“No,” I said. I didn’t know who I was anymore. “I took the uniform to stay warm. When the weather clears, I’ll move on and won’t tell anyone about you two if you want to stay here and hide. I won’t turn you in.” Would these two turn me in if I sent them away? Would we all get caught if we stayed?
Janna kept moving her ankle in small circles as if to loosen it up. There was a mole on the top of her foot. Her thin, crescent-moon eyebrows rose up to her bangs as she talked. She kept pulling on her earlobe as if triggering the words to come. She was soft-spoken, and at moments her voice stuttered. She looked down at her feet in the dirt and the fire cast a wild shadow of her feral hair on the rock behind her.
“We were put in the same train car from Amsterdam. A cattle car.” She nodded her head at Mevi. “The other people in the car kept talking about what might happen to us when we got to wherever the soldiers were taking us. They were convinced we were going to be killed, instead of sent to labor camps.” She started rubbing her bruised calf and ankle with both her hands. “The train car was packed full, but everyone shifted to take turns, trying to pull a loose overhead board apart. It took most of the night, but they got a hole in the roof, and I was one of the only ones small enough to get through. They boosted me up and I pulled myself onto the roof. Then they pushed Mevi up at me and told me we had to jump. That I had to take care of her.”
“Did you see any very, very tall men on the train?” I asked.
“Tall men? No,” Janna said.
The bruises on her legs must have been from when she landed. I imagined her on the top of the speeding train, how the wind and cold would have blotted out the senses, and that giant leap of faith she took.
Janna had the scent of chlorine on her clothes. She smelled it. “From the train cars,” she said, almost apologizing.
She seemed on edge, perhaps not wanting me to ask what happened to her family. I sensed she had no answer or wouldn’t want to give one. I pulled back and let the cave noises fill the void.
The people in the cars must have convinced her they were all going to die for her to jump off a speeding train with a child she didn’t know tucked in her arms. I could imagine from what I’d seen at the mine camp that the people in her train car had been right. Some instinct must have been screaming inside of them. I watched her foot moving and understood how scared she still was, yet was somehow still managing to keep watch over the sleeping girl who had been thrust upon her.
I could see every part of her story and how it fit into the larger narrative. The German military had been telling a story for years and the whole country now believed it. I’d believed in it too as they told it with such flair, such verve and promise, that the words got into my bloodstream and ran wild. Their story was of one peaceful world where they could knock all the trouble out with that one violent push, and that story of a harmonious world had sounded so good to me when I was a kid at summer camp, and even later, when Major Oldif spoke of it. But I’d now seen the truth. That one story was meant to blanket over every other that existed. At that moment I knew where someone like Samuel, the air-writer from Delfzijl, would have ended up—where someone so full of stories, like my father, would have ended up. They didn’t leave room for anyone else’s story, all those beautifully odd tales that had filled my childhood.
When Janna and I went out to gather wood, Mevi was too scared to be left alone and silently followed us. She took hesitant steps down the hill and kept her eyes locked on Janna, a hand on her coat. We laid two long sticks between us to use as a stretcher for the wood that we stacked perpendicularly on top of. The two of us made enough trips to build a few days’ worth of round-the-clock fire.
While sitting around the fire admiring Janna’s silhouette in the darkness ahead of me, I felt a deep want and sadness.
Any time either of us woke in the middle of the night, we stoked the fire. The flittering shadows twitched on the cave walls. The darkness formed staggering shapes overhead. If I had to piss, I walked out to the side of the cave’s mouth and peed down the hillside. I hadn’t shit in days. My limited food intake was burned up to keep my body going.
When she slept, Mevi twitched and chirped like Fergus used to. Her dreams built and crescendoed to a full-blown night terror. She had a coughing fit, curled into herself, tucked up her knees, and spasmed with each breath. Her cheeks glowed red and glossy as if painful. I sat next to her and wished I knew some purification ritual I could employ. When I reached out to touch her shoulders, the muscles trembled under my fingers. She talked in her sleep. Said the names of people she loved. Her grief was a night-blooming flower. She called out their names and then stood up and started walking around the dark looking for them, exploring the frozen world she had jumped headlong into. The firelight illuminated her face. Each fleck in her eye led to another. Her eyes were endless that way, a map to more maps. Of all the ways the human heart chooses to leave trails for others to follow, the eyes were my favorite and maybe the most crushing. Her eyes revealed the raw truth that life would spare her young form no grace and no fury.
I led the sleeping girl back to her blanket next to Janna. Janna’s smooth and delicate forearm and hand were uncovered. I wanted to lift her hand and have it touch me—to hold it between my own hands. Each fine fingertip looked incredibly soft despite the dirt under her nails.
The arched curve of her hip made me start rocking back and forth, trying to shake some of the loneliness out. My shadow shook against the wall, a monstrously humped body rocking over the stone. The light from the fire flickered against the cave wall. Mevi was still whimpering and Janna’s eyes were open, glowing orange in the firelight until she snapped them shut. I swear I heard them close. I lay there looking at her face, and sending secret messages—please touch me here, here, here, and here. Then I watched my own shadow again, dancing on the wall, my darker, truer form. I shut my eyes and imagined more advanced people than me, etching figures into the stone, tracing their own mysteries.