22

As we walked, Mevi reached her hand up to hold mine. Her skin was cold and clammy and I tried to cup all of it in my fist. I ran my thumb over her tiny knuckles and it felt like the simplest version of love. Language was still stunted deep in her throat by fear. But here was the truest form of communication to ever exist. This was all I needed.

A large pine unzipped by a lightning strike oozed sap over its charred trunk. We sucked on the sap. It made my mouth water, and I swallowed the sweet spittle while watching Mevi lap at the bark like a malnourished bear.

The dark hours smelled like wood smoke and lasted the longest. It was during the dark hours that I understood each day was its own living thing in that country. Though the sky was purple at dawn, the color bled away all morning until the sun crested the treetops and left a golden sheen on the tracks.

We followed the tracks, veering always west in the direction of the Dutch border. Me always chanting Ot-ta-wa. The shape of the cattle in the fog blurred as they moved across the field. They were amorphous, as if my brother had rubbed off their sharp lines with his dampened fingertip. The Germans patrolled the main roads, but they were not hard to avoid.

As we huddled together at night we went over our story. I showed them the soldier’s ID I carried.

“We need to have a fast answer ready if asked. You are my wife or girlfriend,” I suggested.

“I am your older sister,” Janna said. “This is my daughter. She doesn’t talk.”

“Okay. My older sister,” I mumbled. Hurt.

The train tracks ran through a small town that had a whole series of bombed and abandoned row houses. We walked through, thumbing the last remaining kitchen cupboards, peering into rooms, trying the doorknobs, and pushing our way into the hidden corners.

“Look for fruit flies,” Janna told me. “They’ll lead to scraps.”

On the ground floor of the second house, there was the frame of a giant harp with all its strings broken. I picked it off the floor and stood it up in front of me so the thick strings hung down slack. I bent down and walked through the body of the harp like it were a door, but everything on the other side was still bleak and empty.

A dusty drop cloth held the shape of the ottoman beneath. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling.

In the basement I found Mevi standing in front of a collection of decorative spoons that hung from the wall, each by two small nails at the base of the neck. She let her fingers touch one, then the next.

Every time I pushed a door back, it felt like someone would crash out past me, or dive to cower in some corner. In my mind, I’d been playing a sort of game with my father, hide-and-seek. My father was always ahead of me, like a ghost laying down secrets in the morning mist. Any moment I might turn a corner and find him crouched behind a tree, peering out from behind the edge of a building, watching over me, or waiting for me to come save him. When it was dark and cold, the thought was comforting. It gave me that inner push to move forward, sleep less, be more aware, as there was no knowing how it might happen that he, we, might be saved.

“Can you tell me about your family?” I asked Janna. I wanted to hear her talk. To hear a voice. I wanted to hear a story.

“What do you want to know?” she asked. She was looking at me then like she first had. Like I was the soldier. Something imposing and scary.

“Just to hear,” I said, and it was true.

“There is not much to tell that doesn’t hurt to think about right now.”

We left the row houses and weaved among the trees in the darkness like dogs, like Fergus, letting that extra sliver of skin shut over our eyeballs to protect us from briars. Deeper in the night we crept through fields, alongside roads, and a ruddy gray canal. When we found another train track, we followed it to the southwest.

My feet pounded in pain. The curled black toes felt like soggy pieces of rubber. Each time I looked at them it was with a sense of horror, as if they didn’t belong to me, but were something else entirely, like dead squids that hung limply at the end of my legs. They gave off a rotting stink I could almost taste.

If God did have his finger on my shoulder, I thought, he was trying to flick me off the ledge.

From deep in the woods, cowbells jingled in the distance. A sheepdog barked. My eyes were always trained for the shifting of sentries. When it was a few hours before dawn, the soft orange glow of a fire shone in the woods. I had the girls hide while I snuck toward it, staying crouched low to the ground. When I was close enough to be sure it was only an old man by himself, I stepped out of the woods to get warm by the fire.

