The boy steps cautiously through the remains, stopping to examine or salvage an object. He is odd. The children she has seen run and squeal. This child is like an adult, careful and quiet, like her, she thinks.
She sorts through the rubble for good bricks with her small white hands, long fingers, with nails bitten to the quick, that look more used to delicate stitching. Rosalind places the last of her bricks in the barrow, and Stefano’s arm brushes hers. She draws away too quickly, startled by their connection, and cautiously gauges his expression that betrays no feeling, eyes that are focused elsewhere, unaware perhaps of anything but the task.
When the barrow is full, Stefano raises it to leave and calls out to Michal to follow. Rosalind walks behind for the return journey, examining the broadness of Stefano’s shoulders, the muscles that ripple beneath his sleeves, and wondering at the distance that has closed between them in just a day. She wonders also at the warmth of him that she still feels against her arm.
“What have you found, Michal?” asks Stefano as he looks in the basket beside him. “You must be pirate, yes? To find such treasure,” he continues in his strange accent, and Rosalind feels the touch of a laugh in the back of her throat, a genuine one, one that comes up from the heart. There is a small spring in the boy’s step, his face more animated. On the way back to the house he keeps checking that the items are still inside the basket. He is excited by his finds: a handle from what once was a walking cane, a brass doorknob, a pipe that is almost intact, and a single red porcelain marble.
They cross a paddock that stretches to the main road. Passing in front of them, a convoy of trucks on its way to Berlin. Several of the American occupants wave to them from inside one of the vehicles. Stefano responds. Rosalind pretends she doesn’t see them.
“What happened?” she asks as his limp becomes more obvious across the damp and uneven ground. Though she wishes immediately that she didn’t ask. She is afraid of something. The truth, a reminder of what people did, something that might break a fledgling truce. Might remind him again of hate.
“Just before the Russians came, your Germans announced that we were leaving the camp. They knew they had lost the war; I saw it in their faces, but the arrogance was still there. They still hung on to that. They had to have one last victory, and they still had weapons. Even without weapons they could have killed us, most of us too weak to fight. They marched us from the camp. The Germans got more desperate, agitated. Insane is probably the best word. I watched others walking off the road toward some trees. I was skeptical at first, and then I followed. Then they began shooting us in the back, and hundreds fell around me. I took a bullet below the knee, and this, strange as it sounds, saved my life.
“The Germans took off across a paddock to hide from the Russian army about to arrive. When they had gone I dragged myself farther into a wood and lay there, sleeping for some time until I heard trucks. Russian trucks.”
He strains from the effort of pushing the barrow, the ground still softened from rain.
“Do you want to stop and rest?”
“No,” he said.
“What happened then?”
“When I was in the camp, I would dream about trees that bordered the camp, a symbol of freedom. We thought that if we made it to those trees, we were free. It was a false hope. The Russians found me and put me back in the same prison again. Ironisch, I think you say.”
“Yes,” she says. “It is certainly ironic.”
He is strong, hair unruly, and there is stubble on his chin. He has had no woman to care for him, she thinks. Georg is lucky that way. He has someone.
They cross the road, and Stefano begins the task of heaving the barrow up the slope. On the ridge, the ground levels briefly, and he weaves swiftly through the sparse and narrow wood.
At the edge of the descent to the backyard of Rosalind’s house, Stefano puts down the barrow and wipes the back of his forehead. She watches him look down at the roofs of their two houses and toward the river beyond the trees before noting piles of rubbish nearby, and something else, too.
“What’s that?”
“Rubbish from the cleanup after the bombings.”
“There!” He points to the white cross close by, above a mound of earth surrounded by stones. “It looks like a tiny grave.”
“I don’t know,” she says, turning briefly in the direction of the small bundle that Monique once buried. “Since the end of the war, many have walked the road below.”
Rosalind is not a suspicious person, but this patch of wood feels colder, even with the too-warm air that blows from the south.
She continues forward to the house, eager to put distance between her and the grave, and Stefano picks up the barrow again to follow.
When they reach the bottom, Stefano empties the barrow at the edge of the house.
“I can check your injury later if you wish,” says Rosalind. “To make sure you haven’t damaged it doing this heavy work for me.”
He nods unconvincingly.
“And the burn on your hand?” She is a nurse now, and it feels good to ask these questions. This was the type of injury she attended to before the bodies flooded in, in pieces.
Stefano looks toward the river, the question arousing a memory. She had seen the mark on his hand when the bandage had come loose, and she could tell immediately that it was a burn. She has also seen him cover it with his other hand sometimes to conceal it. At the table he kept it mostly hidden away on his lap. Whatever is beneath his shirt must be badly battered, she thinks. She can help him, repay him for the wall.
“I took a blast from an explosion in Africa. We were beaten by the Allies. I lost a friend there. I got up and then collapsed. Waking a short time later, I realized I was in the middle of a battlefield.”
“You have had much thrown at you.”
“Especially explosives,” he says in what she perceives as jest, though without the backing of a smile. Instead he stares intently at her. The look of him wild, and too much to take in.
She turns modestly from his gaze to consider his family and the changes they might see. She imagines a man who was once much stronger, before being cut down for reasons that don’t make sense anymore. She believed her leaders, the speeches. Believed Germany would win. Georg didn’t, and neither did Monique.
“We grew up together here,” she says about Georg. She longs to tell someone about the life she had here. For some reason, she longs to tell Stefano. “Georg and I. And Monique. We used to swim in the river and run through the wood like wild children. I used to pray all autumn, winter, and spring for summer to come sooner.”
He stands, waiting for more, but she bites her lip. She has said too much. The relationship has changed. Friendship is creeping in.
“We will need some more bricks,” he says to cover her awkwardness, and the three return to the ruins with the now-empty barrow.
CHAPTER 15
STEFANO