Harry stood outside leaning against his hut and waited. He saw no one. He saw stacks of wood vivid in color—freshly cut—and two carts whose wheels sported shining, freshly hammered metal rims.
“Morning,” Max said, passing Harry’s hut. He strode out onto the little square, where he stopped with hands clamped on his hips and one foot out in front as if about to deliver a few lines of famous monologue. Irina followed him out, wiping the sleep from her eyes but smiling. She sat on the edge of the fountain and, seeing Harry, waved him out to them.
Harry walked out and gave his blanket to Irina, who hugged it for warmth and said what must have been good morning in her language. Max turned to Harry. It was the first time Harry had seen his older brother in the light, up close. Dark complexion under his eyes had consumed the freckles he’d once shared with Harry, and his fleshy eyelids made him look less sleepy than simply tapped out. He still had his dark and shiny hair, but Harry could see his scalp up top where the strands had thinned. And yet Max still looked handsome. It had to be in his eyes, how they lit up, and the way his face could relax for you and only you. He was doing it right now, Harry saw—smiling as if Harry was the one about to deliver the monologue.
“What? What is it?” Harry said.
“Wait for it.” Max stretched out an arm, directing his hand at the settlement around them.
Women and children appeared in windows, in doorways, and from the fog of the woods. They wore the usual refugee rags, though Harry noticed more babushkas than he was used to seeing in Germany. Then horses were snorting and stomping their hooves, stepping out from behind corners, barn doors, woods, and where the stream cut into the woods. Towheaded children sat atop a few horses here and there. Men held the horses by their reins. The men had mustaches and most wore thick sable hats. Harry, pivoting to take it all in from his spot on the square, counted roughly a hundred people and a good twenty horses.
“What the hell’s going on here?” he said to Max, but not taking his eyes off the people as if they could vanish any moment like the ghosts they seemed to be.
“You’re in the Šumava,” Max said.
“That’s not what I asked. Wait—where are we?”
“Šumava. Germans call it the Bohemian Forest.”
“The Böhmerwald?” Harry spun around to Max. “This is Czechoslovakia.”
Max nodded. “That’s right, Harry—we are just inside the Soviet Zone of Occupation. We passed over in the night, after your cart ride. Yet the Czechs and—most important—the Russians don’t know that, you see. They don’t know we are here. Any of us.”
“Please do not ask questions of these people,” Max said. “They will not answer you. I will tell you what you need to know—or as much as I can tell you now. Otherwise, do as you like.”
Harry walked around and mingled among the people. He let them follow him and watch him, the boys and girls with their hands clasped in front of them and the women who stroked the kids’ hair. He watched them cut wood. He cut the wood with them. He ate with them—saw what they ate. The sacks of grain made various porridges. Otherwise, fish from the stream, small woodland animals, and turnips and cabbages seemed to be their regular sustenance. They shared some grain with their horses, since their stock of oats and barley had dwindled to a few bags. Their sole possessions seemed to be bedrolls and packs, like soldiers on the march. Harry had learned all this using improvised sign language—they’d smiled for him, but they wouldn’t answer his German or English. Harry couldn’t help asking questions. He just didn’t get this. Refugees hoped to be discovered, fed, and housed. That’s why they wandered the land out in the open and clogged the roads, aid offices, and camps. That wasn’t the only thing. From their babushkas, sable hats, mustaches, and towheaded children in peasant shirts, they looked like people who should want very much to stay well within Joe Stalin’s half of Europe where the Soviet Army would feed them and deliver them home.
“Are they Czechs?” Harry asked Max. They were back in Harry’s hut, warming up around the fire oven that someone had re-lit for him. Harry kept stealing peeks outside where the children stood in little groups stealing peeks back at him, as if he was the one who seemed an apparition from a previous century.
“No, they are not. I can tell you that.” Max told Harry these people were maintaining an uneasy relationship with a few local Czechs, farmers and smugglers whom they bartered goods with and paid well to reveal nothing about them to their Soviet occupiers. But none of these local contacts knew where the people lived—there were only a few experienced people here who always went out and found whom they needed, and if they were ever followed, the follower would regret it very much. But it was getting more dangerous. Smuggling goods and people across the zonal frontiers was becoming big business, especially with winter approaching. Despite the increased border patrols of the last month or so. “There’s always someone from the outside who offers to go on the take,” Max said, “who lets you through or gets you through—or who screws you just the same.”
“Are these people smugglers too of some sort?” Harry asked.
“No. It’s not like that.”
“Then they’re refugees?”
“According to some. Not to most others.”
“Are they gypsies?” Harry said.
“Good god. Regretfully no.”
“All right. Then, how long have they been here?”
“About a year.”
“It looks like a few days.”
Max smiled with pride. “We can pick up and leave anytime. We have and then come back. We leave few trails.”