The man slept sitting up. He didn’t have a jacket on. The sharp sticks of his collarbone stuck out against his thin shirt. The backs of his hands seemed creased and concave, the bones curved inward and sunk toward his palms. A knot of shaggy, graying beard rose off his loose, bone-colored face. There was a rattle deep in his lungs when he breathed. I sat across the fire from him for a moment to get warm and propped my feet up to the flame. When I looked back up at the man I saw his polished, dying eyes.

“Hello,” I said in German.

Firelight glinted off the white stubble skirting his neckline. The circle of skin around his mouth sunk in like a pocket over his toothless gums. The man’s right eye rolled back into his skull. The left eye was black and held the flame’s vivid reflection on its glass surface.

He stared at me without moving.

“Hello,” I said in Dutch.

Then he nodded. He lifted his hand up to his mouth and started to gnaw on something. When he brought his cupped hand down to his side I saw that he was eating a tulip bulb. The man picked up the rest of the bulb and stuffed it into his mouth where he started to gum at it. He had a jagged ridge of yellow teeth and eyed my uniform as if I were about to steal his last scrap of food.

All those dead fish floating outside of the harbor in Kiel flashed into my mind, and I imagined gathering them all into giant wicker baskets and leaving the silver and glistening piles of fish at the feet of this old man, or at the mouth of the cave for Janna and Mevi to stay hidden away and fed, or multiplying them like a bedraggled Christ and swallowing them whole myself.

I waved to the girls to come get warm and walked the perimeter of the fire, collecting a pile of logs and branches to stock the fire, and hunched my body over it. The old man still didn’t talk, but his eyes kept opening and closing. Janna and Mevi stared at him. Took him in. I was amazed yet again by their resilience. I piled more wood, put some next to him, and when I looked up, Janna had reached out and touched his thin shoulder for a second, trying to communicate some sympathy and warmth. It was one of those small, crushing gestures that stay with you.

We walked back to the tracks, leaving him there to pass the remainder of the night alone.

The tracks wound west, and I limped along them. We were hungry. I was starving. I craved bacon and bacon fat, warm bread, clean meat, and purified water with honey in it. I wanted sweets so badly I licked sap from a tree again, but it only left a pine flavor coating my teeth. The baskets of fish from Kiel harbor came to my mind again, but this time the fish had gone mealy and the foul stench clung to my skin.

In a field covered in hoarfrost we found discarded clothes, books, and a brown leather briefcase, which Janna opened. The inside was custom made to hold small glass vials of oils and powders. The top half had a chart on what to mix to make different perfumes. The three of us kneeled in front of the open case. Each vial had a piece of tape with a name written on the top. Mint. Citronella. Peppermint. Spruce. Eucalyptus. Rosemary. Lemon oil. Juniper oil. Rosewood and myrtle oil. Cinnamon water. Clove. Larch resin. Vanilla water. Lavender. Nutmeg. I took a chance and drank sips of the oils, one after the other like shots of schnapps.

“Here.” I handed the bottles to Janna and she handed them to Mevi, each of us drinking a third.

Janna took the bottle labeled Spruce and sprinkled it into a puddle at the cup of her hand and rubbed it under her armpits and across her chest. The smell was so intense she looked at me with a new fear in her eyes.

“I had the thought of us getting caught when someone asks what’s that god-awful stench,” she said.

I stood up and felt the mix of lemon oil and cinnamon water coating my empty stomach.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “by nightfall we’ll all be pissing some of the smelliest perfume in Europe.”

We left the case on the ground and walked through the rest of the field, reading it like a narrative. Scatter your silver spoons and candle collections. Your jewelry and bound books. Knit pillows and pressed drawings. They mean nothing now.

At the border of Germany and Holland, there were cement pillboxes with 16mm-machine-gun mounts spread out every fifty meters along the open fields. Most of them seemed empty, but I led us south and well behind them until there was a place to pass unnoticed into our own country. Several days later, with a sister and niece I’d gathered along the way, I hobbled into Utrecht.

