A Meal in Winter (6 page)

‘He'll freeze,' said Emmerich. ‘What good would that do us?'

‘He won't freeze any more in there than he would in his hole.'

‘Leave it a bit open anyway.'

The Jew watched me. He knew we were talking about him. I went out of the storeroom, leaving the door half-open.

Next, we worked out how much wood was left. There was one chair, the bench, the shelf and the table. We felt remorseful at the thought that it would all have to be burned, though. Bauer pointed to the trapdoor that led to the attic. ‘Why don't we look up there?'

We pushed the table underneath it and put the chair on top. But who would climb up? It wasn't very high, but you had to hoist your entire body weight up on your elbows. Thankfully, Emmerich had already taken off his coat. He climbed onto the table, then onto the chair, and he lifted up the trapdoor as he was standing up. It was heavy. It made a very loud noise as it fell onto the attic floor. Everything shook, and black dust fell down on us. Emmerich leaned on his elbows and, using all his strength, grunting and moaning, lifted himself up. To help him,
Bauer and I seized one leg each and pushed him towards the ceiling. Finally, he managed to get one knee inside, and then the other. He moaned again, and then he was in the attic. Crouching down, he got his breath back and looked down at us. His whole body shivered. ‘It's still freezing up here.'

‘So hurry up!' Bauer told him.

Emmerich turned his head. ‘It's completely dark.'

‘You want your rifle?' Bauer asked.

Emmerich half-smiled, half-grimaced, then stood up and disappeared into the darkness.

WHILE WE WAITED,
we sat with our backs to the stove, Bauer on the table and me on the bench. We could hear Emmerich walking around the attic. We tried to guess where he was. Bauer shouted up at him: ‘Go on! Keep at it!'

Emmerich made some vague reply, and Bauer yelled: ‘Think about the salami!'

‘I'm not thinking about anything. I can't see anything either.'

‘Use your lighter!'

‘You think I haven't?'

‘If he doesn't find any,' I said to Bauer, ‘we can burn the trapdoor.'

Bauer, instantly struck by this idea, clapped his hands and shouted: ‘Come back down! We've found something!'

Emmerich reappeared above the hole. He crouched
down at the edge. ‘A mattress, some rotten apples . . . I walked in them,' he said. ‘But no wood. So what did you find?'

‘The trapdoor,' Bauer told him.

‘Of course!' Emmerich nodded. ‘Why did I bother looking inside?'

‘Go on, try it. Pull on it.'

Emmerich grabbed hold of it, lifted it up and tried to twist the hinges. But they held.

‘Come and help me! I can't do this on my own.'

Bauer climbed up on the table, then on the chair, and the two of them pulled hard at the trapdoor, swearing and grunting like animals. I went up there to help them, but just as I did, the trapdoor gave. Bauer sent it hurtling to the ground, and it only just missed me. It cracked on the concrete floor, and a split appeared in the wood. So while Bauer helped Emmerich to come back down, I went to work on the trapdoor. But it was heavy and thick and still very solid. It was difficult to chop it into bits. But never mind, I thought – it would take longer to burn like this. I kept smashing away, though, and eventually managed it, making a reassuring woodpile next to the stove.

The snow had melted in the saucepan by now. The water was beginning to steam. We needed more snow. I
asked Bauer and Emmerich for their tin mugs, tied my now-warm scarf around my neck, and went back outside. The cold fell on me like a sledgehammer. The sky too, or so it seemed, as if it were now lower than before, all grey and white. Sky and earth had blurred into one, and there was no comfort to be found in either. While I packed the snow into our mugs, I wondered again how it was possible that we had once seen so many sunflowers here, and not so long ago either. The landscape had been so full of them, so completely covered, that it seemed their oil must have been flowing like a river somewhere. We could have done with some for our soup. Instead of oil, we had lard, which was poor stuff in comparison. Today, though, it seemed like gold. Today, what we missed was not the oil from the sunflowers but their bright yellow light.

I had not put my gloves back on. I packed the snow in the mugs and my fingers hurt so much that for the last mug – mine – I just shoved the snow in with a single movement, not even bothering to pack it down. Then I ran back to the house. Without the balaclava and the helmet, the silence was like a sharp stone.

