Present-day 1945
Stefano is startled awake by the sound of voices close by—a group of people walking, wheeling carts, and carrying children on their backs. It is instinct to stay motionless at every sound, to assess, and then to react. His body has been trained for different sounds and smells. He has seen many travelers heading home since the end of the war, carrying clothing under their arms, some with items tied to their backs with rope. They have emerged from the remnants of Europe, across many foreign lands, but their resentment and their hunger bind them. He does not choose to travel with anyone. He does not wish to reflect upon the war or hear their stories. He has too many of his own.
He puts his head back down, hidden behind the tall gully grasses, and rolls over onto his side. The ground is hard and damp, and Stefano grew cold during the night. He raises his eyes, then sits up suddenly. Lying close by is a woman. On her back, she appears to stare at the sky, and he wonders if she was there when he first lay down in the field. Under a quarter moon he had not seen the dullness of her coat, the gray scarf wrapped around her head. But she is not the sole object of his curiosity. Beside her, sitting and watching him, is a small boy, clutching a basket that holds a bundle of linen.
Stefano stands up carefully and walks nearer, the boy eyeing him warily.
“Are you all right?” he asks, but the boy only stares, eyes heavy with resignation and rimmed in red.
Stefano edges near the woman, slowly, so as not to upset the boy, and crouches to examine her. She has her eyes partially open, the color unseen, disappearing to the backs of her eyelids. She is rigid.
He has seen many dead bodies before, but this one is different: there is no obvious cause of death, no shrapnel embedded, no cotton saturated with blood. She is intact.
“Is this your mother?”
The boy says nothing.
“Where is your father?”
The boy says nothing. Stefano tries French and asks the same questions, but still the boy says nothing.
“Are you hungry?” Stefano asks once again in German.
The boy nods. Stefano retrieves some pieces of chocolate from his satchel. The boy takes them eagerly, shoves the palm of his hand to his mouth, and chews, forgetting all else but the food that will barely fill his stomach. He is ravenous and has likely been this way for days.
Stefano looks around him to the empty spaces, the fields that go on forever. The lack of humans, the lack of anything that will give him answers to the plight of the boy. The group has now passed into the distance. There is nothing he can do here, he thinks. He will have to leave him, hope that a farmer finds him, a soldier, someone to take him in. He looks back at the dead mother, then the boy, and shakes his head gently. There is nothing Stefano can offer him.
“Are you from Berlin?” he asks the boy, who is sitting and watching Stefano’s pack, knowing now that the satchel holds more of the food he yearns for.
“You must go up that way,” Stefano says, standing up and pointing north, “where there are houses. Knock on doors.”
He walks backward a few paces, and the boy starts weeping, bottom lip forward and the fingers of his free hand plucking nervously at the side of his shorts.
“Good luck!” Stefano says.
The boy starts to whine and lays his head on his mother’s chest, the food now forgotten, his despair reignited. With the basket now slightly tilted, Stefano can see the contents: a baby’s forehead and nose exposed, skin blue and bloated with death. And Stefano feels something gnaw at the soft belly of his human condition, at the piece of his makeup that can still feel pity, the same piece that made him stop to help the Trümmerfrau.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” he says more gently, presuming that she is. “You must go on without her. Find help, yes?”
The boy keeps one arm across his mother and the other holding tightly to the handle of the basket. He bends down to kiss the baby’s forehead, and Stefano has to look away, unprepared for the small lump that has formed at the back of his throat, at the sight of the gesture, believing he’d grown immune to such things.
“We should put her coat over both of them to keep them warm in the night,” Stefano says, thinking of his own mother. And the boy sits up to watch as Stefano takes off the woman’s coat and uses some force to bend the limbs that are stiff and empty of life. Then he lifts the almost weightless linen bundle from the basket to lie beside the mother and places the coat over both faces. That at least, so they are not staring into the sun.
The boy watches all this silently.
Stefano is about to say a prayer, then changes his mind. It is too late for prayer. He sighs, wishing he had chosen somewhere else to stop, before turning to walk away. He is of no help to the boy. Not now.
As he steps toward the main road, the boy jumps up to follow him with the now-empty basket. He is wearing shorts, long socks that have no stretch, and shoes that are battered with wear.
“Wrong way!” Stefano says, pointing back in the direction he has come. “That way!” When the boy doesn’t move, Stefano steps forward, touches his shoulder, and feels the warmth of him; the living warmth a sharp contrast, he thinks, to the mother and baby he also touched.
“You must not follow me,” he says. “I have far to go.”
Stefano turns back to look at the long quest ahead, then back down at the boy.
The boy fiddles with the tips of his fingers, looks back at the pile that was his mother and baby sibling, and Stefano knows he is thinking the same. He has no one now.
“What is your name?”
A small frown appears on his face, and the boy looks down briefly, then back at Stefano.
“No name? How old are you?”
Still nothing.
“Five? Six? Four maybe?”
The child nods.
“Four?”
He nods again.
“Do you have a tongue?”
Nothing.
“I can’t take you. I have things to do.”
Nothing.
Stefano sighs. He rubs at the dull ache at the front of his head, thinks briefly that he could trick the child, tell him that he will return and leave him there, before deciding otherwise.
“Come with me,” he orders, suddenly frustrated, and the boy follows him back to his mother. Stefano bends to search the woman’s coat pockets. There is nothing to say who she was, where she is from, who the child is. “You must leave the basket,” he says. “It will only slow you down.” But the boy grips it harder.
Stefano links his hands behind his head, paces in a circle, and curses under his breath, regretting again that he found the child and is now burdened with the task of finding him a home.
The boy looks at him with eyes that tell him nothing. He is lost, like I was, thinks Stefano suddenly. Life has turned its back on him, too.
“All right,” he says. “The basket, too.”
Stefano continues heading south, the child half running to keep up with him. Twice he stops at houses to ask for accommodations for the boy. Twice he is rejected. He is told there are many orphans now, and beggars, and the people who open their doors are quick to close them again.
The child grows weary and drops back several yards, his small legs slowing. Stefano stops to wait for him to catch up this time, the traveler frustrated now that he has to slow his pace.
They stop at another house, the front door missing. Stefano checks his map and enters curiously. There are bullet holes in the walls upstairs and traces of blood at the top of the stairs. He is certain there were bodies here that someone has moved, and out the back there are mounds of earth and crosses above them to suggest where they might now lie.