The few soldiers in town didn’t ask us about our business, and I used several ration cards and marks Uncle Martin had given me to buy bread, carrots, radishes, and cheese. I rearranged the papers in my pockets to have the ID and orders of the soldier to report west to Brussels ready.

In Utrecht, we spent a night in the basement of a bombed-out house. Utrecht was southwest of Delfzijl, and I wanted to go back to see if there was any sign of my father, by the old fort or in the house. I believed that if he was alive he would have had to go back. He’d need to know what happened. He would have had to.

Uncle Martin would have taken care of Fergus for as long as he could, but I suddenly wanted nothing more than to be at home with that dog traipsing through the house. Janna and Mevi could come. I tried to imagine my home. The way it had been. What I thought of instead was my uncle’s tattoos. I could see the bare-chested trapeze woman, her glorious blue-tipped breasts, and then the black, shaded, full moon looking down at a tall man, hanging from a tree by the neck. One side was for life and the other for death, his body containing both.

In the morning, we went around the city looking to buy some salve for my toes and more supplies for at least another week of scurrying west. In an alley a man with jaundiced skin bent down to a puddle and brought the dirty water to his mouth. I felt sorry for him but wanted to be away from the reek and gauntness of other starving men.

Mevi just took in all that hunger and hurt like there was so much it pushed all the words out of her head to make room. I wanted to push her eyelids down and kiss each one to keep them closed. My brother had been wrong to think he wanted to see everything, or had not lived long enough to know all the starving men that cross one’s path.

At the cheese and produce shop, the woman behind the counter had a long, angular face with arched eyebrows and watery eyes. In front of her on the table were heads of red cabbage, leeks, turnips, carrots, and onions that I wanted to bite into like a starved beast; taste the freshness and dirt. The woman had a toddler who cried inconsolably. Something about the small boy reminded me of a monstrous radish: filthy, damp, and bitter with a round red face. The child eyed me in my uniform with an uneasy mix of fear, confusion, and some deep-seated anger, with hungry, hungry eyes. I listened to his wail, and felt a strong desire to slam his head onto the marble floor to shut him up, to see a bright color seep from his skull. I was shocked to look down and see my hand cupped, as if palming the boy’s head, only then realizing how twisted my thoughts were becoming.

We followed the wrought-iron garden fence into the park. A gravel path led to a grotto with a stone statue of a river nymph. On a bench in front of a hedge of budding ornamental shrubs, we ate bread and tried to figure out what to do next. I needed a doctor for my feet.

Mevi tapped Janna’s leg and pointed down the path. Almost a dozen German soldiers turned the corner, coming our way. We were out in the open and they looked like a patrol. A terrific swelling of energy rose up in me and more than any other time in my life, I felt a screaming need to survive, if not for me, than to protect these two with me. Seeing those soldiers, the fear of Mevi ending up at the bottom of a pit crashed down on me. It was too late to make a run for it, and I thought all was about to be lost.

I patted the bench next to me, motioning for Mevi to sit down. I eased back and stretched an arm comfortably over the back of the bench around Janna, and watched the soldiers come. As they got closer, they abruptly stopped. They weren’t carrying rifles but musical instruments in dark cases. Breaking to the right, they started walking to the gazebo to practice for a concert. I shut my eyes. How ridiculous. How ridiculous the world was at that moment.

“What should we do?” Janna asked.

I sat on that bench, trying to think of an exit point from the city, but my feet were too sore to go through another long stretch of time outside in the wet and cold. I needed help, and I didn’t know which identity to try. What person to become.

“Do you want to continue on your own?” I asked them then.

“No,” she said. “No.”

