No food; we found empty tins, but nothing edible. I spread blankets thick on the floor, and, more warm and comfortable than I’d ever expected to be, we lay down, side by side but not touching.
I guessed it was four or five o’clock, with night falling headlong outside. Kate fell asleep immediately. I lay awake, attempting to think a way forward. Before long, I also fell asleep.
How can you tell the time when you’re beneath the ground? And have no watch or clock? It might have been midnight. It might have been only an hour later. I woke to a noise above. Yes, a noise.
I listened. Then I sat up. And crept in my new and awkward clothes. Across the pitch-black floor. I listened again. A tapping. Strong tapping. With something sharp. On the trapdoor right above my head. Not rhythmic. Nor calculated. More an irregular thumping.
And now snuffling. An animal. Without doubt. A deer, probably. I climbed the ladder. To press upward on the door. Above my head the tapping stopped. I heard the big snuffle, and then the sound of a little gallop away.
Followed by a shot. Muffled, but a shot. No doubt about it. Then three more shots. Then men talking. Laughing.
Wide-eyed, Kate sat up. I lit and shaded the flashlight to see her face, then shone it on mine, then crawled to her.
“Shhhhhh.”
“They missed.”
I whispered, “What?”
“They fired at a deer and missed.”
“How do you know?”
“They’re teasing each other,” she whispered.
Above our heads, boots stomped. They were in the hut. I switched off the flashlight. One, two, three, four, five, six pairs of boots. Or so it felt. A few feet above our heads. The aroma of cigarette smoke reached us.
We sat as though paralyzed. She took my arm and wrapped it around her. I tightened my grip. Five, then, fifteen minutes—or hours, how could we tell? They had a radio of some kind; I heard the unmistakable static.
“They’re moving on. The snow is heavy. They think they’re near us,” she said. “And that anyway we won’t survive. But they know it’s us they’re following.”
Neither one of us moved a muscle. When we did, I couldn’t flex my arms or legs. They had gone. We waited and waited—yes, they’d gone.
She slept first; I kept watch. In the darkness I could almost see her face; I never took my eyes off it.
My next passage of sleep took me close to oblivion. I have no knowledge or feeling of how long I slept. When I awoke, Kate was sitting on a camp stool, the carbide lamp beside her, just looking at me. She held out a book, a small, green book with a Star of David on the leather cover. Now that the war is long over, we know the truth about that underground hiding place—and it saved our lives too.
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For a moment, I couldn’t raise the trapdoor. And then I remembered: snow. I pushed harder and opened it an inch. At least a foot of snow had fallen. The wind had died, and the sun shone into my eyes. But I was facing west, and that meant another night in the woodland cellar. I put the time at around three o’clock.
We’d slept a great deal. In retrospect, we’d been shrewd because we’d needed the sleep. And this time we both slept at the same time, and this time nothing disturbed us. Our bodies adjusted. We were dehydrated, but because we’d had no food, we needed no toilet facilities, and hadn’t since we’d begun our escape.
Morning, bright and cold, would energize us as much as it could. We stretched, yawned, checked our clothing. Most of it had dried a good deal, though our coats remained damp. We decided to continue in the clothes we had found, although I retrieved my black coat. Miss Begley wore a dress of brown serge that came down below her knees; I had corduroy pants, a heavy woolen shirt, and a thick vest with pockets. Our shoes had to continue; we found none.
With something close to pleasure, I recalled that we were still near the verge of the wood and could, today at any rate, see where we were going. When we came out to the forest’s rim, the light almost blinded us. In the long hollow of the forest’s U shape, new, deep snow lay higher than before and stretched as far as the horizon.
Not a living creature could we see—not a bird, not a deer. The snow had also obliterated the tracks of our pursuers.
We talked through a simple plan—to walk along that forest edge until we came to some manageable terrain. And we’d stay just inside the trees, so that we couldn’t be seen, yet we could see anybody coming up through the open spaces of the U. If military, we would have to be careful—who would they be? German? Allies?
