Nevertheless, she was so worried about Sonje's precarious mental health that she didn't defend Callum as the girl lashed into him. When the young man climbed from the wagon, it only got worse. Sonje's grim face grew red as she ranted, and it looked as if she might physically attack him. But Mutti concluded that Sonje needed to vent--they all did, she guessed, for different reasons--and she would give her that opportunity, as unfair as that might be for poor Callum. Even Anna seemed to have realized that everyone would be better off if they allowed Sonje her say.
"I can't even bear to walk beside you right now!" she was telling the paratrooper when he climbed from the wagon, her voice strident and shrill. Callum seemed largely unperturbed, as if it were easier to allow this wave of anger to wash over him than it was to rise up and risk it cutting his columnar legs out from under him. Occasionally he would glance at Anna, and he seemed more bemused than defensive, but he was listening and nodding, as if he were receiving nothing more from Sonje than a shopping list for the village. "Are you really the people we are supposed to surrender to? You are no better than the Russians! No better at all! You are a horrible, violent people and you are brutes! When will you have had enough? When? When you've killed every last woman and child in Germany? Destroyed every single home and museum?"
Mutti presumed that part of Sonje's anger stemmed from fear: from the reality that Manfred had left them. She knew that she herself felt a little bereft, a little more anxious, and so why wouldn't Sonje--or, for that matter, her own daughter? Why shouldn't all their tempers be a little short? It was a small miracle they weren't constantly snapping at one another now that their Wehrmacht corporal was gone. It wasn't that Manfred was braver than Callum-- though Mutti had to admit to herself, he probably was. Unlike their young Scot, Manfred would not have allowed himself to be captured without firing a shot. Rather, it was that he was resourceful and focused and just a little bit fierce. Moreover, he was a man in a uniform: His presence gave them a clout the other refugees lacked. The result? When they'd had this handsome Wehrmacht corporal as a part of their group, they couldn't help but feel a little bit safer, a little more secure.
"Barbarians!" Sonje was insisting, shaking her head. "Barbarians!" she repeated.
Yes, it was clear that Manfred had spent more time away from his unit than he probably should have; but she couldn't begrudge the man that, not after all he had endured in his years in the army and all, undoubtedly, he had seen. Besides, he might have saved Anna's life in that barn. Who knew what those Russians might have done to her in the end?
"And now Dresden!" Sonje hissed, her voice eerily reminiscent of Klara's when she said the name of the city, but Mutti had the sense that the girl's tirade might finally be winding down. "Why would you bomb Dresden? What could possibly be gained from bombing Dresden?"
She shook her head and wiped at her eyes and her cheeks with her gloved fingers, and Mutti reached out and rubbed her back in long, slow circles. Russians, British, Americans, she thought. Perhaps Sonje was right. Perhaps it didn't make a difference in which direction they walked. It really did seem as if the whole world was against them.
"What, Mutti?"
She looked over at Anna. She hadn't realized that she had spoken aloud just now.
"What were you saying?" her daughter was asking her, the girl's eyes shining and a little wide with concern. Callum, too, was watching her.
"Oh," she said to them both, noting an especially forlorn- looking birch by the side of the road. "I was just being an old woman. Talking to myself, I guess."
"You are hardly an old woman," said Anna.
"I wasn't three or four months ago. I think I am now. I seem to be easily distracted." She heard the despair in her voice and felt ashamed. Had she ever before sounded so gloomy?
"Well," her daughter was saying kindly, "the mind's bound to roam when all we do is walk out here in the cold. Half the time, I find myself nodding off on my feet. Just listen to the horses' hooves: It's like a metronome. Of course we get distracted!"
We. Anna was kind enough to say we, Mutti noticed, and so she stood up a little straighter. Stopped rubbing Sonje's back. She forced herself to take strides that were longer, more vigorous, and reminded herself that she still had a part of her family with her. Her lovely daughter. Her brave little boy. This was a great blessing. And it meant, as their mother, that she had to remain steadfast and resolute, and do all that she could to protect them. Under no circumstances could she allow herself to break down and become an additional burden.
"Come," she said to no one in particular, "we should keep moving. It won't be dark for another few hours."
anna understood on a level that was more intellectual than visceral that aging represented a steady winnowing of life's possibilities. She grasped death from bullets and bombs and bayonets far better than she did death from old age and cancer. But she was not uncomprehending of the reality that the infinite steadily contracted, the options narrowed, and eventually one's future would be as shallow as a spoon. As predictable--and enervating-- as the mud that followed the first thaws in March. And so as they walked on toward Stettin, three more days beneath a dreary, ever- lowering sky, in her mind she recited a litany of names. Yes, they did get distracted. All of them. They were distracted as much by their memories of what--of whom--they had lost as they were by what loomed before them. Gone, she thought, at least for the moment, was Werner. And disappeared behind him into that great fog of battle were her father and Helmut. Her twin. Then there was her mother's brother, dead, as well as the obdurate man's daughter and daughter-in-law and grandson. There were Klara and Gabi, not certainly dead but most likely dead. Russians, two killed in a barn in the midst of an act of inexplicable kindness. No, that wasn't right: It wasn't an act of kindness at all. They were stealing everything her family had: They had simply chosen not to rape and murder her in the process. Funny how a war altered one's definition of mercy.