As a threesome, we walked into a church to seek shelter. Janna and Mevi sat in a back pew as I walked up to a small altar and a stained-glass window of Jesus with his arms spread out to the congregation. I wasn’t sure if Jesus was calling his flock to him or sending them out into the world. Light lingered on the altar, the communion table, the pressed vestment cloths, and the giant, opened Bible with a red ribbon tucked between the pages. Part of me wanted to limp forward, fall to my knees, crawl across the chancel, slither to the tabernacle, eat the bread, and drink the wine, then steal and sell the gold.

Footsteps came down the aisle. A fat man with a scarred face in a brown friar’s robe walked toward me. A slight wheeze followed each exhale.

“Are you here for confession, son?” the man asked me.

“I think so,” I said.

“Then right this way.” He lumbered into the confessional off to the side of the altar. I followed him, and we each sat on our own side of the booth.

“Father, I need help,” I said.

“We all need help from time to time,” he rasped.

“No, it’s my feet, they’re freezing and I need somewhere to hide.”

The friar was quiet for a moment, and I didn’t say a word. The red chair smelled of incense.

“Your fellow soldiers will be able to help you,” he said.

“I am not one of them, Father.”

“Then what are you?”

What am I? That’s what I didn’t know anymore, what I hadn’t understood since the war began and everyone was forced to take sides. I was a cave-dweller. An animal in the twilight. A vagrant of the snow. A Dutchman. A Nazi. An orphan. I couldn’t answer. I scratched at the wood on the pew with my fingertips.

“My son, what can I do for you?”

“My feet,” I said. “I need someone to doctor them. Please.”

“Son, I think the other soldiers can help you.”

“Father, please. I’m not one of them.” I wanted to tell him about Janna and Mevi, but at the moment I thought they’d be ignored or worse for being Jewish and falling in his line of sight. “Just look at my feet.”

The friar stood up, opened his door, and then swung mine open. He stood there, imposing and as wide as the door frame. I’d made a mistake. I reached into my bag and rooted around for the Luger. The friar lifted his cassock and pulled out two Colt revolvers, one in each hand, that he slung from his belt line. By the time he had the guns leveled at my head, I hadn’t even grabbed the handle of the Luger.

“Jesus,” I said.

“Please, watch your mouth in here, young man.”

“You’re carrying guns in the church?”

“What are you reaching for?”

I slumped back. The bag fell to my feet. I didn’t see a way to get by him.

“Well, son. I guess you’d better let me have a look at your feet to judge for myself,” he said.

I kicked off my left boot and reached down to peel off the sock, and the friar let one gun drop to his side and lifted his other hand to block his nose from the stench. My second and third toes on that foot were solid black. There were red lines under the skin, leading across the top of my foot where the entire thing had become infected.

“Why haven’t you gone to the soldiers to have those taken care of?”

“I told you, I’m not one of them.”

“Is the other foot like that?”

“Only one of my toes on that foot is frozen.”

“Okay then,” the man said, holstering his guns under his cassock. “Who are you?”

“Someone who needs help, that’s all.”

“You have to understand, no one can be trusted in these times. The Gestapo dress up like downed airmen in order to infiltrate the escape lines. Even telling that story does damage. It makes people nervous. I can never be too careful.” He stroked his ginger-colored beard and looked at my rotting foot again. “Let’s see what we can do for you.”

“You’re not going to turn me in?” I asked.

“You’re not going to give me a reason to, are you?”

Specks of dust drifted through the rafters. The friar’s breathing was still labored.

“No. I’m out of options. I need your help.”

“Like I said, we all need help sometimes.”

“Then, I have friends too,” I said, and pointed to the back of the church where Janna was holding Mevi tight as if ready to dash from the church.

The friar led the three of us to a room behind the altar. “You stay here for a bit. When it’s dark, we’ll find you some help.”

We waited there for hours. I struggled to remember the ritual of a Mass. The standing, sitting, and kneeling. Lining up for communion. I couldn’t grasp finding solace in such a habit. I wanted no Christian bread or Jesus wafers now. After being alone with my thoughts for so long, I only wanted the hot breath of words. More words than I could take in. Anoint me with voices and the stories of those I love, an outpouring of everything they know. That alone would be worth falling to my knees in worship.