Five or six hours we walked, on relatively easy ground, and Kate’s bag seemed not as heavy. Babes in the Wood, we were, and I recalled the lines from a childhood poem that used to make me cry. And when they were dead, the robins so red, brought strawberry leaves, and over them spread. No strawberry leaves now, but dying remained a significant possibility.
Kate remained silent while walking. When I asked her, for the third anxious time, “Are you all right?” she nodded.
“I’m conserving my breath,” she said.
What was she thinking? I couldn’t read her mood. All I could sense about her may be summarized by the word determination. At one moment, on the crest of a sharp little slope, when we stopped to rest, I reached over and hugged her and held her.
We walked all day. How we kept going I can’t say. In the midafternoon, she began talking to herself, loud enough for me to hear.
“Constant Occupation Prevents Dreadful Temptation” was the first thing she said.
“What?”
She answered with, “Exercise Patience in one moment of Anger and you’ll escape many hours of Regret.”
“Are you keeping your spirits up?” I asked.
“Lose the saddle, not the horse,” she said, but didn’t mean it as a reply.
“Kate—stop,” I said, and pulled her to a standstill. Her face had turned blue.
“One today is worth two tomorrow.”
“Kate!” She looked up at my face but didn’t see me. The brown eyes had begun to cloud over with a heavy glaze, almost like a gray film. She was babbling, and light saliva frosted her mouth.
“Poverty waits at the Gates of Idleness,” she said. “Error Clouds the Windows of the Mind,” and she began to weep, as though the clouds in her eyes had turned to rain.
I inspected her. Feet bleeding. Shoes had leather strips flittering from them. One shin with a horrible gash. A thin stripe of blood drew a dark line down one cheek where a tree branch thin as a fingernail had reached down and scraped her. Nose and eyes blue, eyes blinking all the time against the glare.
What could I do? I wrapped her inside my arms. I rocked her from side to side, and rocked her again. She began to feel limp. I picked her up, got her onto my shoulders, and carried her through the wood, one hand gripping her legs to stabilize her, the other carrying her bag.
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Did I feel her weight? No. And when I go searching my memory now to try for a more accurate answer to the question, I still can’t feel it. She either fell asleep on my shoulders or she passed out. Lifting my feet high above the snow, I set a deliberate pace. I reconciled myself to one thought: If the soldiers come, we can’t escape. And it had begun to snow again, the same heavy, drifting flakes, intent on covering the world.
Traveling inside the tree line proved too difficult. Staggering with tiredness and freight, I bumped into trees, and I feared that I might hit her head off something. I opted for the open skies, and took a little comfort from the fact that nobody could see me in this snow. The slope helped too, not too steep, not too rocky—in fact by now the older snow had frozen so hard that I almost had a firm base beneath my boots.
Down the hillside I went, trying to keeping my stumbles to a minimum. If I fell forward, I had no means of protecting her head—and perhaps not the strength to get up again and lift her onto my shoulders. The world had by now turned entirely white—the sky, the land, the two beset human beings.
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Kate Begley had gods on
her team of Life—because, with such daylight as still glimmered through the white veils beginning to quit the sky, I hit level ground—and a gate. From there, a secluded lane appeared, so shaded by trees that it had almost no snow. Under this thick canopy, the lane petered to the edge of the wood where I walked—but from where? It seemed respectable enough to be worth following—and I had no options. The gate had no catch; easy as a door, it swung open, and I applauded the smoothness of the track.
What’s this? A mirage? Must be. No. But—how had that got here?
Even now, as I look back on it, it would have felt more at home in a Paris or Berlin suburb; and it still looks like that. I stood and stared—a cube of white with rough walls and acres of glass. As I drew closer, and by now the snow had reduced itself to light whipping flurries, I could see a pair of doors as white as the walls, and all but camouflaged in the way they had been inserted.
