"Good?" he asked, a wrinkle of worry creeping into his voice in even that one syllable. Clearly he sensed that her mind was wandering tonight. "Are you warm enough?"
"I'm fine," she reassured him, her voice a purr for his benefit, and she smiled. She hadn't felt this alive since they had left Kaminheim. "I'm just fine," she murmured, and then she gave herself over completely to the swelling rush inside her that would build and build till she came.
the sun was higher and hotter than it had been on any day since they had started west months ago, and there were rumors that to the south of them the western Allies were nearing the Elbe. They had the sense that they themselves were close to the Americans and the Brits.
Now they rested at the edge of a shallow river that ran parallel to the dirt farm road and allowed the horses to browse upon the moist spring grass. Anna and her mother were in the knee-deep water, bathing, shielded from the two men by the wagon.
Uri sat down on a stone the size of a footstool at the side of the road and stretched his legs out before him. Callum collapsed flat in the grass and for a moment lay on his back with his eyes closed against the sun. Then, when he had caught his breath, he sat up and pulled off his boots and stared at his socks. They were ash gray now, but once they had been white. He had two more pairs in his pack, but he knew they were even worse: They smelled unbearable and were riddled with holes.
"When I'm home," he said, "I am never going to wear boots again."
"Nonsense," Uri told him. "You'll be wearing boots again by November. You'll have forgotten your blisters by then."
"I doubt that."
Uri took the tobacco and two sheets of cigarette paper from his pouch and started to roll a cigarette for the Scot. "You forget pain. We all do. We tell ourselves we remember the specifics, but it's all just a lot of pictures and words in our heads. No sensations. I think we actually remember life's humiliations much better. The degradations. The cruelties. But the pain? We seem to forget what pain actually feels like. It's a cloud after the sky has cleared."
"You are awfully philosophic this morning."
"I can finally see the end."
"Well, I will never forget how much my feet hurt."
In the river behind them they heard Anna shrieking cheerfully because the water was so cold. Uri handed Callum the cigarette and rolled one for himself. "You won't even be thinking about your feet in a couple of months," he continued. "You will be married to that girl back there and you will be home in your beloved Scotland."
"There were times when I didn't think I'd ever hear her laugh again," Callum said, and he motioned his head in the direction of the women. "Her or her mother."
"I know what you mean."
"Tell me: What are you looking forward to most when you get to America? If you get there. What's the one thing?"
"Oh, I'll get there. I've no doubts. The one thing? Mass transportation. The subways and the buses they have in New York City. Like you, I don't ever want to walk again. I am going to ride everywhere."
"And where will everywhere be?"
"I want to go to school."
Callum nodded and seemed to think about this. "I usually see you as so much older than me."
"Six years. Not so much."
"And so I usually think of you as having finished school. I keep forgetting they didn't let you."
"Of all the things they took from me--other, of course, than my family--that's what I want back the most. An education."
"I must confess, I don't think much about that. I guess I will enroll in university. But when I'm done? I honestly don't know. I really don't. After all this . . . after the last year . . . well, I just can't imagine what God has in store for me. I can't conceive of what possibly could come next."
Uri took a long drag on his cigarette and decided his throat was too sore. He really wasn't enjoying it much, and so he licked his thumb and forefinger and squeezed the smoldering tip. When he was sure it was extinguished, he placed it back in his pouch.
"What about you?" Callum was asking. "When you finish school, then what?"
"I've lived my entire adult life just trying to get through the present. Today. I have never for a moment thought much about what I will be doing tomorrow." He stared up into the sky, savoring the warmth against his eyelids. "And I certainly don't think there's a God in heaven who has a plan for me. Or, for that matter, for anyone."
"No?"
"No."
"No plan or no God?"
"Either." Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. It always surprised Uri when he recalled a prayer. Was this, he tried to remember now, what he was supposed to say when he was dying? Was this the incantation that would ensure that he didn't die alone--that would link his passing with the passing of all other Jews? He thought so, but it had been so long. Still, he wondered if Rebekah had whispered this prayer when she'd been killed. If she had, he hoped it had given her comfort. In all likelihood, it had given his parents some consolation; perhaps it had helped his sister in some fashion, too.
He heard Callum taking another long drag on the cigarette, but he didn't open his eyes. Then he heard a songbird. The water as it rolled through the channel on the other side of the wagon. Anna and Mutti, giggling once again in that river. One of the horses snorting. A fly. Finally he said to Callum, "If my sister were alive, I might view tomorrow differently. But there's no one now. Just me. And so I don't. I just try to keep myself alive. But even that seems less important than it once did."
"It's plenty important."
"No, not really. I'm not the last Jew left in Germany."
"What?"
"There are others. I know that now. I didn't always. But I swear to you, there were moments when the only thing that kept me going was my determination to live so I could someday tell people what the Germans were doing."