When the friar came back, he motioned for us to follow. We walked out the back of the church and through the park where we’d been sitting earlier. We cleared the park, and kept walking to the outskirts of town. When we passed people on the street, even soldiers, they nodded to the friar and didn’t stop us.

I asked him where he had gotten his guns.

“Maybe it’s best we know very little about each other,” he said.

“It’s only that I’ve never met such a heavily armed man of God before. Not even a poorly armed one.”

“Well, one of the guns is for any German who gets in my way, and the other is for me if I fail to hold them off.”

We continued in silence past the city limits. Painful kilometers, leading us through farmlands.

When we reached a farmhouse set off by itself, the friar knocked on the door and we waited until an old man opened. The man wore scuffed rubber boots, wool pants, and a brown sweater with a coarse collar popped to cover the back of his neck. His cheeks were pitted, and a purple filigree of veins webbed across his swollen nose. He looked at the four of us, and I saw he didn’t recognize the friar.

“May we warm up at your table for a minute, sir, before we carry on our way?”

The man hesitantly stepped aside. Inside, an old woman stood in the doorway. The old man had a laborer’s powerful hands. His wife was stern, upright, with big eyes that took us in. She gave a slight, sad smile to Mevi.

“Very cold out there tonight. We’re sorry to be a bother, but like I said, just a moment to warm up.”

The old man pulled out three roughly hewn chairs at his table for us to sit down. The friar looked around the house and then set his eyes on the old man. “A lovely house you have here, sir.” He pulled a torn playing card from his cassock and laid it on the table in front of him.

“Thank you,” the man said. He looked at the card, and then for a long moment at each of us. He stood up and walked to a cupboard behind him, and when the man turned his back the friar fingered the handle of one of the revolvers under his cassock, his white cord with three knots swung off the side of the chair. When the old man turned around, he brought the matching half of the friar’s torn card to the table.

“Very good,” the friar said, letting his hands slip away from his sides. “This young man here could use some help that is beyond me.”

“And who is this young man?” the old woman asked.

“I’m Dutch.”

“And?”

I looked at Janna, then back to the old woman. “I’m trying to escape conscription. They’re with me,” I said, nodding at the girls. Janna looked surprised by my confession, but I kept my eyes on the old couple, who, to my surprise, decided to let us stay. The first night they fed us beans, potatoes, and cognac, which warmed me and I could feel the blood start to circulate, but also made my feet throb. The old couple let me change in their bathroom, and when they saw my feet with my three curled-up and blackened toes, they both covered their mouths.

Mevi stared without flinching.

“Maybe take her to the back,” the old woman said to Janna, motioning to Mevi.

“You have to do something about those toes, boy,” the old man said.

He had been a soldier in the Great War. He said he’d seen frostbite before and knew how bad it could get if not dealt with.

“He can’t go back to town. There are too many soldiers, and there will be questions,” the friar said.

“We’ll help you. But this won’t be pleasant.”

They got me drunk that night. The liquor was sharp and sour and felt like acid in my gut, swishing over my ulcers. I sat in a chair until I could barely hold my head up, and mumbled about Janna and Mevi, the old man dying in the woods, and a giant stepping on me. The friar grabbed my chin and poured more liquor down my throat. Then they put ropes around my upper legs to cinch off the arteries, and then more around my upper calves until my legs felt like sausages in casings. Then the friar laid his giant body across my chest so I couldn’t move. The old man had his wife pour alcohol all over my feet. A giant metal pot of water boiled nearby. She had bandages, a jigsaw, a mallet, and a flat-mouthed screwdriver with a sharpened tip that would slice through bone when her husband hit the handle with the mallet.

