I lean in, close to his ear. “I am not go on without you. You have to get up. You cannot leave me alone,” but he doesn’t budge. I lean in and order him furiously, “You must live. Tell people what we see. Make sure this never happen again. You have work to do.”
After a long minute, he lifts his eyes to mine and nods imperceptibly. I drag him to his feet and pull one of his arms over my shoulder. We shuffle on together, one foot in front of the other. When the others aren’t looking, the older postern offers Max some charcoal to chew to ease the pain.
• • •
Coming out of Tharandt, we drag ourselves slowly up a long climb to the summit of hill and a flat plateau. I think over and over that the two of us won’t make it to the top of the hill, and this is where it will all end. But somehow we do, and at the top, we’re allowed to sit for fifteen minutes to look down on small picturesque villages dotted about the frozen countryside. And then we’re on the move again, heading into a massive forest that stretches to the horizon. I remember my promise to Ralph that I’ll look after Max. I will keep going as long as he’s alive. It may not be long.
Every mile or so, we shuffle past huge piles of logs waiting to be picked up by forestry trucks. There’s a lake, still frozen round the edges, with ducks standing on the ice or swimming in the center. We pass a house with a millpond.
Overnight we stop in a school building. We are sleeping in the main school hall, which has a large blackboard on which someone has written Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy, which I remember learning at school.
A soldier I don’t know asks, “Do you think someone knew we were coming?”
I don’t think so, because I can see the difficult words underlined and imagine the teacher who was trying to explain this speech to a class of bored children who’d never experienced despair. Max sits in front of the board, staring at the words for a very long time. He’s sitting there when the lights go out, but he doesn’t say anything. I think he is choosing not to be, and I have failed in my promise to Ralph.
• • •
I wake in the morning to the loss of Bill. It kicks me in the stomach so that I curl myself around the pain. And as if the universe is laughing at me, I’ve also developed a severe head cold. My nose runs, my eyes water and my head aches and feels full of fog. I have hot sweats and cold shivers. I have no choice but to walk, using a rag to wipe my nose, wringing it out to reuse.
After the forest, we begin to descend again on a road the guards call the Silberstrasse. We pass big riding stables and a fast-flowing unfrozen river. Why couldn’t this river have been near us when the RAF attacked? Maybe then everyone would have had clean water, and Max wouldn’t have dysentery.
Every time we shuffle down a hill, it’s in the knowledge that in a few hours we’ll have to drag our bodies up another. Sometimes Max can stagger on his own; sometimes he walks with arms linked to mine. Traveling up the hills, the two of us support each other, and I feel a strange sensation of water trickling down my face and my spine as we reach the top. I think it’s the fever from my cold.
I look at Max, and his hair is wet with sweat as well. A man behind us says, “I’m sweating buckets,” and I realize the day is getting warmer as if we have leaped from winter to summer in a couple of hours.
Along the route we start to see discarded greatcoats and blankets. First one or two, then more and more. I know it can still get cold again after a false spring, and I’m determined to keep my coat and one blanket, but I discard the second blanket, the scratchiest one. I’ll try to change out of my long winter underwear if there’s somewhere private enough at our stopping place tonight. I can feel it becoming damp and heavy with perspiration.
Max insists on dropping his coat and one blanket. “I can’t carry the weight of them any longer. I’m too weak,” he whispers.
I certainly don’t have the strength to carry them for him, so he leaves them by the side of the road.
We pass under double railway bridges, a big rail yard, a wasserwerk tower, a chimney tiled all the way up with roof tiles. In the open country there are groves of trees, plowed fields, crops starting to come up in the uncaring cycle of the seasons, the gradual greening of the land. We eat a handful of grass and some rye shoots. I find a kostival plant and pull off its hairy leaves, stuffing them into my rucksack. Someone asks, “Can you eat those?” and I shake my head. I could explain they are just for wounds and could even be poisonous if eaten, but he doesn’t pick any.
More and more, on and on, come the same agonizing long, slow hills, up onto a plateau and down into the next valley. My nose stops running, but it’s now blocked, so I have to breathe through my mouth. I’m always thirsty, and I begin to cough, a chesty persistence that shakes my frame. I daren’t raise my eyes to look ahead, knowing there will be another hill that we have to climb.
I don’t know what enables everyone else to keep going, but I think now I’m powered only by a steady flame of rage, fed at every step: rage at myself for not going with Bill or preventing him from leaving; rage at human beings who can treat one another worse than animals; rage against the ordinary people who failed to stand up against fascism until it was too late. I understand those who simply sit down and say they can’t go any farther. I’d do the same if not for my promise to take care of Max.
The felt has now worn off the inside of my brother’s boots, and they are too big. At a stopping point, I inspect my blisters, which I know are becoming infected, and I wrap the kostival leaf around them to draw out the badness. I find some newspaper and wrap that around my feet. Somehow the pain each time I put my foot to the ground tells me that I’m still alive.
We pass clumps of snowdrops and a lone crocus under a tree. I register these without the usual leap of my heart. It means spring will come again, but what sort of spring will it be? At night now, if we are in a low-lying village, comes the familiar whine of mosquitoes, joining the lice to suck the last of our blood. I sleep fitfully, coughing, itching, hungry, thirsty, grieving for Bill. Some strong instinct tells me he’s dead. The wound was worse than we thought, and he bled to death, or it has gone septic. He’s dead, I think. Dead. And I don’t want to be alive without him.
We trudge on. Heads down. I’m almost carrying Max on some days and simply supporting him on others. I learn to walk in a lolloping way that puts least pressure on the sore points of my feet. I cough with my head turned away from Max, fearful of infecting him if it’s TB.
We pass some retreating SS men sitting beside the road, carefully cutting the insignia off their uniforms. For the first time, the posterns look really worried. They talk among themselves in low voices, but they follow their orders, forcing us on.
One day a farm vehicle comes the other way, and as it passes, the back of it is emptied of milk and chickens. I drink some milk, and it tastes fatty and rich. Somewhere I can smell a chicken cooking, and my mouth waters at the thought of the crispy skin and soft flesh, but we don’t get any. Mostly we live on turnips from the fields, fish heads from dustbins, grass. There’s a fight between two men over some swede peelings.
At the top of yet another hill, we lie on the ground. I cough my lungs clear, spitting green phlegm into the grass.
“Look there, some big town,” says Max, pointing.