A Meal in Winter (9 page)

‘Me neither,' I said.

We looked at him. He was almost asleep, leaning on the stove. Up to this point, we had been able to stand him. But soon his disgusting mouth would be eating at the table with us.

Emmerich leaned towards me with a questioning expression.

‘We'll see,' I replied. ‘Maybe he does have one.'

But suddenly Bauer said, ‘No, we won't see. I'm going to chuck him outside, even if he does have a spoon.'

‘I'll give him mine if he doesn't have one,' I joked.

But Bauer was on the warpath now. ‘I want to chuck him outside. Are we scared of him?'

‘Hang on, let's wait and see,' I said, putting a hand on his leg.

He calmed down a little, but not for long.

‘I don't care what he does, but that mouth is not going near our soup,' he said.

All of this had been said in a whisper. The Pole was still dozing, his eyes half-closed. Suddenly Bauer yelled: ‘Hey, you! What are you planning to eat with? Not with your filthy gob, I'm telling you that now. Because it makes me want to puke.'

The Pole had jumped at this. Now he was looking at each of us in turn, trying to work out who had spoken.

In a nasty voice, Bauer repeated, ‘Hey, what are you planning to eat with?'

The Pole replied in his own language. We didn't know what he said, but it sounded nasty too.

We weren't afraid of him, of course, but he wasn't afraid of us either. He replied to us the way we'd spoken to him. Bauer took his spoon from a pocket and showed it to the Pole. Moving it around, he said, ‘Show me yours!'

The Pole's gaze moved from the spoon to the soup to
us. He was trying to understand. To help him out, Bauer pointed at him then moved the spoon closer towards him. This time, the Pole shook his head and patted his quilted jacket to say that no, he didn't have one.

‘Well then, little man, you'd better go home,' said Bauer, ‘because we don't want you touching our soup. You make me sick.'

The Pole, I am sure, did not catch a single word of this, yet he understood anyway. He had sensed a threat in Bauer's voice and eyes. He began to twitch. Then he replied to Bauer, unleashing a sort of bitter, fearful litany. We did not catch a single word of it, yet we understood it anyway.

‘Yeah, yeah, go ahead and cry, little man,' Bauer said.

The Pole continued to whine. Bauer nodded sympathetically and smiled sadly at him. Then suddenly the Pole moved away from the stove and crouched down in front of the remains of the storeroom door. He started searching through the bits of wood, his litany unabated. But when he found what he was looking for, he stopped talking, showed it to us, then returned to the side of the stove. He took a hideous little knife from his pocket and began feverishly sculpting his bit of wood, glancing up at us
fiercely from time to time. His lips peeled back from his gums occasionally too, and his vile mouth was more terrifying to us than any evil stare.

WE LIT A
cigarette, our last before the soup. We smoked it while watching the Pole carve his piece of wood. He had forgotten us. Concentrated, careful, he carved away, and as the daylight had continued to fade and the flames in the stove did not directly illuminate him, he moved his eyes very close to the wood. Some shavings fell on his dog. Others fell on the cast-iron stovetop and burned up instantly.

Although it was still afternoon, it looked dark enough outside to be evening. The layer of clouds between us and the sun must have grown even thicker.

The shape of the spoon appeared fairly quickly. Within a few minutes, the handle and the oval end could both be easily made out.

But what we were waiting to see was how he would make the hollow. Because without a hollow, there was no
spoon. He finished the shape, looked at it for a moment, then wedged it against the stove and began to scratch at it with the point of his knife. But the wood was hard, and he seemed unable to hollow it out just by scratching. He grumbled, and looked up at us blankly, as if by staring through us he were searching for a solution. He did not look frightened by the thought of not eating if he couldn't do it, nor angry with us, just focused on his search for inspiration. And then he began working again, in a different way. We leaned forward. In the dying light, it took us a while to understand.

Still using the point of the knife, he was now tracing and retracing grooves in the wood, several times over. When two grooves became deep enough, he broke off the wood between them. And so on.

‘He's going to do it,' I said.

‘In that case, he's going to pay for his soup,' said Bauer, turning round to take the flask from the table.

But before taking a drink, he hesitated. He turned the flask in his hands, looked down at his boots, lifted his head, and said, ‘Or we could just chuck him outside. Spoon or no spoon, he still makes me want to puke.'