Lights shone inside. Suddenly breaking down, I staggered to the door at the side; judging from the unshoveled snow, nobody had come out of this building in the past twenty-four hours.
I knocked—and it wasn’t a dream or a mirage: Somebody inside opened the door. A tall woman, severe as a teacher, looked at us, and said in English, “Well, hello there!”
She reached down and tried to take Miss Begley’s bag—my fingers had frozen to the handle.
“Max,” she called.
A dog appeared, a big clumber spaniel. Too lazy to have barked when we knocked, he looked up at us without even a whit of curiosity, sort of wagged his tail, and ambled back to his place in front of the fire. He wasn’t Max, his name was Shambles.
A man appeared, twenty years younger than the woman, handsome as groomed leather.
“I’m Max Jackson,” he said. I couldn’t place the accent. “This is my wife, Joan.”
Between them they got us into the house. When, hours later, they asked about our journey, I, accustomed to countryside travel, could give them a good description. Between then and the previous day, they reckoned, with their knowledge of the area, that we had traveled about seventy miles.
“In this weather?” they said.
Architects, both Australian, they became friends of mine after the war, and I’ve visited them, and they’ve visited me here on this mountainside, and every time we meet, they ask me again to tell them (and their guests, if I’m in their house) the story that I’ve described so far. I always leave out the killing.
That night, when they saw our condition, they became our nursemaids. Only much later did I surmise—and they’ve never confirmed or denied—that they had done this often. Their skill seemed too practiced, their surprise too mild. For instance, they wouldn’t give us much food, they said, not until next day.
Together they lifted Kate from my shoulders and carried her to a couch. I leaned against the wall and then sat on the floor.
Warm flannels, hot towels, a dab of brandy on her lips—Kate had indeed passed out and had escaped frostbite by less than an hour, they said. They carried her upstairs, where they laid her on a bed and covered her with blankets, taking off only her outer clothes. Max lit a fire in her room; an hour or two later, Joan revived her and helped her into a hot bath. I sort of passed out on the sofa downstairs.
Not for long; I took some brandy, and perked up enough to want a bath too. With every fiber of my body a burning pain, I lowered myself slowly into the water—where I almost passed out again.
Next afternoon, when we had grown lucid, and when they had taken into account all our details, they made our next plans for us. We would stay with them until, as Max put it, “the right information” reached him as to the safest place to go. He told us that we had walked through the forests above the village of Büllingen, and that he’d heard of German troops heading west through there that very morning.
I asked, “Are we safe here?”
He said, “What’s safe? Tanks. Allied or German. They could get down this road.”
I said, “Nothing to stop them, I suppose.”
Max said, “But you’re in from the weather here.”
They’d seen almost nothing of the war. Max had an office across the border, in Germany.
“I think I’m on some kind of safe list,” and he laughed. “I wasn’t part of the Bauhaus group, so I’m not suspect. And I used to work for Albert Speer—so maybe he’s protecting me.” He laughed again.
I was too tired to check the references.
Our few days there felt like a vacation. And it snowed, and it snowed, and it snowed. On Saturday morning, a plow arrived and cleared their path and the lane. The driver, a neighbor, brought news of the war. He said that the Germans were pushing back. Hoping to take Liège.
Max said, “They’re crazy.”
Joan said, “They’ve already captured a number of Allied forces.”
And the snowplow driver said, “But the Americans have almost surrounded them. And they’re at Elsenborn.”
I think that we all play games in our minds with words and language. Even in dire conditions, we dally with little runs of word sounds and phrases that ring like small bells or bounce around like toys. This is the phrase that danced in my head in that house: “scared and scoured.” My mind went, We are scared and scoured. Scoured and scared. Scared-scoured, scoured-scared. Scared. And. Scoured.
No need to explain scared—you can tell whence that came. But we never found Captain Miller in those Belgian villages, and the failure to fulfill my dear friend’s dream left me whitened and empty inside, like a shed that has been stripped of everything but its walls, roof, and floor, and all of those whitewashed. In some places, the gray shows through the rubbed white. That’s what the inside of my mind felt like: blank; bleak; brittle—scoured.