The old woman put a wet rag in my mouth, and the water seeped down my throat and choked me as I bit into it. It was under these crude conditions that the old man amputated three toes on my left foot and one on my right. Thick, phlegm-green pus oozed out of each, followed by black blood. When he cut, my toes made a soft thud against the porcelain plate. More black blood drained from the dismembered toes, and then turned pink and normal-looking again, as if I was making my feet sick. My blood soaked into the wadded cloth until he cauterized the wound with a knife his wife had kept on the stovetop burner until it throbbed bright orange. Strange smells filled the room. The friar’s face was bright red from straining to keep me from bucking loose.

The friar pulled the rag from my mouth, held his scored face close to mine and whispered, “Were you sent to find out the escape routes?”

I bit down on the inside of my cheeks.

“Tell me,” he said, slipping a free hand from my shoulder and pushing it on my throat.

“Please, don’t do that,” the old woman said, putting a hand on the friar’s arm.

“We have to know for sure,” the friar said. “Who sent you?” he yelled into my face.

Pain pulsed through my body. My teeth sought each other through the skin of my cheeks. The room moved at an angle. The asthmatic red face interrogated me, Colt revolvers that were looped into the friar’s cassock dug into my gut.

“No. Let him go,” I heard Janna scream as she rushed into the room. Her sleepy little half of a shadow followed behind her, taking it all in.

The friar easily held Janna back as I shook my head no, pinched my eyes shut, and whatever ghastly expression the friar saw on my face said enough. He let go of my throat and resumed pinning me down.

Soon after, they placed the burning metal against my third toe stump, and I passed out.

I don’t remember anything that happened after that. I didn’t dream.

I awoke startled, disoriented, my heart booming. The deep thrumming of my own pulse and short breaths let me know the urgent force of life hadn’t left me. I was still drunk and had a horrible fever. Hot blood pooled inside my stomach.

In the distance a calf bawled. Folds of cloth and quilted blankets were wrapped around my body. My hands began groping at the blankets to feel my legs, to run my palms down my shins, over the ankles, and along the fanned-out bones of my feet to the thick padding around my toes. The two white wads of my bandaged feet bobbed up from beneath the blankets. I stared at the gauze but could not yet imagine the obscene gaps between my toes.

Fear came to me in shuddering, breathless gulps. My clearest thoughts fluttered off like gypsy moths. My body sank back into the sweat-soaked bedding and darkness.

When I woke again, everything seemed far away. Or I was far away, like being pulled out of a photograph. Yanked away from a woman talking. Janna. Janna in the center of the room, far away. She was saying something. It seemed urgent. I wanted to be near her. To walk up to her but everything between us wavered.

Nothing felt real.

Then I felt her hand pushing on me. On my chest. Her fingers splayed, each resting with a gentle force. Her hands touched my chest the way I’d pushed on the tombstone Ludo carved for Edwin. Then there was nothing again.

I woke a third time and there was the girl. Mevi. Her face close to mine. I willed my mind to rise up from the fog pinning me down, but then she was gone.

My eyes opened and closed in a blur. The old woman who helped cut my feet came in with a steaming cup of hot coffee and a bowl of beef broth, and laid them on the small nightstand next to the bed. She walked heavily and wore a thick, tweed skirt and gray sweater. She wiped her hands on her brown smock and then placed a palm on my forehead, then against my cheek, cupping it, which eased some of the desolate feelings that had come to me in the night. She tapped her crooked finger against my collarbone, and smiled with blackening teeth.

“You had me worried for a while, boy.”

When I came out of my stupor the next afternoon, a crochet counterpane was tucked over me. My stomach burned, and both of my feet throbbed all the way up to my hips. The old woman was there. Behind her was a radio tuned to an illicit English station. I heard snippets of news while tossing in bed.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“It’s better we don’t share names, dear,” she said.

