A Boy in Winter

by Rachel Seiffert

  She should have stayed put, like Osip said. Yasia thinks she should hurry back to him: Didn’t he warn her that the town is full of Germans? And already the daylight is fading.

  Yasia looks about herself and finds more soldiers in the grey there, by the gates to the brickyard, and a few more policemen; she sees jeeps parked beside them, and a row of trucks too. But though Yasia looks, she sees no Jews.

  She blinks at the high wall of the yard: Are they all inside? It is an uncomfortable thought. All those people. It hardly seems possible.

  “You there!”

  Yasia starts.

  “You there!”

  She flinches a little as she turns. There is a jeep pulling up at the barriers, top open, with two SS men inside it; and a driver too, who stands up behind his steering wheel, calling out to the policemen.

  “Make way here!”

  His voice is Kievan, he is a Ukrainian, not in SS uniform, but he speaks sharply enough to have the police guards blinking.

  “The Sturmbannführer has to come through.”

  The Kievan does not turn to her; he talks to the men behind the barriers, giving orders for them to be lifted, but still Yasia shrinks away from him. Best to stay away from this ugliness like Osip told her.

  She can try again tomorrow, Yasia tells herself, retreating, basket held like a shield in front of her: Osip says she can stay here, after all, so she can find Mykola once the soldiers have gone again.

  But still Yasia keeps her eyes on the SS jeep a moment, and on the policemen too, who run to lift the barriers.

  And then, as she turns away, she finds herself wondering if Myko runs like that now for the Germans. If he ran any Jews out of their houses this morning.

  —

  Miryam is murmuring to Rosa. The girl is tired, and Miryam whispers stories to soothe her.

  All around them, children have been crying these past hours as it got dark again. They can’t understand this waiting, even less than their parents can, but Rosa is quiet, her eyelids heavy. She has been listening to her mother a good while, leaning close, face pressed to her mother’s chest, arms around her waist, fingers wrapped in the ties of her apron. Miryam has kept Rosa patient, occupied with family stories, with Yiddish fables to comfort and console her, and now the girl is drowsy; Ephraim thinks he listens more than she does.

  His wife has been talking of Rosa’s and Yankel’s younger days, and of her own childhood too. But Miryam tells most of all about her brother: about when Jaakov left, and all the hopes he had.

  She does not speak of missing him, Ephraim notices: only of his high hopes, and how he sailed with many others like him. Miryam tells of miles and miles of travelling; to Odessa first, overland, and then by ship to Palestine; tales of sailing the oceans for weeks at a time, and then finally arriving. And all this has Ephraim wondering: does Rosa think that’s what they will do now?

  He looks at his daughter’s face, her eyes clouded as though already dreaming, her soft lids falling, and then he thinks, perhaps that’s what Miryam wants: for their daughter to sleep and dream of leaving, with no need to feel frightened. Her uncle left, after all, and now he’s in a better land.

  Ephraim remembers.

  First his brother-in-law’s bright features—such an optimist, always—and then his brother-in-law’s absence, and Miryam’s sadness. But he recalls her joy, too, when a photograph came of him, after almost a year away.

  A photograph! The miracle of it! A true likeness, white rimmed and so life-like: Jaakov in shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, lean and bearded, squinting in the desert sun. He stood, hands on hips for the camera, before a rocky desert background. This was the barren ground he and others would toil to cultivate, Jaakov explained in his accompanying letter; this was the new-and-old land they’d sought, which would bring forth life and all its fruits as they worked it together for the common good.

  Miryam bought a frame for the photo—walnut, expensive, and they were only just married then. But a photograph was such a rare and precious thing, and this photograph especially; she kept it on the small table at her side of their marriage bed.

  Ephraim looked at it sometimes, if he was alone in their bedroom. And when he did so, he saw not just the brother-pioneer his wife did, the hope-filled face, but also the sunburned forehead and forearms, and the sun-bleached stretches behind his brother-in-law, parched and rock-strewn into the arid distance. Ephraim saw risk there. Of thirst and exposure, and of disappointment; above all, he saw the risk of failure.

