.
Janna had an oval-shaped face with a wide hairline and cheekbones sloping down to a narrow jaw. The little girl, Mevi, had a pear-shaped face with a pouchy jaw and cartoonish, round cheeks. They looked nothing alike.
I thought of resting my hand on the crown of the little girl’s head.
“I’m Jacob,” I said, the name feeling strange to hear out loud.
Mevi still slept. Her eyelids and fingers twitched.
Janna sat against the cave wall and took off her socks and shoes. She folded her right leg over her left, and flexed her ankle, which bounced up and down. The top of her foot had veins rising across the thin fan of bones beneath the skin. Splotches of bruises ringed her lower calves.
She saw me looking at her bruises.
“Is Mevi your daughter?” I asked.
“No.”
“Who is she?”
“Are you a German soldier?”