THE SNOW I'D
brought back in the mugs had melted, and the saucepan was just over half-filled. The water was steaming again. We were getting there now. Emmerich and I were on the bench, Bauer standing in front of the stove. He cut the onion in four and threw it in the saucepan. The lard, he dropped in whole. Next, he added the cornmeal. All we had to do now was wait. I looked at the salami, which was still sitting on the bench between Emmerich and me. Bauer had not forgotten it – he was thinking about it too – but he was taking his time to reach a conclusion.

Finally, I asked: ‘What about the salami?'

Bauer hesitated. ‘What shall we do?' he asked dreamily. ‘Shall we eat it or shall we wait?'

Emmerich and I became dreamy too. After a while, I said, ‘Is it frozen?'

‘No,' Bauer replied. ‘It was pressed against me.'

But, just to check, he picked it up from the bench. He squeezed it and sniffed it.

‘It's fine,' he said. ‘What shall we do?'

‘Why don't we put it in the soup as well?' Emmerich said.

‘All of it?' Bauer asked.

‘Why not?' said Emmerich.

But I was sick of waiting. I needed to eat something now. So I said, ‘Or we could cut it. Eat a bit now, and put the rest in the soup.'

It was Bauer's decision. He had brought the salami. We would all eat an equal share, that was certain, but it was up to him to decide the way in which we ate it.

‘All right,' he shouted suddenly.

We jumped. But we didn't know what he was agreeing with. He took his knife out and, on the bench, cut the salami into twelve thin slices, so perfectly equal that we could have chosen one with our eyes closed. He dropped six slices into the soup and we helped ourselves to the others.

There was nothing left to discuss now. Each of us had two slices, and we could do what we liked with them. Would we eat them straight away? Would we keep them
to eat with our bread when it was warm enough? Or did we have enough will power to wait for the soup to cook, so we could eat it all at the same time?

I didn't even have time to think about it. One of the slices was already in my mouth, and the second followed it soon afterwards. Emmerich and Bauer had scoffed theirs too. And if we'd followed our instincts, we'd have fished the other slices out of the saucepan and eaten those too. The taste of it that remained in our mouths felt so good, yet at the same time it was torture. We couldn't stop drooling, and wanting more.

Before he sat down with us on the bench, Bauer dipped a finger in the soup and said, ‘Lukewarm.'

I couldn't believe it. ‘Only lukewarm?'

‘Yeah.'

I glanced at what remained of the trapdoor: barely half of it.

‘If it's only lukewarm now, we're going to have to burn everything, including this,' I said, tapping the bench.

‘Never mind,' said Bauer. ‘We'll burn everything, then. I'm hungry. The table, too. Who cares?'

He sat down between us. That is the difference between wood and coal. Wood burns fast.

We smoked another cigarette because there was nothing
else to do, apart from watching the fire in the stove. The window had quickly frosted over and no longer let much light through. The flames behind the mica window lit us up like an electric bulb.

And, because there was nothing to do now but wait for the soup, I sensed that Emmerich was quietly withdrawing into himself, and I knew what he was thinking about, which problem he was once again struggling with in his mind. Bauer knew too, and he nodded to me discreetly, just between the two of us. I replied in the same way. We were sorry for Emmerich, but what could we do?

The three of us were silent. We smoked without speaking. But Emmerich's silence was different to ours, and Bauer and I could feel it. His silence grew ever thicker. But only from the outside, because inside his head, his son was making so much noise – knocking hard on the door of his conscience – that Bauer and I could hear him. So how loud the din must have been inside Emmerich's head. I remembered that the three of us were supposed to think about his problem together. I'd promised him that as we stood by the frozen pond. He probably didn't dare remind me of this. He was probably waiting for me to say something. But I wanted to smoke first.

The Jew started coughing again. I turned round to
look. He was sitting with his legs folded under him. The temperature had risen inside the storeroom too: he had opened his coat. Underneath he was wearing a thick quilted jacket. And even though, from here, I could not see the snowflake embroidered on his hat, I thought about it anyway, though distantly and not for long.

