A Meal in Winter (10 page)

Bauer and I felt depressed that day. More than usual, I mean. And it was a different, particular kind of depression. In the evening, we talked about it, outside. The weather was good. Emmerich helped us. We understood that the solution was simple: with the new laundrymen, we would not look at them or talk to them. We wouldn't do anything with them that had anything to do with life.

Bauer had asked me why the Jew should stay in the storeroom. But he knew the answer, you see. He'd known it since October.

The Jew was now almost out of the storeroom. He took another step forward and stopped in the doorway. He
waited there as if on the threshold of a house. Bauer signalled to him to keep going. So he came out of the storeroom and moved towards the table. A vein was throbbing on his temple. The side of his mouth was quivering. He didn't know what to do with his hands. He put them behind his back, then brought them back in front and crossed them. His gaze never wavered. And yet he managed not to look at anyone. He stared at a point on the wall, close to the window. Just beneath his hat, his vein was still throbbing.

The Pole, standing up in front of him, starting drumming his spoon nervously on the table. Rage was shining in his eyes.

‘Shut your face,' Bauer told him. ‘Eat. Get stuck in. It'll choke you later, you'll see.'

The Pole stopped drumming, put his hands on the table, leaned towards Bauer, and spoke to him in a voice full of suppressed rage, drawing back his lips, not like a dead fish any more, but like an animal. And he leaned ever closer to Bauer, looking as if he wanted to rip his heart out. He was so enraged with Bauer that I looked over at our rifles. Bauer didn't seem bothered, though. He listened seriously, attentively, as though the Pole was confiding in him.

Suddenly the Pole stood up and looked away from Bauer, his rage replaced by laughter as he pointed his spoon at the Jew, who was still staring towards the window. There was not even a shadow of good cheer in that laugh. I noticed his dog, which had been lying next to the stove, now sat up.

Then, as the Pole gradually stopped laughing, I leaned towards Bauer and Emmerich. ‘Let's chuck him outside. I've had enough of this.'

‘Me too,' said Emmerich. ‘I'm hungry.'

‘No,' Bauer said happily, ‘he's going to pay for his soup. He's going to eat with a Jew. He'll remember that.'

But I really had had enough of all this, and of Bauer too, a little. So I pointed at the Jew and said coldly, ‘We're going to pay for it too. We won't be able to kill him after this.'

What I meant was that, if we had to do it, it would be hard. Bauer asked me, ‘Why?'

‘Remember the autumn?' I said. ‘How depressed we got over our laundrymen.'

‘The autumn was a long time ago.'

And then, with a hand gesture, he erased something in the air, and said, ‘Anyway, who'll do that? Not us. We're bringing one back. So tomorrow, it's certain, Graaf will let us go out again. We'll come back here.'

‘Maybe,' I said, a little doubtfully. ‘We'll see.'

But really, he was right. I chased away a fear: that Graaf would prevent us leaving anyway, just for the pleasure of it. So I didn't argue any more, mainly because I was hungry and I wanted to feel happy again, the way we'd felt when we started to eat, a little earlier.

Emmerich felt the same way. He pushed his mug in front of the Jew and pulled the saucepan a bit closer to him so he could share it with Bauer.

The Jew stopped looking at the point on the wall and turned his gaze to Emmerich's mug. His hands, still crossed in front of him, started to move. He pursed his lips. His face relaxed. The embroidered snowflake on his hat was half-concealed in a fold. But I could still see part of it. I wanted to eat in peace. I signalled to him to take off his hat. He took it off and put it in his pocket, and now, without his hat, with his hair falling around his face, we could see even more clearly how young he was.

We didn't hear any more from the Pole. Hunger had swallowed up his laughter. He waited, spoon in hand, motionless apart from his eyes. His dog was lying down again next to the stove. It was licking the puddle of water made by the snow sleighbells when they melted.

Bauer gave the signal. He took a slice of salami from the
saucepan and accompanied it with a mouthful of toasted bread. Everyone else followed suit.

Thus began the strangest meal we ever had in Poland.

Outside, through the window, the light was dim and still fading. The flames in the stove lit us up from behind. As we ate, our shadows accompanied us by dancing on the table.