‘Make him pay,' I said, to calm Bauer down.

‘Yeah, that's better,' Emmerich agreed.

Emmerich and I were not afraid of the Pole. But being here felt like returning to a childhood home, and we didn't want to spoil the innocent mood. We were smoking cigarettes, warm and cosy in front of the flames that lit up our faces with a familiar light, our senses floating gently in the smell of the soup. If we threw the Pole outside, that would mean fighting, getting riled up, opening the door and letting in the cold, and almost certainly fighting again once we were outside. We feared that, after all of that, we would end up eating the soup in full awareness of the discomfort of this filthy little Polish hovel, our emotions still riled up, and that the soup would stick in our throats.

Bauer took a good swig and handed me the flask. I took a good swig too. Emmerich didn't want any more. Bauer stood up and put more wood in the stove. And while he was stirring the soup with his spoon, the Pole, without looking up, still carving his wood, muttered something, and Bauer replied: ‘Keep working, little man, instead of talking. Hurry up – it's nearly cooked.'

‘Is that true?' I asked.

‘Yeah, the cornmeal's getting thicker. It's sticking to the bottom.'

‘So unstick it,' I said. ‘It'll burn.'

He did that, then asked me to hand him the flask. And
the amount of alcohol he poured into the soup! It was partly to make the Pole pay, and partly because we would be eating it so soon, the taste of the alcohol would not have time to evaporate.

Bauer handed me the almost empty flask, and the Pole finished working with his knife. He put it away in his pocket and began sanding the spoon's hollow on a corner of the stove. He showed no fear: he pressed down with all his strength, as though he were sanding a tree stump.

‘If he breaks it now,' said Bauer, closing his eyes to imagine this happening, ‘I will die laughing.'

‘Let me see,' I said to the Pole, gesturing with my hand.

He stopped sanding and stared at me. I made the same gesture, more insistently, and he handed me the spoon with a threatening look on his face. I turned it in my hands, examining the hollow, weighing it up, and said (because it was the truth): ‘It's pretty well done.'

I passed it to Emmerich. ‘Yeah,' he agreed. ‘He's done it.'

‘Give it to me,' said Bauer, holding out his hand.

‘What are you going to do?'

‘Throw it in the fire.'

The Pole stared at Emmerich. Bauer was still holding out his hand, grinning now, his eyes fierce. Emmerich
figured out the best way to do it. He moved the spoon close to Bauer – but careful not to get too close – and turned it around so that he could see it from every angle. Then he handed it back to the Pole. Still grinning, Bauer said, ‘It's ready.'

He grabbed the saucepan's handle with two hands and placed it carefully on the table, then he went back to the stove and picked up the slices of bread. Emmerich and I turned around so we were facing the table, and took out our spoons and tin mugs. Bauer stepped over the bench and sat between us.

AND SUDDENLY THE
hunger, which had left us for a while – that hunger sent to sleep by the cigarettes and the potato alcohol and the fire in the stove – awoke and rose from the saucepan and fell upon us as if it were a living creature. The soup looked good and smelled good. The slices of salami floated on the surface, carried there by the cornmeal, now cooked. The melted lard was still boiling.

We turned away from the stove, and the heat caressed our backs. We watched steam rise from the soup. My head was spinning. We looked at the slices of bread. The soup was continuing to simmer. The edges of the bread were toasted, reminding us of things past. As if imparting a secret, but loud enough for Emmerich to hear too, Bauer said to me: ‘We'll tell our nephew about this.'

Relaxed and fully in agreement, I nodded. Emmerich whispered, ‘We mustn't forget.'

I leaned across so he could see me, and pointed to my forehead. ‘It's in here,' I told him. ‘We won't forget anything.'

Emmerich scratched his head and gave me a smile like nothing I've ever seen: happy, sad, grateful . . . a smile to make you weep. On the table, our shadows danced.

The Pole appeared next to Emmerich, spoon in hand. If we had moved up, he could have sat down at the end of the bench, next to Emmerich or to me. But we didn't think about that, and neither did he. The question never arose. I noticed that his hands were less ravaged by the cold than ours were. He blew on his spoon.

