EVERY NOW AND THEN Agneta would risk a look at the boy with the gun. He was slight for his age. The old army greatcoat he wore was too big for him – the material folding in with a dimple on shoulders that were too narrow for its width. Its hem brushed the snow when he walked back and forth. He looked cold. Each time she glanced up at him, she found his pale eyes waiting for her. How could it have happened that her life had ended up in the hands of a child? Each time she caught his eye, he smiled at her.
He terrified her. The earth had frozen, locking itself into tight pellets. It sounded like gravel when it landed on the sheet-wrapped bodies. It required effort to prise it out from the mound that ran alongside the trench.
Someone – his mother? – had given the boy a scarf the colour of a bright red apple. A thin strip of it appeared between the Wehrmacht grey and his pale cheeks. The scarf’s colour matched the boy’s red lips. If he’d been a girl you’d think he wore lipstick.
She wondered if the other women were as frightened of the boy as she was. Sometimes she had to stand in amongst the dead bodies, sometimes even on them, in order to make sure the earth was evenly spread, but she was used to dead bodies. They didn’t unnerve her the way the boy did. It was the boy’s smile that was most chilling. His clear, pale eyes knew neither guilt nor sin. The gun, she suspected, was heavier than he was comfortable with. He held it at an angle, the butt underneath his armpit and the barrel pointing at the ground in front of him. Both hands supporting its weight.
She tried to think of something from before – of something from the past. Something joyful. She thought back to her last moment of freedom – of sitting down opposite Brandt in the cafe, how he’d leant across and taken her hand. How he’d looked into her eyes and how warm she’d felt, all of a sudden. How her stomach had felt lighter than her body, lifting her up to the ceiling. But the boy kept pushing himself into her consciousness and Vienna was a world away while the child with the gun still stood there, his finger resting on the trigger, his eyes following her every movement. She looked over at him once more, feeling her skin sing with fear when again he caught her glance and held it. She imagined him telling his friends about how he’d guarded hardened prisoners. How one of them had been a Jew. She wondered how the story ended.
The boy began to whistle.
She wondered where Brandt was. She wondered if he’d told the truth. She wondered if he would be able to do what he’d said he could.