SO, ONE LAST
time, this is where each of us was, how we were eating, and what we were eating with. Emmerich, Bauer and I were sitting on the bench, in that order. Emmerich and Bauer were both eating from the saucepan, and I was eating from my mug. The Pole, standing next to Emmerich, was eating from Bauer's mug with the spoon he'd carved from the storeroom door. Facing him, standing next to me, the Jew was eating from Emmerich's mug, without a spoon.

The soup was tasty, hot and filling. The bread was still warm. We made noises as we ate. The fire, behind us, added its own sounds. What a beautiful music, or silence, that was: the sounds of the food in our mouths and the fire in the stove.

All of it – onions, salami, cornmeal – melted in the mouth. We were happy again. Occasionally, without meaning
to, I caught the Jew's eye. What I read in his eyes had no meaning at all. I mean to say that, the way he looked at me, he seemed to be saying that all of this – what we were eating, the fire in the stove, the evening light coming through the window – had, for him, no meaning at all. But he ate. He picked up the cornmeal with his fingers, then licked his fingers and drank the soup in small mouthfuls. The melted lard left traces of white around his lips.

Several times, I saw Emmerich lift his head from the saucepan he was sharing with Bauer and look up at the ceiling. Then he looked at the Jew, and went back to the saucepan. Bauer and he ate politely, each waiting for the other to take a spoonful of soup before putting their own spoon in.

Behind us, the Pole's dog had fallen back to sleep, and now and then it made little whimpers.

As we ate, and the soup disappeared, the music changed. The spoons made more noise in the mugs and the saucepan. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Emmerich murmured, ‘We should let him go.'

‘What?' Bauer asked. ‘Who are you talking about?'

‘Him,' Emmerich replied, pointing to the Jew with his spoon, without looking at him.

‘What are you on about?' Bauer asked. ‘Why?'

But Emmerich said nothing. For a moment, we waited.

‘Come on, why?' Bauer insisted.

‘I don't know. Because.'

‘You should eat,' Bauer said in a quiet, kind voice.

Emmerich started eating again.

I finished my bread. I glanced at Emmerich. I didn't know what he'd meant, really. I fished the last slice of salami from the soup, and before eating it I said to Bauer, ‘This is the best meal we've ever had.'

‘Yeah.'

He pointed to the Pole's flask. ‘That's good stuff. It tastes bad when you drink it, but for cooking . . . we should have it every day.'

‘We should tell Kropp,' I joked.

I had just swallowed the salami when Emmerich, in the same murmur he'd used before, said, ‘It'd make us feel better, don't you think?'

For a moment, I thought he was talking about Kropp, the cook. I had no idea what was supposed to make us feel better. But Bauer, quicker than me, asked him: ‘What are you talking about, Emmerich? What would make us feel better?'

His spoon hanging in mid-air, Emmerich turned towards the Jew and said, ‘Letting him go.'

‘What for?' Bauer asked.

‘In the future, when we thought about him, we'd feel better.'

‘I don't see why,' said Bauer.

The Pole, hearing us, sat up straight and watched us tensely.

‘You,' Bauer told him, ‘look away and eat.'

To Emmerich, he asked: ‘What would have been the point of us freezing our balls off?'

‘We'd have been freezing anyway.'

‘But we were out in it all day. And now you want to let him crawl back into his hole?'

Emmerich looked down at the saucepan. After a moment, he started eating again.

But Bauer wouldn't let it go. ‘Come on. What for?'

Emmerich sighed, but almost imperceptibly, like a cow in a distant field. The Jew, having drunk all his soup, held the mug close to his lips and used two fingers to scrape the last bits of cornmeal into his mouth. Then, when he noticed me watching him, he looked embarrassed and stopped what he was doing. But he had no spoon, so it was fine for him to eat like that. I signalled that he should continue. Bauer, sitting with his shoulder against mine, shot me a look, referring to what Emmerich had begun saying.
Then he stood up, and I heard him putting more wood in the stove.

From the corner of his eye, Emmerich watched the Jew, who had begun eating with his fingers again.

‘Great idea to use that door,' said Bauer, returning to the bench. ‘It's as good as coal.'

‘Yeah,' I said. ‘It saved us.'