‘And the plate,' Bauer said, drawing a circle with his hands. ‘You forgot to make one. Tough luck.'

The Pole understood and looked afraid. I was afraid too – afraid that we'd have to beat him up and get angry if it turned nasty, just at the moment when we were sitting at the table, starving once more. Only, Bauer was right. What was he going to eat from? We hadn't thought of that. We hadn't imagined him eating out of the saucepan.

‘Hurry up,' said Bauer. ‘Go and make one now before it gets cold.'

He half-laughed, nastily. The Pole, suddenly very pale, gripped his spoon in one hand as if he were going to break it and opened his mouth to speak.

‘Shut your face,' Bauer told him, and pushed his own mug in front of him. There was no fraternity or kindness in the gesture, of course, just the desire, shared by all of us, to finally eat.

The Pole, still very pale, stared at Bauer, his eyes rolling. In his head, everything was upside down and going too fast.

Bauer served us in our mugs and drew the saucepan towards him. And then we began to eat. We bit into the hot bread. We smelled the flavour and thickness of the soup. All of it was good: the bread, the Italians' cornmeal, the slices of melting salami. We could smell the alcohol too.

We burned our tongues and palates. We were happy, but not for long, because the Pole suddenly stopped eating in that strange way he had – like an old woman, with his missing teeth – and his eyes turned to slits as his mouth was deformed by a fierce grin. We stopped eating too, and watched him.

From where he stood, he was facing the storeroom. The Jew was dozing, sitting on his coat. The Pole spoke a few words, not very loud, but we understood that they were addressed to the Jew, and that they were filled with satisfaction and contempt. It was a strange kind of curse.

‘Don't start that again,' Bauer told him.

The Pole shut up, but lifted his steaming mug towards the storeroom as his face split once again into that vile grin. It was probably that smile that caused Bauer to decide on something that Emmerich and I had never considered – because we were not Bauer, and also, I guess, because we'd drunk a lot less potato alcohol than he had.

So he looked scornfully at the Pole for a moment and then, without saying anything, turned towards the storeroom. ‘Come over here,' he called.

The Jew lifted his head and looked over at us.

‘Get up, come over here,' said Bauer, indicating the free side of the table, facing the Pole.

‘What are you doing? What for?' I asked, although I had understood.

Bauer shot me a look. Then, ignoring me, he touched the saucepan handle and called out in a loud voice: ‘Come and eat. Go on, get up and come over here.'

‘No,' I said. ‘Stop. Leave him where he is.'

‘Why?' Bauer asked, as the Jew slowly, hesitantly stood up.

Once he was on his feet, he bent down to pick up his coat, but Bauer signalled that he should leave it there. Then he made another hand gesture to say he should come out of the storeroom.

‘No, Bauer,' I repeated. ‘Leave him where he is.'

Again, Bauer asked, ‘Why?'

I didn't reply. What was the point? He knew the answer. He knew the risk we were taking with our morale by inviting him to eat with us.

In early autumn, two Jews – two brothers, we thought – used to do our laundry. They soaped it, put it in hot water in a bathtub outside, and then hung it out to dry. Sometimes we walked past them. Sometimes we watched them work. One day, after watching them for a while, we'd talked to them about the way they rinsed the clothes. We thought it wasn't good. It seemed to us that we could still see the soap in the hanging clothes. It was almost enough to make us itch. They tried to understand what we wanted, though I'm not sure they succeeded. But, as they'd made the effort, we slipped each of them a cigarette. And after that, they folded our clothes first, even our underwear, and brought them to our beds in the gymnasium. If we were there when they did that, we would slip them each another cigarette. And instead of smoking a whole one each, they cut them in two so they could have two smokes during the day.

Except that, when their turn came, we remembered them. For the whole of October, it had been their hands
that washed and folded our laundry, and our cigarettes that they smoked. And, unfortunately for them, and for us, among the hundred or so soldiers who were there that day, it was in front of Bauer and me that they lay down, on their stomachs, in the clearing. Bauer and I wanted to change places with other soldiers, but as we hesitated, wondering how to do it, the others next to us had already fired. So we had no choice: we shot our laundrymen. And just before we pulled the trigger, one of them had thrown us a look full of sadness – because he was going to die, of course, but also, so it seemed to us, because we were the ones who were killing him.