Yes, I felt like finishing my cigarette before helping Emmerich. It was peaceful, smoking in front of the stove. I wanted to savour that moment until it was over. That was why I waited. But I knew there was also a bit of spite in it. Because there had been times when I'd needed help too.

You could smell the rotten apples. They'd stuck to Emmerich's boots when he came down from the attic. They smelled almost like jam. Oh, if only we'd had some jam to eat after the soup! Emmerich got up and turned the bread over on the edge of the stove, then sat back down. And, once again, I heard his son knocking.

IT WAS NOT
the first evening, nor the second, but the third evening after the first shootings that Emmerich started fearing for him. And since then, the fear had never left him. It was probably his son that Emmerich saw when he stared at Bauer and me, later, in the spring, while he was dying under the bridge in Galicia. No, in truth I don't know if it was him that Emmerich saw when he looked through us. But I hoped it was him, so that he could have seen him one last time while he died, to help him. And, through hoping, I ended up believing it.

But on that evening – the third after the first shootings – we came back from outside, where Graaf had called us, the whole company, for no good reason: to tell us about some coal that had been stolen and sold to a Pole. Emmerich had sat on his bed, face pale, and sighed pitifully, then told us – Bauer and me – about his son, with
such intensity in his voice that we didn't dare take off our coats, as if by doing so we would have deprived him of something.

We listened to him. He had a lot to say. Emmerich had been holding this in for three days. We understood that the distance between his home and our base here in Poland had grown longer, stretched out. It was almost as if a wall had risen up between them.

Like everyone else, Bauer and I were still living through the shootings, the killings; they flashed endlessly before our eyes and reverberated in our ears. So much so that listening to Emmerich talking so helplessly seemed strange to us. Could we tell him that? But thankfully, he was not asking us for advice, at least not yet. We listened to him. We understood him and we did not understand him and we were too hot in our coats, and after three days the killings were still filling up our minds, boiling away inside them, and spilling over. And on top of this, all Emmerich's fears for his son, instead of making us forget our own worries, just made them worse.

We had never thought about his kid before then. We knew he existed, and that was all. He'd talked about him, of course, the way friends always talk to each other about their wives if they're married or their children if they have
any. But from that evening on, Emmerich's son became part of our lives. He was, so to speak, sitting on Emmerich's bed. He slept with us that night, and every night after, and he was there with us every morning too, at breakfast. It was as if Emmerich had caught a disease.

After that evening, Emmerich managed to use each event here to talk to us about his son. Not only about his fears, thankfully, but also memories, details. And that was fine. But it was a real disease, all the same. Sometimes Bauer and I couldn't stand it any more. And we told him so.

THE FIRE SOON
died down. I got up and filled the firebox with the wood from the trapdoor. There was enough left to fill it again, but only one more time. So Emmerich got up too, picked up the second chair and smashed it on the concrete slab, so hard that bits of wood flew everywhere. We could see that what he was trying to smash was his problem as much as the chair. He collected the bits and, before sitting down, dipped his finger in the soup.

‘It's slightly warm,' he said.

‘At this rate, what we eat will be hot but not cooked,' said Bauer in a resigned voice.

‘There's a fence outside,' I said. ‘But it's covered in snow. We'd never get to it.'

‘If only there were coal,' Bauer said, ‘that would be
perfect. We could sleep, and when we woke up it would be cooked.'

I looked around me. There was still the shelf. After that, we'd have to burn the bench, and after the bench, the table. But then where would we eat? The concrete slab was still frozen. We'd have to eat standing up.

‘What we eat will be cooked,' I said, ‘but we'll eat standing up. It's not the end of the world.'

I sniffed at the steam that was rising from the saucepan. The flavour was starting to form. The onion and the salami tickled my palate. The cornmeal was still at the bottom: it had not yet begun to swell. That was what we were waiting for. But maybe the shelf and the bench would be enough, and we would still have the table to eat from. I went back to the bench and sat down. After a while, Bauer's head started to drop and then he sat up straight. He was gradually falling asleep like that. I would have liked to do the same.