  Jaakov’s letters were few and far between after that first one: his was now a peasant’s life of sun-up to sun-down toiling, with little time for writing. The letters, when they came, spoke of satisfaction, but also of setbacks—far louder of those than of any triumphs, at least to Ephraim’s ears. But they kept arriving, now and again, over the years.

  Miryam read them out for the children, as soon as the children were old enough. She favoured the hopeful parts, about the trees their young uncle had planted—olive and almond, and date palms—and the wells he and his fellow kibbutzniks had sunk to keep them watered: they would have to irrigate the new groves until their roots grew deep into the desert earth, and even after that. In one of Jaakov’s letters, he wrote how they’d dug for weeks, twenty, thirty feet down into the rocky sand and subsoil, all by pickaxe and shovel, hauling up the rubble by bucket and rope, hand over hand. They’d carved out the wells by dint of sweat and blister and hard graft, only to find the water table sank lower in the dry years. (Dry years? Ephraim fumed inwardly as he listened. What was his brother-in-law thinking? What other years were there out in Palestine but parched ones?) He found himself infuriated, whenever he thought of it. To have gone so far, from home and from family, and all that was known to them. Did they not know this land of peasants and nobles? Had they not endured here for centuries, earning their place among the sod and silt and wheat fields? His young brother-in-law had left all of that, and for what, exactly? Blistered palms and dry wells—and withered almond groves, presumably.

  Jaakov sent no more pictures after that first one; neither of himself nor of his groves, thriving or otherwise, and he often went years without writing news home. But the children liked to have his letters read and reread to them; Miryam saved them for high days and holidays, and she read them like stories; solemn, ceremonious, as though they were fables.

  The two boys liked to look at the picture too, Yankel especially. He asked more about Jaakov as he got older, wanting more often to hear the stories of his travels and his olive trees, or even just to see his photo. So Miryam brought it down some evenings for the boy to look at after the younger two were in bed. And though Yankel sat with it quietly, content with his own thoughts, never saying very much, Ephraim saw—not without pain—the admiration in his son’s gaze. He began to feel, too, how his eldest’s eyes measured him, silently: the narrow walls of his workshop, the fastidious labour in the lenses he ground there, the tiny screws he tightened to hold them in their wire frames. The scope of his life was meagre, seen against his brother-in-law’s.

  But Ephraim cannot think of this, not now; he does not want to feel this bitterness. He just wants his sons with him here. His boys as well as his wife and daughter, all together in their time of need.

  So he looks to the doors, and he prays for his sons to be brought through them; his Yankel and Momik. Without bruises—without cuts and bruises, if at all possible—but delivered to him above all.

  “They must be found, they must be found soon.”

  He mutters now to Miryam, because there is some consolation in hearing himself say this, even if quietly, so as not to disturb his daughter. Saying it, even if only under his breath, makes it feel more likely.

  But his wife says nothing; still Miryam says nothing.

  She holds the dozing Rosa to her, and she keeps her eyes on the doors, and this last Ephraim can understand, only too well. But why so tight-lipped?

  It starts to bother him, her silence. Not a word has
passed her lips about their sons since they have been penned in here. So now Ephraim blinks a while at Miryam: her arms so tight around their daughter, and her mouth so closed about their two boys.

  Did she know—did she hope—that Yankel would do this? Hide himself and his young brother in an attempt to foil the Germans? Ephraim looks at her face and then he thinks he does see hope there.

  “But how can they stay here?” he asks her, a sharp hiss, despite Rosa’s slumbers, despite the guards too and their coshes.

  Miryam cannot believe, surely, that it would be better for their boys to hide themselves, from the police and from the Germans.

  “They will be alone,” Ephraim tells her. Their boys will be left on their own here when they are taken. “And what then? What then, when we are gone, Miryam?”

  She blinks a little; Ephraim sees how unhappy she is at this prospect. But she does not answer.

  Still he gets no answer.