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Max’s snowplow driver got us almost to Elsenborn. Almost. A Walloon who spoke perfect German, Ernst knew every road in his region. We drove through people’s yards, we drove along the banks of rivers and across frozen streams, we drove into the woods again; the little truck must have been made of the greatest steel. In the rear sat three of the driver’s friends—with hunting rifles across their knees, their faces masked against the cold.
We stopped multiple times—to hide, to stretch our legs, or to wait while Ernst could go forward and look down a hill or around a corner. In one village (it may have been Saint-Vith), he stopped beside an army truck—a German army truck.
Ernst joked with the soldiers in German, smoked a cigarette with them, told them that he worked undercover locally for them, and said he’d return and help them. He said that we were a young Walloon couple with a pregnancy that was going wrong early, and he was trying to get through to the hospital in Liège. They told him not to go near Elsenborn, that the Americans now controlled that side of the forest.
From that village, Ernst headed east. As I was about to inquire why, he turned hard right and hard right again on a series of lanes and now we were heading west. I saw a sign for Malmédy, and we went down that road.
On the sharp crest of a hill, Ernst made an error. He stopped so hard that Kate and I, sitting beside him on the bench seat, almost cracked our faces on the windshield. Ernst began to back up—but too late: We’d been seen. Down the hill, at a crossroads, gathered a thick agglomeration of German troops—it seemed almost an army unto itself.
They saw us—they saw our sudden stop, our urgent backing up. No more than a hundred yards or so from us, they opened fire. Nothing hit us, but they began to follow. Ernst revved and revved; the wheels stuck and whizzed—no purchase on the iced mud of the little road.
The three men in the rear jumped out and opened fire down the hill. Two of them continued the fire and the third, with me helping, and Ernst at the wheel, pushed the truck out of the mud. The gunmen jumped back in, and away we went. Two miles on, Ernst turned down another hill and pointed ahead.
“You’re safe.”
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In the American camp at Elsenborn, a wide and deep scattering of tents and vehicles
under the loosest trees of the forest, the nurses sedated Kate and put her to bed. They had to. When she walked into the medical tent, her feet in six inches of mud, she pitched forward into the arms of the first nurse she saw.
I stood by, as though to make sure that they laid her down carefully, tenderly. “Her husband,” I told them, “is an American officer—Captain Charles Miller. We believe he’s here somewhere. We’re searching for him.”
The second nurse pointed through the door of the tent and whispered, “Go and ask over there.”
And still I lingered. When she and the first nurse had wrapped Kate like a baby and put her gently to bed, her face the shade of blue chalk, only then did I leave. I walked from the tent and, in the mud outside, bent forward and threw up everything that I’d eaten in the last ten years—or so it felt like.
This thought I remember: The difference between a friend and an enemy is friendliness. I had come that low—into banality, into wary thought, into nonstop fear. A bright, heavily uniformed young man with beetling eyebrows said, “Can I help you, sir?” and he smiled.
“This is who I am,” and I told him. “This is what I’m doing here,” and I told him.
“Dunno if I can help,” he said, but he certainly tried. He gave me coffee and a chair to sit on, went off to make inquiries, and returned maybe ten minutes later or maybe an hour later, that’s how stunned I was—with a senior man.
At this officer’s request I repeated my name and my mission and pointed to the tent where Kate lay asleep.
“In the name of Christ,” said this new officer, “what were you guys thinking of?”
“Don’t ask me,” I said.
“I will ask you. You’re here. Middle of a damn war.”
Billy Moloney, where were you when I needed you? You recall that Mother—that’s your grandmother—and I, in order to report his hilarious speech accurately, had agreed years ago to substitute the word flock for every second word Billy spoke?
The Matchmaker of Kenmare Page 32