The tracks wound west, and I limped along them. We were hungry. I was starving. I craved bacon and bacon fat, warm bread, clean meat, and purified water with honey in it. I wanted sweets so badly I licked sap from a tree again, but it only left a pine flavor coating my teeth. The baskets of fish from Kiel harbor came to my mind again, but this time the fish had gone mealy and the foul stench clung to my skin.
In a field covered in hoarfrost we found discarded clothes, books, and a brown leather briefcase, which Janna opened. The inside was custom made to hold small glass vials of oils and powders. The top half had a chart on what to mix to make different perfumes. The three of us kneeled in front of the open case. Each vial had a piece of tape with a name written on the top. Mint. Citronella. Peppermint. Spruce. Eucalyptus. Rosemary. Lemon oil. Juniper oil. Rosewood and myrtle oil. Cinnamon water. Clove. Larch resin. Vanilla water. Lavender. Nutmeg. I took a chance and drank sips of the oils, one after the other like shots of schnapps.
“Here.” I handed the bottles to Janna and she handed them to Mevi, each of us drinking a third.
Janna took the bottle labeled Spruce and sprinkled it into a puddle at the cup of her hand and rubbed it under her armpits and across her chest. The smell was so intense she looked at me with a new fear in her eyes.
“I had the thought of us getting caught when someone asks what’s that god-awful stench,” she said.
I stood up and felt the mix of lemon oil and cinnamon water coating my empty stomach.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “by nightfall we’ll all be pissing some of the smelliest perfume in Europe.”
We left the case on the ground and walked through the rest of the field, reading it like a narrative. Scatter your silver spoons and candle collections. Your jewelry and bound books. Knit pillows and pressed drawings. They mean nothing now.
At the border of Germany and Holland, there were cement pillboxes with 16mm-machine-gun mounts spread out every fifty meters along the open fields. Most of them seemed empty, but I led us south and well behind them until there was a place to pass unnoticed into our own country. Several days later, with a sister and niece I’d gathered along the way, I hobbled into Utrecht.
The few soldiers in town didn’t ask us about our business, and I used several ration cards and marks Uncle Martin had given me to buy bread, carrots, radishes, and cheese. I rearranged the papers in my pockets to have the ID and orders of the soldier to report west to Brussels ready.
In Utrecht, we spent a night in the basement of a bombed-out house. Utrecht was southwest of Delfzijl, and I wanted to go back to see if there was any sign of my father, by the old fort or in the house. I believed that if he was alive he would have had to go back. He’d need to know what happened. He would have had to.
Uncle Martin would have taken care of Fergus for as long as he could, but I suddenly wanted nothing more than to be at home with that dog traipsing through the house. Janna and Mevi could come. I tried to imagine my home. The way it had been. What I thought of instead was my uncle’s tattoos. I could see the bare-chested trapeze woman, her glorious blue-tipped breasts, and then the black, shaded, full moon looking down at a tall man, hanging from a tree by the neck. One side was for life and the other for death, his body containing both.
In the morning, we went around the city looking to buy some salve for my toes and more supplies for at least another week of scurrying west. In an alley a man with jaundiced skin bent down to a puddle and brought the dirty water to his mouth. I felt sorry for him but wanted to be away from the reek and gauntness of other starving men.
Mevi just took in all that hunger and hurt like there was so much it pushed all the words out of her head to make room. I wanted to push her eyelids down and kiss each one to keep them closed. My brother had been wrong to think he wanted to see everything, or had not lived long enough to know all the starving men that cross one’s path.
At the cheese and produce shop, the woman behind the counter had a long, angular face with arched eyebrows and watery eyes. In front of her on the table were heads of red cabbage, leeks, turnips, carrots, and onions that I wanted to bite into like a starved beast; taste the freshness and dirt. The woman had a toddler who cried inconsolably. Something about the small boy reminded me of a monstrous radish: filthy, damp, and bitter with a round red face. The child eyed me in my uniform with an uneasy mix of fear, confusion, and some deep-seated anger, with hungry, hungry eyes. I listened to his wail, and felt a strong desire to slam his head onto the marble floor to shut him up, to see a bright color seep from his skull. I was shocked to look down and see my hand cupped, as if palming the boy’s head, only then realizing how twisted my thoughts were becoming.
We followed the wrought-iron garden fence into the park. A gravel path led to a grotto with a stone statue of a river nymph. On a bench in front of a hedge of budding ornamental shrubs, we ate bread and tried to figure out what to do next. I needed a doctor for my feet.
Mevi tapped Janna’s leg and pointed down the path. Almost a dozen German soldiers turned the corner, coming our way. We were out in the open and they looked like a patrol. A terrific swelling of energy rose up in me and more than any other time in my life, I felt a screaming need to survive, if not for me, than to protect these two with me. Seeing those soldiers, the fear of Mevi ending up at the bottom of a pit crashed down on me. It was too late to make a run for it, and I thought all was about to be lost.
I patted the bench next to me, motioning for Mevi to sit down. I eased back and stretched an arm comfortably over the back of the bench around Janna, and watched the soldiers come. As they got closer, they abruptly stopped. They weren’t carrying rifles but musical instruments in dark cases. Breaking to the right, they started walking to the gazebo to practice for a concert. I shut my eyes. How ridiculous. How ridiculous the world was at that moment.
“What should we do?” Janna asked.
I sat on that bench, trying to think of an exit point from the city, but my feet were too sore to go through another long stretch of time outside in the wet and cold. I needed help, and I didn’t know which identity to try. What person to become.
“Do you want to continue on your own?” I asked them then.
“No,” she said. “No.”
As a threesome, we walked into a church to seek shelter. Janna and Mevi sat in a back pew as I walked up to a small altar and a stained-glass window of Jesus with his arms spread out to the congregation. I wasn’t sure if Jesus was calling his flock to him or sending them out into the world. Light lingered on the altar, the communion table, the pressed vestment cloths, and the giant, opened Bible with a red ribbon tucked between the pages. Part of me wanted to limp forward, fall to my knees, crawl across the chancel, slither to the tabernacle, eat the bread, and drink the wine, then steal and sell the gold.
Footsteps came down the aisle. A fat man with a scarred face in a brown friar’s robe walked toward me. A slight wheeze followed each exhale.
“Are you here for confession, son?” the man asked me.