She waited five minutes until she poked her head out onto the trail. Tears formed in her eyes as tension gripped her. She grasped the rope on the front of the sled and managed to coax her aching arms into dragging the man back up onto the trail. The sun was bright in the crisp blue sky, illuminating the beauty the snows the night before had created. The layer of white was undisturbed except for the trail Herr Berkel had left. She resumed pulling the man along, her thoughts returning to getting him back to the cabin alive.
There were no other walkers out that morning. She removed her hand from the pistol in her pocket and used it to pull the sled. Every thought disappeared from her mind until the only thing she could picture was getting back to the cabin. There was nothing else now. It was all that the world existed for. One painful step followed another until the last hill came into view. She hadn’t taken a rest other than the one that Herr Berkel’s presence had forced upon her, but she sat now, regaining her breath before the final test. She had come so far. There was just this one hill left, and then the house on top held the promise of food, water, painkillers, and, more importantly, sleep.
She looked over at him. “We’re nearly home. It’s just a little farther now.”
The muscles in her legs almost gave out, but she fought the pain and weakness and stood up straight and tall, grasping the rope tied to the sled. She pulled and heaved and sweated and made it to the house.
She struggled for breath as she put a hand on the front door and pushed it open. She dragged the sled inside, leaving a trail of snow and muck that she’d have to clean up later.
He was here, inside the cabin. It felt like a miracle. She dragged him into the living room and left him in front of the embers of last night’s fire. There was just enough wood there to make it up again, and she took a few minutes to light it. Her hat and coat felt like a second skin as she peeled them off. She went to the kitchen and gulped down several cups of water before going to him. She held the cup to his lips, dribbling water into his mouth. He managed to swallow some of it. He was a filthy, stinking mess and had two broken legs, but he was alive, and that was enough for now. She left him there, unconscious but safe, in front of the fire. Then she went to the bedroom, took off her clothes, and was asleep as soon as she felt the pillow against her face.
Chapter 3
The ticking of a clock. The chimes. He blinked his eyes open and found himself lying in a pool of filthy sweat and tied to a length of wood. A stormy haze had settled between his ears, and it took a few seconds to remember where he was, let alone why he was here. The agony in his legs shot up through his torso. He could take pain, but enough was enough, and he looked around the room for an escape. The dying embers of a fire glowed red in the fireplace a few feet away. He was alone. Had he been captured? He could expect no mercy. Where were they? The memory of his family appeared through the clouds of his consciousness. His father, his mother, and his wife—his ex-wife now. The vague remembrance of their divorce was new to him again for a few seconds. Then the letter she’d written him appeared in his mind, and he was back there, hovering above his bunk in basic training, watching himself reading it. Glimpses of his past life appeared and then retreated into the abyss. He tried to recall something about the present, about where he was now. The feeling of hands on his body, of being dragged along—it all came to him more as an essence than a solid memory he could cling to. It was as if he could feel the moment—perhaps even smell and touch it. Picturing it was beyond him. He tried to rouse himself off the wooden platform he was on, whatever it was, but his efforts came to nothing as he fell back onto it again. His eyelids felt like they weighed a thousand tons. He had time just to glance around the room before they shut and he succumbed to the mercy of sleep once more.
The light of the day had dwindled by the time she awoke in the early evening. She sat up in the bed. Her empty stomach growled. The muscles in her arms, shoulders, and back were as stiff as a tortoise shell. She worked her fingers into the grooves where hard muscle met bone and sinew at the top of her shoulders, doing her best to massage away the pain. The living room door was ajar a few inches. She peered out at the man passed out there. She sat still, listening for sounds that weren’t there. Nothing was moving other than the wind through the trees outside. She got out from under the covers and stood beside the bed, almost against her own will. She went to the wardrobe and slipped into a simple gray dress. The cold floor stung her feet, and she put on thick woolen socks before sliding into slippers.
She inched out, a stranger in her own house. The first things she saw were his legs and the splints she’d fashioned on either side of each one. He wasn’t moving. His eyes were still closed.
“Hallo, sir,” she whispered. “Are you awake?”
Nothing.
She took a deep breath, trying to slow down her heart. Sweat was forming on her palms. His short brown hair was thick with muck and still wet from the snow. His unshaven face was scratched and caked with filth. He didn’t seem to have moved. She reached down to check for a pulse. His heartbeat was steady and even. He would survive this. She went to the kitchen and came back with a cupful of water and dribbled some in between his lips. Once again he seemed to swallow some of it between coughing and spluttering away the rest.
She knelt beside him and reached under the sled to untie the rope that held him in place. She thought about slicing the rope but decided against that. She might need it again if he proved unwilling to cooperate. The rope fell beneath the sled, and she moved the parachute aside. She reached for the straps on his shoulders, which had held the parachute in place, and had little difficulty slipping them off. The problem of what to do with the parachute remained. Hiding a parachute was the kind of subversive act that could land a citizen in jail, or worse. Burning it would produce toxic fumes. For the time being, she dumped it in a pile near the back door.
He was going to need bed rest. The sled, even though it had left a trail of dirt when she pushed him into the house earlier, was still the best way of moving him around. She got down on her knees and turned the sled around, angling it toward the spare room where she and Fredi had slept on summer nights as children. It had been empty for years. The man lay immobile as she pushed the sled into the bedroom. The door was already open, the bed made, and the room immaculately clean. She tried to remember who had slept there last. It must have been her, or maybe even Fredi. She could recall her father taking Fredi up here, but that was years before the war—before Fredi had become too much for their father to take care of alone. Before she’d deserted them. She wiped the memories away like grime off a windshield and endeavored to focus on the problems at hand. She went back into the living room for his backpack. Clean civilian clothes lay folded at the bottom, but there was nothing he could sleep in, and she certainly wasn’t going to have him lying around the house in his underwear. Some of her father’s old clothes would fit him. Within a few minutes she’d found a pair of his old pajamas and a wine-colored bathrobe. She went back in and threw the pajamas on the bed but held on to the bathrobe for a few seconds, feeling the smoothness of the material between her fingers. The past was everywhere here. There was no escaping it.