Half asleep, and half awake, I lay and stared out the window and thought of going to summer camp with my brother and Ludo years before. There, we had tossed one another up and chanted our names. It shocked me now how casual we were about marching in our uniforms, aiming guns, and lobbing grenades. How all that we had been training for unfurled before us, how easy all that had come.

The memory faded, and I became lucid for a moment. I faced the old woman.

“Where are they?”

She shook her head no.

“Where are they?”

“They left.”

“What. To where?”

“They told you when you woke. The woman told you. She thanked you. You were awake.”

“When will they be back?”

The woman shook her head no again.

“Why? How long have I been sleeping?” I pushed myself up in the bed, but lay back down when the weight of Janna’s hands on my chest felt real again, felt like something very serious and not a dream at all, but stones pushing me down.

The old woman rubbed a rag over my forehead, and the feel of it on my skin, of someone tenderly reaching out to me when I felt so alone, brought wracking sobs up my spine. I choked. “No. Where? No. Where’d they go?”

“It’s best not to know.”

“What. Why. Why now?” I rolled onto my side to cover how raw I felt. “Why’d they leave?”

Though I knew. Even then, newly freed from the fever dream, I knew. I was not a worthy shepherd. Not for them. To them I was a stranger. But to me they had become much more. To me they were a renewed purpose. A tangible direction. Jesus, was I to lose everyone?

“The friar?” I pressed on.

The woman pressed the rag to the back of my neck. “Yes.”

“He took them someplace safe?”

“He brought you here. You’re safe. He’ll take them somewhere as well.”

When I stopped crying, I rolled back to the old woman.

“Will he tell me where they are? If I go back to him, will he tell me?”

She let the rag fall open, then lay the cool cloth over my face so I could not see her.

I kept my eyes closed then and pretended to sleep. When she bent down to feel my forehead I could smell the starch on the cuff of her shirt, the dark odor of boiled vegetables, and the warmth of her breath. When she left the scent lingered, a presence I held on to for comfort.

Once my fever broke, the horrible pain in my feet lessened. It took another week before the swelling went down, and I could stand and start to take a few baby steps. My balance was off. I had to relearn where to put pressure against the floor. The large gaps between my toes felt all wrong. I would put too much pressure on one side of my foot to overcompensate, and at times, the phantom weight of my missing toes ached inside my bandages.

I wandered their home. Now with the girls gone the desire to keep going faded. My appetite for food or love or sex or even safety slipped beyond me. I wanted everything to go black again.

There were a few pictures of the old farmer who took me in as a soldier when he was younger. Looking at them made me feel guilty for running away from my war. I wished for his bravery. I told the old lady as much.

“I’ll get you all killed,” I told her. “You’re risking too much.”

“The old have less to lose, dear,” she said, patting my shoulder as she set a bowl of broth in front of me.

There was another picture on the wall of a young man with a wide, stern face similar to the old man’s. “Is this your son?”

“Yes.”

“Where is he?”

“We don’t know.”

On the wall was another old photograph of a large family standing in front of a small log home. The family bunched together around an old man laid out on a wooden cart that was propped up to face the camera. The old man wore a suit and his long beard had been brushed out, and his hair looked wet and pushed back. At first I thought he had large eyes but when I looked closer, I saw that they had been painted over his closed eyelids. I’d seen pictures like that before. Easterners took pictures of their dead to keep some trace. As pictures were very expensive then, these funeral pictures were an event to dress up for. If you couldn’t travel to see a relative, you could see the picture of them being put to rest. There were old women, rough-looking bearded men, and stern wives with broad children of all ages, some cradled in their mothers’ arms and others as tall as their fathers. It would be a fine way to die, propped up like a meat puppet and surrounded by loved ones. It should be the way we all die.

We had been eating their potato rations, and once, after a bombing close to town, the old man brought back the head of a cow that had been killed. He said he had to use a fellow farmer’s double-handed tree saw to get it loose. He carved the meat off the bone and they both rattled around the kitchen frying it up, and boiling it into a stew.