"That was a lot of pressure to put on yourself."
"It seemed to matter."
"You know . . ."
"Yes?"
"You could always come to Scotland."
"Excuse me? I couldn't possibly have heard you correctly," Uri said, turning from the sun to the paratrooper and smiling at him.
"Oh, I'm sure America is a terrific place. I liked most of the Yankees I met. Not all. But most. Anyway, it was just a thought."
"Ah, yes. I could just move in with you and Anna. Is that what you had in mind?"
"Well, as a matter of fact, you could. My mother has plenty of room. I'm sure we'll live there when we first arrive."
"And what would I do in Scotland?"
"Same as you'd do in America. Go to school. Meet a nice girl. Fall in love."
"Huh."
"Think about it."
Behind him, Uri could hear Anna and Mutti emerging from the water and starting to get dressed. He didn't precisely view Mutti as anyone's mother but Anna's; likewise, he didn't see Anna as a sister. But his own mother and his own sister were long dead. So, certainly, was his father. His whole family. He didn't know the details--would never know the details--of how they had perished, and on some level he was relieved. But there was still a part of him that craved the specifics: where and when and who was responsible. Who held the angry, barking dogs on their leashes? Who raised high the truncheons, who marched them into the pits? Who fired the machine guns? Or, perhaps, switched on the gas? These were Germans and Poles and Ukrainians with faces and names, men and women who before the war had had families and ran streetcars and bars and butcher shops--people he and his sister and his parents might have seen on any sidewalk and hardly given a second look.
"Uri?"
"Yes?"
"I'm serious."
No, he wanted out of Europe. He wanted away from those streetcars, those bars, those butcher shops.
But then there were these few survivors of what had once been a family named Emmerich. There was this Scot. The reality was, these people were the closest thing he had to a family now. They were all t
hat he had in the world. With this thought--one he found at once oddly and uncharacteristically hopeful--he stood up and hollered good-naturedly at the women. Asked them if they were decent, and whether the men might actually get a chance to bathe, too.
for another week they walked and they slept and, on occasion, Mutti or Anna rode atop the wagon. Every other day, it seemed, there had also been moments when the men--both of them now--would need to crawl quickly beneath the feed because they were nearing diehard SS troopers who, even though it was clear that not even the fuhrer's wonder weapons or the death of an American president could possibly roll back the tide, were either commandeering deserters or shooting them outright. Whole truck- loads of teen boys passed them, the vehicles heading toward the Oder or the outskirts of Berlin, where the young men would be expected either to repulse the final Soviet advance or to die trying. Many looked as if they were Theo's age, their cheeks in some cases rosy and round, in others hollowed out by hunger and dread. One day there were snow flurries and on another it rained, but frequently the sun was so warm that they all tossed their jackets and capes onto the wagon and walked for hours in only their blouses and shirts.
They were no longer a part of a lengthy column. There were still plenty of other refugees on the roads: They passed mothers with children, exhausted old people, and men of all ages who had lost all manner of limbs. But the tragic and interminable parade that had started west from East Prussia and what once had been Poland had all but dissipated. Some elements had simply given up and allowed themselves to fall prey to the Russians, while others had reached whatever destination they had originally had in mind. Still others--many, many thousands, it seemed, based on the bodies and the debris that littered the roads that spring--had died in the cold of January and February and March. One afternoon they learned a pair of Wehrmacht battle groups were counterattacking a Russian spearhead no more than ten or twelve kilometers to the southeast, and that particular Soviet column was now moving away from them toward the southwest. Other days, their footsteps would be energized when they heard how the British and the Americans were moving in great numbers into the heart of the country, encountering only the most token resistance virtually everywhere. The four of them knew that the distance separating them from their western saviors (and that was how all of them viewed the Brits and the Americans that April) was narrowing.
Still, the walking was hard. The ground was often sloshy and soft, and though pilots were less likely to waste time strafing them since they weren't part of a caravan easily seen from the sky, occasionally an aircraft would swoop down from the clouds and fire a missile or two in their direction. A wagon no more than fifty meters ahead of them was blown up one afternoon by a British plane, slaughtering a sweet young mother and her two little boys: The Emmerichs and Callum and Uri had rested with them for thirty minutes in the middle of the day, only hours before the woman and her sons would be killed. Another time, they passed through the smoldering remains of yet one more town that recently had been bombed, and in the rubble of what had been the stone schoolhouse they saw the bodies of students. There were easily a dozen of them, perhaps a few more, all girls, and at first they assumed that the children had been brought there to protect them. Then, however, when Callum and Uri went to pull some of the stones and fallen timbers away to examine the corpses--make sure that none of the girls were still breathing--they realized that the bodies were largely unscathed. Moreover, there was very little bruising or blood, even on the parts of their bodies that had been crushed by debris from the crumbling structure. They understood then that the girls had probably been poisoned, their lives taken from them by adults who feared a far worse death awaited them when the Russians arrived.