  Miryam turns her face so he cannot look at her directly; he cannot see what she is thinking. And she turns Rosa with her, as though to shield her.

  “There are others,” Miryam murmurs, finally. “There will be others; Yankel will find them.” And then: “We have to think that.”

  Ephraim doesn’t know what to say to her.

  What can he say to such naivety?

  In Yankel it is forgivable: he is a child still, and guileless. But Miryam? She is clutching at straws, no more: at the possibility of other Jews left behind here, out to save their own skins, or at the benevolence of townsfolk. Ephraim cannot trust his sons to such uncertainty, to the kindness of strangers.

  “Who in this town has been kind to us since the Germans came?” he demands, hoarse and vehement. And then he has to stand in silence; he has to try to calm himself.

  Ephraim tells himself: there is only comfort in numbers. He thinks of the Jews in Łodz, in Warsaw. Three days’ travel, three more days of this, but when they get there, they can make themselves useful to one another, as they always have. He pulls his briefcase closer; his tools and lenses.

  But regardless of how much he assures himself, Yankel and Momik are still not beside him.

  Rosa is asleep now, almost; lids closing, she sways against her mother’s skirts, her mother’s arms no longer enough to hold her upright. Miryam lifts her, taking Rosa’s sleeping weight on her shoulder, and though Ephraim can see the girl is too heavy for her to stand long, he is too angry to take Rosa from her for the moment.

  He stands beside them for a good while, his stubborn wife, so misguided, his sleeping daughter; Ephraim tries fighting down his anger.

  And then, around them, he sees a few people are bending—to ease their backs and legs after the long hours of standing. A few even try crouching, tentative, and the policemen seem to allow this. They turn away, or look over the crouching heads, as though they don’t see them.

  Some time later, Ephraim sees that the schoolmaster’s mother is squatting at Miryam’s ankles; she sits on her bundle, and the old woman tugs at Miryam’s jacket, motioning for her to share it.

  Soon they sit back to back, each leaning on the other; Rosa’s sleeping form in Miryam’s lap, half-hidden in her skirt-folds where the girl will be warmer. The old woman’s hand rests on her son’s forearm, and Miryam arranges the schoolmaster’s torn coat around him; his waking will be painful, when it comes, so now they reach and tuck and reassure him. Watching his wife’s care, Ephraim sees her kindness again.

  He feels her glances too, off and on, all the while this is going on; not seeking an apology, not relenting, but simply seeing how he is. If something can be done for him. After a short while, she reaches a foot out to their trunk and edges it towards him.

  Sit. You sit now, Miryam motions.

  She knows how much his back will be hurting, his shoulders. So Ephraim sits down: what use is it now for them to be angry with each other? They should be kinder, he thinks, and it soothes him to sit beside her. Each of them still quiet, but feeling a little kinder towards one another.

  Except he sees, too, how Miryam still watches the door, no less sharp-eyed, no less wary than before. And the mistrust in the way she looks at the policemen.

  She doesn’t see it as a kindness on their part, this turning of a blind eye.

  “They won’t take us today. Not today, that’s all,” she tells Ephraim, when she sees him watching.

  Ephraim nods. He has to. He thinks his stubborn wife is right, most likely; he has to concede that much. The Germans will be looking, after all, it stands to reason, for all of those still hidden. Their boys included.

  He turns away, leaning himself forward, there where he sits on their one trunk of belongings, and it eases the ache in his back a little, but does nothing for the ache inside him.

  How much longer?

  —

  The fog was lifting, Pohl was sure of it. The fog was lifting, only for dark to fall.

  Evening is here now, and he is still at the encampment, in his small site office with its desk and lamp and cot bed, its four walls of planed boards.

  The first shock has passed, leaving a leaden feeling. All day he has found himself incapable of working, unable to rid himself of this morning. Pohl can think of nothing but leaving, and he has sat down at his desk any number of times to write his reasons.

  He wrote in rage first. But what he put on the pages was little more than a tirade. No one would take such ravings seriously; even he, in all his anger, could see that. And then, after he’d redrafted, Pohl hit up against doubt and distrust: who to send this to? He could think of no one he was sure of.