That night, when I sat down at the table with them and had a meal with them for the first time, the food she laid out almost made me weep. She’d made beef casseroled in beer and served with raisins fried in a pan over the hearth. That night we feasted, but I had a terrible case of the runs. I was strangely happy about this as it meant at least my bowels still worked.

Later that night, the old woman had me lie down on the kitchen floor with a towel under my heels. From a mothballed closet in the shadowed corner of the room she brought out a sewing kit with a polished cherry handle. She undid the bandages at my feet, pinched the rounded eye of a needle, and lanced my cloudy blisters. Each rotting abscess let out a nauseating stench. After that, I limped around the old couple’s house feeling like Thump-Drag himself.

Then I repacked my backpack and readied myself to move on. I left two hundred guilders and the gold coins from the barter kit on the pillow of the mattress they’d given me.

“Thank you for everything,” I said.

“Your fast, running days are over,” the old woman said. “Hide when you can. Please hide.”

Over the next several days of moving west, I stopped in old barns, office buildings, and basements of deserted houses. One home looked ancient, like the small cottages I’d seen with Edwin and Uncle Martin in Borkum, one of the Frisian Islands, which had once been inhabited by whalers. Some of the oldest homes on that island had whale-bone fences surrounding the property.

A Messerschmitt buzzed overhead. The black crosses on the underside of its wings were visible. I stumbled over tree trunks and brambles as it passed. I was always falling, then worming my way forward.

My feet always hurt. Each breath pressurized the feeling I was obligated to carry everyone I ever loved free of this mess. When walking I felt like the beating of all their hearts replaced that of my own.

Outside the town of Guttenfield, there was a parking area and a large sign staked into the ground that read Guttenfield Zoo. There were no cars, and the broad, iron gates were closed and chained shut with a thick iron padlock. A smaller sign hung from the gate on which it had been printed Please Don’t Eat the Animals’ Food. The apostrophe and the word food had been crossed out with a white brushstroke, so the sign now read Please Don’t Eat the Animals.

I kept working my way past farmhouses with thatch-roofed barns and a shadowy castle draped in fog along a river. It felt like I’d marched through centuries, back to some barbaric age. I imagined kings, with fur caps and dark beards, who hunted in the woods along the river, wandering the castle’s firelit hallways. I ate what little food I could scavenge and rooted around for snails on the forest floor, digging the meaty parts out with the tip of my dagger. They tasted like diluted salt and slipped down my throat like hunks of phlegm. After eating, I doctored my feet, changing the bandaging, which soaked through from all my walking. My bare feet showed the charred nubbins where my toes had been, each pinched off like the end of a sausage link.

I crossed into Belgium and made my way to Bruges. There were people in the streets of the city: a French mountain man in a full-length bear-fur coat; an old man with a Lord Kitchener mustache; and a small girl in a shabby smock of a dress, holding one handle of a bag tethered to a tired-looking woman with greasy, brown hair. The bulbous end of a baguette stuck out of their bag, and the little girl’s dark eyes watched the bread as she was dragged along by the woman’s grip. Around them was the rubble of buildings left in the wake of the Allied bombings. The old couple had given me a change of clothes, farmer’s clothes, but the city people eyed my hobbled gait with suspicion anyway.

There were posters on the walls: Nazi propaganda intended for Belgians and Frenchmen, as the British at the time were sinking French naval ships in the Mediterranean to keep them from falling into German hands. The posters said thirteen hundred French sailors had been killed by the RAF. So the Nazis wanted the French and Belgians to take up arms against the RAF. The posters helped me decide on an escape route through northern Europe. I figured the less time in France the better, as the country would likely have every kind of displaced person, and the allegiances would be too varied to navigate safely.

My first night in Bruges, as I slept in the main square of town, prisoners were roped together and shuffled through the streets to the train station. Floodlights filled the air overhead, sweeping back and forth. If I watched the lights long enough, they turned into stars that had become mobile, swirling around in space.