The specter of her previous plans returned. She had expected her body to be found the next day, had wanted it that way. She could have wandered into the middle of the forest, where no one would have found her for months, where her flesh would have faded from her bones, leaving only the white of her skeleton to be uncovered. It seemed she had little choice now but to abandon those plans and help this man instead. If she left him in the hole, he would die. If she turned him over to the authorities, he would die. She would have to live with the knowledge that she had helped further the perverted will of the Gestapo and the regime they represented. If she waited until dawn, she might meet someone else who would force her hand, and he would die, and perhaps she along with him. There didn’t seem to be any choice at all.
The snow had smoothed over the footprints she’d made getting here, but she knew these hills and meadows, snow covered or not. She began hiking back to the cabin. It would take more than an hour to get there, and the same to return to him. Was he a spy, or an escaping prisoner of war? But if he was a POW, why would he have jumped out of a plane into Germany? Perhaps his plane had been shot down or had run into some technical trouble and he’d been forced to bail out. Why else would he be here, in the middle of the mountains? Freiburg was only around ten miles away. Maybe he had been blown off course. Yet she’d heard no plane and seen no flak in the sky on the way out here. The bombing raids were coming more frequently. Even here. Thoughts of the bomb dropping brought with them the memory of her father, and the pain that had driven her out here with his pistol in her pocket soon followed, but the remembrance of the man in the snow cave forced her back into the moment, driving her feet forward.
She made her way down the hill she’d found the man on, back the way she came, and soon she could no longer see the snow cave, nor the tree she’d dug it under.
“Try not to worry about things you can’t control,” she said out loud.
It felt good to hear her own thoughts, felt almost as if there were someone there with her and she wasn’t alone in trying to save this man’s life.
“What are you doing?” she said. “Why are you getting involved with this man you don’t know?” The words had come out as if spoken by someone else.
She was in a state of near exhaustion when the cabin came into view. The door was unlocked, and she pushed it open. She had never expected to come here again, yet she had left it immaculately clean, a gift for the people who would find it. She took off her snowshoes, leaving them at the door as she went inside. She removed her gloves before fumbling with the matches that lay on a nearby table. The room glowed from the candle she lit, and she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror before jerking her eyes away. She had no desire to confront her own reflection. The embers of last night’s fire were dead in the fireplace. The wood was out back. That would be a job for later. She paced down the hall into the living area and found a bottle of brandy she then stuffed in her coat pocket. She put her hands on her head and searched her mind for anything else that might help her on the way back here with him. Her journey alone had been arduous enough. She began to wonder if it was even possible and contemplated sitting down and closing her eyes, just to rest for a while.
She poured herself a cup of water and finished it in seconds. She put the cup back down and placed a kitchen knife in her pocket. The door to the bedroom she’d slept in last night was ajar, the bed stripped, the covers stacked at the end in a neat pile. The bed represented an impossible luxury, everything she could possibly have wanted in that moment. She knew what her resting would mean for the man in the snow. She closed the bedroom door and walked out the back and into the night once more. The firewood she’d gathered the week before sat untouched, speckled with a light coating of snow blown under the awning that protected it. She eyed the sled she’d used to drag the logs back from the forest. It was sturdy, well able to take his weight. She dragged it around the side of the house before going inside again.
The cuckoo clock on the wall struck 5:00 a.m. The two-inch-high figurine of a man emerged and struck the bell five times with a hammer. Fredi, her brother, had loved that clock. The joy that stupid clock gave him had been the only thing that had stopped her from smashing it. Everything he’d loved, anything he’d touched, was pure gold now.
“Fredi,” she said as the man disappeared back inside the clock. “You see what I’m doing, don’t you? I need you with me. I need to feel you with me. I can’t do this without you.”
She hadn’t said his name aloud in months, hadn’t allowed herself to. It had been too much. It was best to forget—to ignore the past in order to control the agony. But she needed him now, needed to feel love again. She tried to remember the love she’d felt, tried to draw it from deep within her like precious water is drawn from a desert well. She balled her hand into a fist, took a heavy breath, and opened the front door.
The wind was gone. The air was as still as death itself. She grasped the cord attached to the front of the sled and set out across the snow. Her footprints were still visible and would remain that way until the next snow came. Anyone would be able to follow her. The blanket of night would hide them for another couple of hours, but after that they’d be visible to anyone out for a morning stroll. How would she explain hauling a prostrate Luftwaffe airman through the snow on a sled? She’d think of those lies if she needed to. For now, the only thing that mattered was putting one foot in front of the other.
The fear that he would be dead haunted her for the entire journey back. What if the Gestapo had been tracking him? What if they’d seen his parachute and hadn’t had the chance to capture him during the storm? Surely they’d be on their way up to the field now. Savage memories came to her of interrogations, of jail cells, of the cold gray eyes of the Gestapo man who had questioned her. Relief only came as she sighted the field. The pressing matter of evading detection drowned out her thoughts.
The field was empty, as she’d left it. She listened. No sound. The silence of the night had a story to tell. The trees were still, the snow dense and heavy. She waited two minutes but then realized she was wasting time. No one had seen him, but someone would unless she acted soon. She peered around the tree she was hiding behind and made her way across the field toward the snow cave. Seeing that the entrance was only a few inches wide now, she knelt and cleared it out. The man was still lying on the sleeping bag she’d taken from his backpack, his chest still moving with his breathing. He was still unconscious.
“Hello?” she said. “Are you awake, sir? Can you hear me?”
Her voice seemed to echo through the vacuum of night. The man didn’t stir. She reached down and poked his shoulder—still nothing. The sun would be up soon. It had to happen now. She took the nylon strands of the parachute and pulled until they were taut against his weight, then dug her feet into the snow and heaved. The man’s body inched up the ramp and out of the snow cave. She collapsed, gasping beside him, her heart pounding. He was out. Now all she had to do was get him onto the sled and drag him two miles back to the cabin. That was all.