“What about smoke? From cooking.”
“Quite simple. They light as few fires as possible, and when they do? We keep watch around the perimeter, to make sure it’s safe. We also use the cover of the frequent fog. They vent the smoke into the woods using fans made of branches and boards. Other boards redirect the smoke into tunnels we’ve dug, with small vents poking out along the way. Much of the meat and fish is cured, usually by drying.” Max shrugged. “You get used to it.”
“Why? Why do you have to?”
“I … can’t tell you.”
“But you brought me here. In Munich—Irina’s corpse. He was one of these people?”
Max shook his head.
“Then why? Why bring me here?”
“Irina told you. Some have heard what you did with that train, with the Jews’ belongings. You found a way to get it back to them so they could start over. You did it despite all that was against you, against them. It seemed impossible. That train was done for, sold off. Another victim of greed. And yet you did it. It’s quite impressive, Harry. My little brother has it in him.”
“That was why Irina came to me,” Harry said. “But what about you?
Max’s head jerked back as if Harry had taken a swing at him. “Me? What about me? I don’t matter.”
He muttered something about “making the rounds” and left Harry alone in the hut.
By the late afternoon it began to snow, lightly. The people watched it fall. No one smiled in wonder. The children glared at the snowflakes as if each one had just slapped them on the face. Then a wind came through the trees, the temperature dropped, and the people retreated to their huts and barns. Harry watched as Max circulated with the people. His brother moved in and out of the buildings, hauling items, giving commands, and best of all for Harry, playing the clown for the children. He kept his chin high when working but he was genuinely on his tiptoes for the children, dancing around them and grinning, singing their songs and show tunes no one knew. That was the Max Harry had remembered. So much looser and lighter than Harry. Harry was the Ami now, but if one watched the two from behind soundproof glass, their clothing not telltale, one would think that carefree Max was the American.
But then, as Harry kept watching, he saw another Max. When wisps of smoke drifted by and Max, his face contorted, fanned and swung at the smoke to make it dissipate so that it would never give them away, not even this
one little bit. When the clouds returned to block the sun and more of those few snowflakes swirled around and Max stood with his feet planted far apart to glare at the ice gray sky. He caught the flakes and held them in his hand, moving them around, checking their details. He was a botanist and this pestilence falling might be a new strain of insect come to lay death upon the land. He spoke to mothers and children and patted them on the shoulders and their little heads, nodding, but after they left with their heads high, reassured, Max would turn from them, his fists balled and shoulders tightened up, and he would grimace at the earth, his brain searching for some answer he hadn’t considered.
“They’ve already suffered through one winter, you see,” he told Harry.
In the hut, Max, Irina, and Harry shared a dinner—dried meat with rare dark bread. Afterward, Max sat upright on a stool, his hands pressed to his knees. Irina sat on the floor with her back against the cold wall, the thinning purple light giving her face a harder cast.
A boy appeared in the doorway, just half his head showing. The little guy was about five. Harry saw him first but only because he happened to be glancing that way. Harry never would have heard him, he was so quiet. Harry pretended to look away, and then he glanced back and showed a smile and then a wink, until the boy, now smiling, showed all of himself in the doorway. Yet he held onto the doorframe as if he was peering out of a fast-moving train. Harry recognized the boy as one who had stood far back during the day, the only one over time, sometimes behind a tree, sometimes behind the leg of a horse or the hip of an old man. He had blond hair, a square face, and enough layers of worn clothing and trimmed blankets to last him a year on the road. They doubled his size. From a great distance he surely resembled an adult, if not a soldier, a forward scout in dark camouflage. But there was just a scared skinny tyke under there.
Harry glanced over at Max and saw Max gazing at Irina. She stared at the boy with a tense smile on her face, beholding him as one would a rare forest bird that hadn’t been witnessed by humans for decades. Max gave Harry the slightest shake of his head that said, Don’t disturb them.
She whispered something to the boy in her language and gestured for him to come in. He vanished. They waited it out. The boy showed himself again. All three smiled for him. Irina rose from the floor and crouched on her haunches, ready to grab him.
The boy whispered something back finally and Irina, gasping with joy, rushed over and enveloped him so fully that he disappeared under her. She rocked back and forth, hugging him in the doorway. As if saving him from falling from that speeding train, Harry thought.
“He likes Harry,” she said to Max, then she beamed at Harry and exited into the darkness still swaddling the boy.
Max kept smiling until she was out of earshot.
“He’s a shy one,” Harry said.
“He has his reasons. Irina likes it that way. Helps keep him safe.”
“Hers?”
Max nodded.
“The father?”
“Died fighting. Near the end.”
“What’s the name?” Harry said.
“Oleksandr. Alex, perhaps one day. One hopes.”
“He will be.”
Max just stared at the doorway.
“So we get them west,” Harry said. “That’s what you want, right?”
