The dark hours smelled like wood smoke and lasted the longest. It was during the dark hours that I understood each day was its own living thing in that country. Though the sky was purple at dawn, the color bled away all morning until the sun crested the treetops and left a golden sheen on the tracks.
We followed the tracks, veering always west in the direction of the Dutch border. Me always chanting Ot-ta-wa. The shape of the cattle in the fog blurred as they moved across the field. They were amorphous, as if my brother had rubbed off their sharp lines with his dampened fingertip. The Germans patrolled the main roads, but they were not hard to avoid.
As we huddled together at night we went over our story. I showed them the soldier’s ID I carried.
“We need to have a fast answer ready if asked. You are my wife or girlfriend,” I suggested.
“I am your older sister,” Janna said. “This is my daughter. She doesn’t talk.”
“Okay. My older sister,” I mumbled. Hurt.
The train tracks ran through a small town that had a whole series of bombed and abandoned row houses. We walked through, thumbing the last remaining kitchen cupboards, peering into rooms, trying the doorknobs, and pushing our way into the hidden corners.
“Look for fruit flies,” Janna told me. “They’ll lead to scraps.”
On the ground floor of the second house, there was the frame of a giant harp with all its strings broken. I picked it off the floor and stood it up in front of me so the thick strings hung down slack. I bent down and walked through the body of the harp like it were a door, but everything on the other side was still bleak and empty.
A dusty drop cloth held the shape of the ottoman beneath. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling.
In the basement I found Mevi standing in front of a collection of decorative spoons that hung from the wall, each by two small nails at the base of the neck. She let her fingers touch one, then the next.
Every time I pushed a door back, it felt like someone would crash out past me, or dive to cower in some corner. In my mind, I’d been playing a sort of game with my father, hide-and-seek. My father was always ahead of me, like a ghost laying down secrets in the morning mist. Any moment I might turn a corner and find him crouched behind a tree, peering out from behind the edge of a building, watching over me, or waiting for me to come save him. When it was dark and cold, the thought was comforting. It gave me that inner push to move forward, sleep less, be more aware, as there was no knowing how it might happen that he, we, might be saved.
“Can you tell me about your family?” I asked Janna. I wanted to hear her talk. To hear a voice. I wanted to hear a story.
“What do you want to know?” she asked. She was looking at me then like she first had. Like I was the soldier. Something imposing and scary.
“Just to hear,” I said, and it was true.
“There is not much to tell that doesn’t hurt to think about right now.”
We left the row houses and weaved among the trees in the darkness like dogs, like Fergus, letting that extra sliver of skin shut over our eyeballs to protect us from briars. Deeper in the night we crept through fields, alongside roads, and a ruddy gray canal. When we found another train track, we followed it to the southwest.
My feet pounded in pain. The curled black toes felt like soggy pieces of rubber. Each time I looked at them it was with a sense of horror, as if they didn’t belong to me, but were something else entirely, like dead squids that hung limply at the end of my legs. They gave off a rotting stink I could almost taste.
If God did have his finger on my shoulder, I thought, he was trying to flick me off the ledge.
From deep in the woods, cowbells jingled in the distance. A sheepdog barked. My eyes were always trained for the shifting of sentries. When it was a few hours before dawn, the soft orange glow of a fire shone in the woods. I had the girls hide while I snuck toward it, staying crouched low to the ground. When I was close enough to be sure it was only an old man by himself, I stepped out of the woods to get warm by the fire.
The man slept sitting up. He didn’t have a jacket on. The sharp sticks of his collarbone stuck out against his thin shirt. The backs of his hands seemed creased and concave, the bones curved inward and sunk toward his palms. A knot of shaggy, graying beard rose off his loose, bone-colored face. There was a rattle deep in his lungs when he breathed. I sat across the fire from him for a moment to get warm and propped my feet up to the flame. When I looked back up at the man I saw his polished, dying eyes.
“Hello,” I said in German.
Firelight glinted off the white stubble skirting his neckline. The circle of skin around his mouth sunk in like a pocket over his toothless gums. The man’s right eye rolled back into his skull. The left eye was black and held the flame’s vivid reflection on its glass surface.
He stared at me without moving.
“Hello,” I said in Dutch.
Then he nodded. He lifted his hand up to his mouth and started to gnaw on something. When he brought his cupped hand down to his side I saw that he was eating a tulip bulb. The man picked up the rest of the bulb and stuffed it into his mouth where he started to gum at it. He had a jagged ridge of yellow teeth and eyed my uniform as if I were about to steal his last scrap of food.
All those dead fish floating outside of the harbor in Kiel flashed into my mind, and I imagined gathering them all into giant wicker baskets and leaving the silver and glistening piles of fish at the feet of this old man, or at the mouth of the cave for Janna and Mevi to stay hidden away and fed, or multiplying them like a bedraggled Christ and swallowing them whole myself.
I waved to the girls to come get warm and walked the perimeter of the fire, collecting a pile of logs and branches to stock the fire, and hunched my body over it. The old man still didn’t talk, but his eyes kept opening and closing. Janna and Mevi stared at him. Took him in. I was amazed yet again by their resilience. I piled more wood, put some next to him, and when I looked up, Janna had reached out and touched his thin shoulder for a second, trying to communicate some sympathy and warmth. It was one of those small, crushing gestures that stay with you.
We walked back to the tracks, leaving him there to pass the remainder of the night alone.