He took a big spoonful of cornmeal from the saucepan. Swallowing it, he sighed with satisfaction. It really was cooked to perfection, and it tasted good too. The salami was the dominant flavour. To begin with, we'd felt like we were losing it by putting it in the soup. But not any more. It was true, I thought: we should tell Kropp about our recipe.

Everyone was finishing their cornmeal now. We were scraping the sides and the bottom. Soon, it was all gone.

The Pole finished his soup in a hurry, perhaps because he thought that Bauer might take the mug off him, or perhaps because the hunger was gnawing at him more and more. His spoon went straight from the mug to his mouth, never stopping for a second, although all it held each time was a few bits of cornmeal.

Bauer and I finished eating, both of us thinking of what Emmerich had said about the Jew. It was circling around
in our heads and our bellies now. We were still hungry, but we'd lost a bit of the happiness we'd felt at the beginning.

Emmerich pushed the saucepan slowly towards Bauer, to let him know he could finish it on his own.

‘You sure?' Bauer asked.

Emmerich nodded.

‘There's still a bit left,' Bauer said.

‘I know,' said Emmerich. ‘But I'm fine.'

While Emmerich took out a cigarette to mark the official end of his meal, Bauer stared into the saucepan as if he were reading something, and said, ‘Why should he go back to his hole? We went to so much trouble. We left without eating breakfast. We froze our balls off. What was the point of it all?'

Emmerich took his time lighting the cigarette. Then he leaned across so he could see us both, Bauer and me.

‘The point is, at least we'd have done it once.'

He took a drag on his cigarette. He drummed on the table. He fidgeted like crazy. And then he turned as still as a statue.

‘How many have we killed?' he asked, trying to control his voice. ‘It's making us sick. We've had it up to here. We should let him go. When we think about him, we'll feel better.'

He looked straight ahead, and then at the ceiling, and said, ‘When we dream at night, we'll dream about him.'

‘Personally,' said Bauer, ‘I'll feel sick tomorrow if Graaf makes us stay there because we didn't bring any back. I'm feeling sick now, just thinking about it.'

‘Me too,' said Emmerich. ‘But if we look beyond tomorrow, we'll be able to remember that at least we've done it once.'

‘I can't look beyond tomorrow,' Bauer said.

He began scraping the cornmeal from the sides of the saucepan. I had almost finished mine. It had gone cold and made a crust at the bottom of the mug. Bauer noticed this, and lifted the saucepan to give me some more because he had more left than I did. I lifted my hand to say no, thank you.

‘How far can you look?' he asked me. ‘Tomorrow? The day after tomorrow?'

Emmerich was leaning over and watching me, awaiting my response. I shook my head slowly, not knowing what to say, not knowing who was right. As I didn't reply, Emmerich said to me in a gentle, sad voice, ‘You were lucky to go on your tram last night. For me, the nights are as bad as the days. Sometimes they're worse.'

I tried to smile at him, then lowered my eyes.

You see? I was right. We should keep our dreams to ourselves. We should never talk about them. There had not been even the shadow of a reproach in Emmerich's voice, but I still felt bad that I was luckier than him.

‘I'm not always on a tram,' I said, trying to keep my voice light. ‘That was the first time.'

‘I've never been on one,' Emmerich murmured.

Though Bauer was silent, I could see he was frowning, closing in on himself. He pushed the saucepan away, and I saw that there was still some cornmeal left at the bottom and on the sides. The Pole saw this too, and leaned down. He said something, with a scowl, and Bauer shot him a look full of hatred. The Pole mirrored his expression. But he didn't touch the saucepan.

Some time passed. Now that my hunger was gone, tiredness took its place. I half-closed my eyes. I wanted to go home. But home was too far away. I would have needed more time, and more imagination. So I stayed there, next to Emmerich and Bauer, in that little Polish house that had scared us when we first found it.

Night had fallen behind the only window. Had it not been for the fire in the stove, we would have been sitting in the dark. And I felt, more intensely than I usually did, that wherever we were – Emmerich, Bauer and I – that
was home. It was warm, and the firelight was pleasant. So it was a shame, I thought a little bitterly, that Emmerich had chosen this particular moment to torture himself.

Now he had finished eating, the Jew seemed unsure whether to go back to the storeroom or remain standing next to the table. I wasn't sure what he should do either. He licked his lips where the melted lard had left traces of white.