And then, of course, there were the animals, some profoundly beloved. There were the animals they had left behind at Kaminheim and the ones they had lost since starting west: Labiau, senselessly butchered, and Balga--her favorite--commandeered. Already she could see the physical strain on the two horses that remained. Cal- lum was walking beside the wagons most of the time, but at least once or twice each day he had been forced to crawl beneath the remaining bags of oats and one of the horses had had to struggle extra hard to proceed. She had sacrificed her suitcase soon after they had left that first SS checkpoint, telling no one when she did it, though in hindsight it hadn't been very heavy and she had regretted her sacrifice as soon as they had stopped at the end of that day. Still, when she had looked into the eyes of Waldau and Ragnit, when she had watched the white foam ooze from their mouths, she had been almost unable to bear it.
Yet as they trudged west, the loss she found herself ruing with a frequency and a depth that surprised her was neither her father nor her brothers nor even her precious horse. It was Manfred. It wasn't that she cared for him more than anyone else. She was quite sure of that. (She was, wasn't she?) But she nonetheless found herself thinking of him even when she tried not to. She thought of him when Callum was trying to cheer her up with his stories of the Scottish coast and what a life might be like for them in Elgin. His accent pained her now, because while his German vocabulary was extensive--he was, more or less, fluent--his pronunciation was still slightly off, and every conversation reminded her of how different they were. She thought of him when Theo was asking her if she thought there was a chance they might come across new boots for him soon, because his, he said, were getting a little tight. Manfred was capable and ingenious: He would have found her brother some boots. And she thought of him when she traded two bags of feed for a small sack of muesli and a little milk, and when Mutti would talk reverentially about her husband and her two distant sons. Mutti was, essentially, whistling in the dark, talking aloud about how resilient the Emmerich men were, and how they would get through this. They would, she was ce
rtain. They'd find a way.
Anna was considerably less confident, but she wasn't going to disagree with her mother. You believed whatever was necessary to keep putting one foot in front of the other in this cold and gray and ice.
Almost imperceptibly, however, over those three days the fields and the forests were slowly transformed into lawns and garden plots, still white with snow or silvery pearl with ice, but the houses were growing closer together and eventually they grew even into rows. Behind them, to the east, the front had apparently stabilized. The Russians were no longer licking at the rear wheels of their wagons.
And then, as if Mutti were discussing a common bird she had seen at a feeder at Kaminheim, one morning her mother casually remarked that they were on the Altdamm road and Altdamm was an eastern suburb of Stettin. Any moment, she said, they might hear the sound of ships in the great harbor. She reminded them that her cousin lived at the edge of the city--on a cliff overlooking the lake--and she guessed they would be there by midafternoon.
Anna turned to her brother, who at the moment was riding on the driver's box of the wagon Waldau was pulling.
"We did it," she said, and she found herself smiling more broadly than she had in a very long while. "We made it."
Theo tried to smile back, but she was surprised to see there were tears running down his cheeks and his eyes were red. Theo, crying? The child struggled so hard to be brave that she wasn't sure if he had cried once since they had left Kaminheim.
"Sweetie, don't cry," she said to the boy. "Don't you see? We're here. Tonight you'll have warm food and a warm bed."
The boy sniffed back a small sob and said in a voice that was barely above a whisper--it was hushed and scared, as if he didn't want Mutti to hear him--"Anna? I think . . ." "Tell me, sweetie."
"I think something bad has happened to my foot."
*
PART III
The First Days of Spring
1945
Chapter 16
cecile hadn't really believed they were destined for work, even though she had said such things to Jeanne and to Vera and to anyone else who would listen. As often as not as they had walked west in the winter, she had begun to conclude that either there was no purpose to their marching other than to march them to death or they were being marched to a camp that was beyond the reach of the Soviets. Perhaps one with a gas chamber to asphyxiate the prisoners and a crematorium. She'd heard stories about such camps. And yet here they were, working by day at a factory that made a small part for airplane engines and sleeping by night in a barracks. During the last part of their trip, and the part that had covered the most ground by far, they had been locked inside windowless vans--not gas vans, as they had all briefly presumed, some grateful that their misery was finally going to be ended. Actual transportation vans. Eleven of them. They were driven inside the vans for two days and then deposited at barracks that smelled of alcohol. Each of the prisoners had a thin bunk to herself, a pillow filled with straw, and a blanket. Russian women had worked here before them and the blankets still were infested with body lice, but they were no longer sleeping outside or in barns, and they were given the clothing the Russians had left behind before they had--the Jewish women supposed--been executed themselves. And so while some of the prisoners concluded that eventually they would be machine-gunned or gassed as well, for the moment they had warmer clothes and their rations of soup and bread were more substantial. Not generous, not even remotely satisfying, but larger. Moreover, they were grateful for that soup, even on those days when it was watery and thin, because if nothing else it had been boiled and that meant they could drink it and slake their thirst without fear of typhus. And though the barracks weren't heated, the walls kept out the worst of the wind. Besides, it was March now and the sun was higher during the day and the most brutal weather was behind them.