“I’m afraid it’s not as easy as all that.”
“What, do they think I’ll sell them out?” Harry said.
“No one’s saying that, brother. It’s not you. It’s the people outside who could stalk you, or use you for this information. You must be very careful. They can come from any corner. This is the new world now. It’s not about fighting head to head, a clear enemy. It’s about infiltrating, and deceiving, and betraying, and all the fear that’s created by that. Are we clear? Judas can be anywhere—here, Munich, everywhere.”
“Is that what happened?” Harry said. “With the murder?”
Max glared at Harry, his lips pursed tight. He sighed. He stood and left the hut.
After a while, Harry looked out the doorway. He saw Irina walking with Max, tugging at his shirt and pleading at him in her language.
Harry finished eating. The fire smoldered and he let it. He pulled a blanket around him.
Max came back inside. He held a bottle of clear spirits. He was smiling again. He sat at the pine table and poured them out two tin cups.
“I don’t want a drink,” Harry said.
“Yes, you do. She wants us to.”
“First I want you tell me something. A confession. Anything.”
Max had his tin cup halfway to his mouth. He held it steady as if it was full to the brim with nitroglycerine. “Very well: We tipped them off, Harry.”
“Tipped who off?”
“Your Military Police. We told them about the corpse. We were the ones.”
Thirteen
HARRY LUNGED FOR THE BOTTLE and Max flinched, raising his other arm in defense. Harry wasn’t going to hit Max—he needed a belt. Anger surged in his head and he had to check it somehow. He took the bottle, took his belt. Fire wasn’t the word for this juice. It burned his throat and the back of his skull like Chinese mustard. He crouched hissing like an old cat kicked out of its bed.
Max crouched with him. “I’m sorry, little brother.”
“I should punch you in the mouth,” Harry growled, wiping at his stinging lips. “Man, this hooch is stiff.”
Max downed his cup as if it was cool spring water. “I told you you’d want a drink.”
Harry hauled a stool to the table, slammed down the bottle and sat, his shoulders level with Max’s. They were so close that Harry could smell the booze on their breath, but he couldn’t tell whose breath.
“You told me to confess,” Max said.
“Major Joyner could have tossed me in the stockade. He pressed me for answers. He still can. You do understand that, right?”
“You were getting out of control. Please don’t give me that look. Yes, you. You were starting to attract attention, and we can’t have that. I had to reign you in.”
“Reign me in? What am I, the dog loose in the backyard?”
“No. You are definitely not that.”
“I’m not the one playing the fugitive—if that’s what you are doing. Because I really don’t know what you are doing here.”
“I truly am sorry.”
“Your tip-off really was anonymous, I hope. Tell me that it was.”
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
“You don’t know Major Joyner?”
Max shook his head. “Not personally. But I knew he was the one you’d seen—”
“And the very one who hunts Germans—I bet you didn’t know that? No? That you were tipping off the very people you appear to be so afraid of.” Harry slapped the table. “And Dietz? Shit. What about him?”
“I don’t know that name—ah, you mean the police detective? No, he had no clue either as far as I could ascertain.”
Max poured Harry more. Harry drank. It helped, all burning aside, to remind Harry that runaway anger was a Joe’s worst enemy. Dearest Reason was always the best defense. He calmed himself, focusing on the knotty gray wood at his fingertips.
“I guess I should thank you all the same,” he said. “You did help me find Irina and then you.”
“Please, nothing to thank,” Max said, attempting a smile.
“So, where are we at? These people here—you want to get these people west. Look, I know this woman at the DP camp in Munich.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“That’s what you say.”
“They won’t go, Harry. Believe me, I want them to go. They need to go.”
“Why won’t they?”
“They need to be convinced to go. They need to be convinced that you—that the Americans—will not treat them like the Soviets are, like the Germans have.”
“What makes them think I would? That we would?”
“They have their reasons. And, I suppose I have my own reas
ons too,” Max muttered. He stood and paced the small room, stopping to warm his hands on the oven although it was barely lukewarm.
Harry looked out the window. A few of the men were sitting on a log and arguing in hushed tones, their gestures slivers of moonlight, their orange cigarette embers rising and falling. Those men belonged to a clan, Harry saw, and let nothing escape outside it. Max, on the other hand, had become a clan unto himself. Nothing escaped his soul. And that was a hard safe to crack.
Max was sitting on the floor now, on Harry’s bedroll, his palms upturned as if from exhaustion. He wore a long frown that in another setting might have looked forced, like a clown’s scowl. Harry brought the bottle and cups over and sat like Max, his back up against the hard uneven plaster. He poured one for Max and Max closed his fingers around the cup.
“I’m not going to force it out of you,” Harry said.
Max drank. He held up his other hand and let it drop. “They’ve had a tough go of it, and it’s left some scars, I can tell you.”
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