  Pohl had to force himself to think clearly, and more cleverly: his request for transfer had to have solid ground to stand on—any accusations he made all the more so. But this was no day to find clarity, or assurance, and page upon page ended in shreds in his wastepaper basket.

  Now Pohl stands at his office window and watches for the labour gangs returning.

  They are back later than he expected. Work will have started at dawn, perhaps even earlier, but it is well past six by the time he sees the lamps swaying in the dark out there.

  The overseers carry lamps and torches; they walk ahead and behind and on either side of the columns of workers. Roughshod and roughly clothed, the labour gangs are peasants, they are toilers, their bodies already bent by work long before they started on these road excavations. But still, Pohl is taken aback by the sight of them this evening.

  Most are Ukrainians, from nearby settlements, but there are POWs among them: men of the Steppe, peasant soldiers from the vast plains of Asia, their leathery faces wrapped in rags against the chill, some still in remnants of their Red Army uniforms. Russian or local, they are all drawn and wearied, all under-rested; perhaps they are even under-fed, or is that just the lamplight and shadow playing tricks on him? Pohl sees boots that do not fit, wrists protruding thin from jacket sleeves. They work the rubble with bare hands; he sees it in their fingers and palms, and it pains him.

  The excavation of this stretch has taken far longer than intended. Closest to the marshes, it has been the most difficult, and now they are working against the weather, with just another week, perhaps another fortnight, to finish the drainage work before the ground starts freezing. Pohl and the foremen have already diverted work gangs from other encampments, to the east and the west; instead of surfacing those stretches, they have doubled the numbers manning the trenches here. But still, wherever they dig, up comes water.

  The channels at the roadsides fill with it overnight, or even as the workers are still digging deeper. It seeps in underfoot, and then it rises, rises, until the labourers are ankle-deep in mire and water. But still they work on, because the schedule demands it. Their boots slick, their sleeves and trousers sodden, the men dig further, and then they return to the encampment mud-caked, their clothes mud-stiffened, in the half-light of evening. Or even in darkness, it would seem now.

  On whose authority are his labourers made to put in such hours?
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  Pohl looks for Brodnik among the workers, thinking his foreman will be able to tell him; he’s already worked on the new Reich roads at home in Poland, so he knows the company’s practices. Brodnik knows the SS, too, and how they operate.

  (“Do we have to deal with them?” Pohl asked him, as soon as he knew he could speak his mind to the man. “Must the SS have a hand in everything here?”

  “This is how it is done, sir.” Brodnik spat on the ground. “In my home district, too. There are more of them, they can find more labourers than we can. Believe me: my home town was swarming with those arseholes.”)

  The man is a find in these times; Pohl has often found himself grateful that Brodnik’s German is good enough for cursing. He sees the dim glow of lamps being lit beyond the barrack doorway; the labourers are in their quarters, and Pohl thinks that if Brodnik looks out, he will see the light in his own office window; he will call in to report. And then he can ask him about the work hours. Perhaps he can even tell Brodnik what he saw in the town this morning, because he must tell someone.

  But now he is stiff and tired, and the small site office is cold around him. Pohl turns away from his window, from all the squalor and disorder, and the barrack houses squatting wretched in pools of miry water. It is too cold and late to be driving after the shock of today—that awful awakening—so he stokes the stove in the corner and then, heavy limbed, heavy of heart, he sits on his cot to unlace his boots.

  The company will see red—Pohl is sure of it—as soon as they read his request to transfer: they will not have queues of engineers willing and qualified to replace him. But worse than this will be the SS reaction. Pohl unbuttons his tunic, thinking he will have to confront the Sturmbannführer; the man will want to know his reasons. And how on earth can he start such a conversation?

  Pohl has come to know the SS man in charge here. Sturmbannführer Arnold often stops at the encampments; not to deliver the labour teams—that is left to his subordinates—but to show the roadworks to visiting officers, or just to put questions about the headway they are making.