And soon the Russians would get here. They had to. Or perhaps, Cecile and Jeanne had conjectured, they were so far west that the British or the Americans would rescue them first.
The barracks were about two kilometers from the factory, and they walked along the edge of a small village to reach it. Cecile still wore her hiking boots and Jeanne still had the crocodile dress flats that Cecile had given her. And always, whether it was dawn or dusk, they saw townspeople. Sometimes the townspeople would avert their eyes when they saw the women trudging back and forth, and sometimes they would go about their business as if the prisoners were invisible. They would pass them on their bicycles. They would continue to prepare the loosening soil for their gardens. If they were children, they would walk to their school. The prisoners knew they didn't dare say a word to the Germans, and the Germans, it seemed, had neither interest nor curiosity in this group that had replaced the Russians at the factory.
The work wasn't hard. Some days they assembled pistons, using four long bolts to attach the fire plates to the piston's crown; other days they screwed the parts of the nozzle together for the fuel injection system for a particular Junkers fighter. Always there was a Dutch foreman, a prisoner, too, who inspected their work. He wasn't especially rigorous, and the women grew to understand that his lackadaisical attitude was his own personal form of resistance. Could a badly fitted piston or imperfect fuel nozzle bring down a German fighter plane on its own? They didn't know for sure, but they could hope.
Cecile knew she wasn't actually recovering her health with her new diet, her threadbare jacket with lice, or the reality that she was no longer sleeping in the worst of the cold like a wild animal. But she understood, as did all of the other women, that it was going to take a lot longer to die in this fashion. They might expire walking to and from the gates of the factory. But they were no longer actively being killed.
there was roughly one guard for every ten or twelve women escorting them between the barracks and the factory. Usually, Cecile scoffed at the idea that any prisoner was even capable of trying to escape. All of the girls were disappointed that so many of the guards from their original camp--the real sadists, it seemed, women like Sigi and men like Pusch--had accompanied them when the vans had picked them up and were brutalizing them here, too, whenever the opportunity arose. The guards were supplemented by older men who seemed to live in the town with the factory. Most of them weren't SS, and many of them seemed a little frail-looking themselves. Still, they carried their guns and they walked the prisoners back and forth between the barracks and the factory, and the only time they spoke to the women was to yell at them to keep up or move faster. They didn't seem to see any reason to be kind to the prisoners.
Consequently, Cecile was surprised one morning when a guard, as he walked beside the column of women, unwrapped a piece of butcher's paper to reveal a plump, cooked chicken breast and offered it to her. The guard was one of the older men from the town.
At first she was afraid to touch it, and so she said nothing. She didn't think this was a trick precisely, but she wondered whether accepting it might be suggesting that she felt the camp wasn't feeding her sufficiently and lead to an additional punishment. Moreover, she was completely unprepared for this--or any--act of mercy. Finally, when she hadn't taken it from him, he shrugged and handed it to Jeanne, who promptly tore the meat off in pieces, giving some to Cecile and some to the woman on her right, and keeping some for herself. The three women ate their chicken ravenously, almost swallowing their chunks of meat whole. The guard was, Cecile guessed, close to sixty years old, and his uniform didn't match the outfits the other men were wearing. She wouldn't have been surprised if it was the uniform he had worn in the First World War.
On the way back to the barracks that evening she realized that once more she was marching near that guard, and so she went to him to thank him. To explain why she hadn't seemed more grateful in the morning. He looked at her as if he didn't have the slightest idea what she was talking about and ordered her to shut up, stare straight ahead, and keep moving.
Two mornings later she found herself walking beside the older man a third time. On
ce more he reached into his uniform coat pocket and, as if he were a magician unveiling a bouquet of flowers he had somehow concealed up his sleeve, pulled out an object draped loosely in butcher's paper. He unwrapped it and this time revealed for Cecile a cooked pork chop. He motioned for her to take it.
"Why me?" she asked him, a reflex, still a little afraid to reach for it.
From the corner of her eye she saw Jeanne eyeing the meat and then glancing at her as if she were a complete lunatic--which, perhaps, she was. There was a part of her that knew she should just grab it and eat it. Suck every small scrap of flesh from the bone. Before she had moved her fingers toward it, however, she heard another guard, a younger man named Blumer, screaming furiously at--she supposed--her. She curled her arms against her body and ducked, preparing for the blow. But Blumer, who had probably been a real soldier until he had lost an eye and a part of his ear, wasn't furious with her; she was, at the moment, all but invisible to him. Instead he was yanking hard at the older man with the pork chop, pulling at his sleeve so suddenly that he dropped the meat and it fell to the muddy street, where Blumer used his boot to smash the bone and grind the pieces into the ground. Then he whisked the fellow away from the column, ordering the other nearby guards to keep a close watch on the swine, while the rest of the group plodded on to the factory.