No one in the group was precisely sure anymore where they were going. At one point Anna suggested they consider Schwein- furt, since it was far to the west and Uri might know people there. But it was also far to the south--so far that the distance, even after the hundreds of kilometers they had trekked, seemed prohibitive. Moreover, Uri wanted nothing to do with the city: He was quite certain that all of his family and friends were dead, and anyone still there had been all too happy to see the city's Jewish population degraded, deported, and, in the end, exterminated.
Consequently, their plan was simply to continue west, trying to avoid the major cities with their desperate, inevitable congestion-- and, at night, the air raids that continued to pulverize the metropolitan areas even now. They would steer clear of Berlin at all costs, given the desperate battle that loomed there. When they heard cannonade to the east, they walked briskly; when they heard only bird- song, they allowed themselves the opportunity to shamble.
it was uri who spotted the woeful column first. Their road was almost converging upon the one the column was on, separated from it at the moment by an expanse of triangular field cratered by shell fire and filled with the remnants of charred and blackened Wehrmacht vehicles--wagons, motorcycles, half-tracks, and what Uri alone recognized as the remains of two or three small, turretless Bushwhacker tanks. The soldiers had probably been encamped there when they had been spotted by an enemy pilot and attacked from the air. It must have been at least a day or two earlier, however, because there were no signs of soldiers either wounded or deceased, and the dead horses had started to smell.
Still, it was what was across the field that caused Uri's heart to race: There, no more than two hundred meters distant, was a plodding line of the most pathetic, despairing old men he had ever seen. At least he thought they were old men. Most of them were clad in shirts and trousers that even from this distance he could see were little more than threadbare rags, but some seemed to be wearing sacklike shifts and skirts and kerchiefs on their heads. There were also a few in striped prison uniforms. He guessed there were a hundred of them, perhaps more, and without exception the group was haggard and stooped and lumbering along at a crawl. He counted nine guards, three of whom seemed to be female.
"What do you make of that?" Callum was asking.
"The old men?"
"Old men? Are you blind?" the paratrooper admonished him, his voice indignant. "They're girls! They're young women!"
Uri squinted and studied the column of prisoners. He decided that if Callum was right, then those guards deserved to be shot. Hell, they deserved to be shot regardless of the age or the gender of the walking skeletons they were prodding along.
"Women," he murmured, when he realized that Callum was correct.
"Young women!" Callum said again, more loudly this time. "Girls! Some are probably the same age as Anna here! Some could be as young as your sister!"
Anna and Mutti had come up beside them, standing so close that he could feel the warmth of Anna's breath and smell the damp wool of her sweater. Her parka was in the back of the wagon at the moment.
"Are they . . ." Mutti began.
"They're Jews," Callum said to her. "No doubt, they're Jews." He was at once incredulous and disgusted, and it sounded to Uri as if he were chastising the woman. This, he was saying in essence, is what your people are doing. Have done. Here it is in full view: No more hiding it behind barbed wire fences and cement crematoriums, no more burying the corpses in ditches. Here's a whole bloody parade of the walking dead.
Mutti held her hands before her mouth and a small moan-- a cry, almost--escaped. "They're girls, you say?" she murmured finally.
"Yes!" Callum said. "They're Jewish girls! Here's what your ten- thousand-year Reich was really all about!"
Uri watched as the column seemed to drift: It looked to him as if the individuals were bobbing in a river. It made absolutely no sound.
"Those guards: the most abominable bastards on the planet. What kind of person would do that?" Callum was muttering. Uri had never seen him so angry. Didn't know the Scot had it in him.
"Well, then," Uri said, aware of precisely what he wanted to do--what he was going to do--and wholly unconcerned with the ramifications. "Let's take care of them." He pulled his rifle off his shoulder and re
leased the safety. "I'd suggest you get one of the Russian rifles out of the wagon."
"What are you doing?" This was Anna, and he heard a little tremor in her voice.
"I am going to kill that fellow"--and he paused as he squinted through the sight, moving his rifle like a pointer--"right there. The one with that ridiculous white mustache."
"But there are too many of them," Mutti said.
"And, I'd bet, they're all cowards. They're pathetic bullies and cowards."
His angle now was such that he was going to have to shoot the man in the back. So be it. He aimed heart level, just to the left of the guard's spine and below the man's scapula. And then he squeezed the trigger, experienced the recoil in his shoulder as he heard the blast in his ear, and watched as the guard with his preposterous resemblance to a walrus fell like a straw man whose braces have been removed, the fellow's knees buckling, his chin rolling into his neck, his arms flapping once like a dancer's. The idea somehow crossed Uri's mind that he might have been eating something as he walked: He thought he saw a large chunk of bread fly from the man's fingers as he died.