A Meal in Winter Read Online Free Page A

‘All three of us were there.’
    Bauer shook his head. ‘I don’t remember that.’
    Emmerich looked up at the sky and said, ‘If only that were possible, taking a tram at night. We could go and eat somewhere, then come back to sleep in the gymnasium.’
    Sitting on his snow chair, Bauer asked, ‘Why come back to the gymnasium?’
    Emmerich and I agreed with him.
    Then we talked about it some more.
    I had been right: the cold was less severe than before. To finish our cigarettes, we took off a glove each, and it was less painful than it had been by the frozen pond.
    Now Emmerich looked like he was thinking about my tram. I didn’t know where it was taking him. He stared at me while he took a drag on his cigarette, which was now so small that I had the feeling he would end up swallowing it.
    I inhaled everything I could from mine, too, and gave Emmerich a look that meant I was lending him my tram so he could go and eat somewhere. He didn’t understand, of course. It’s not easy to give someone a nonexistent tram.
    And again, in that moment, if I’d lifted my eyes to thehorizon – I mean, again, if it had been possible to see as far as that warm Galician spring – I would have seen Emmerich looking even older than he did now with his balaclava, leaning against the pillar of the bridge. And everything Bauer and I had managed to do, it was almost nothing. The only courage we’d shown was in not turning our eyes away while he panted and spat. But we were so upset, we did not have the courage to touch him or talk to him. And as soon as we stood up, Bauer and I, the mild spring rain began to fall, and we heard it, that rain, on the deck of the bridge. And the two grey curtains it made on either side of us closed us in with Emmerich, with his now dead body and his haggard face, and I knew that we should say a prayer or something. But Bauer looked at me and I looked at Bauer because we no longer dared look at Emmerich and all the blood he’d lost. And for a long time afterwards, to ease my mind, I told myself that the spring rain falling above and beside us, making such a din, had spoken for us. Because, that day in Galicia, someone should have spoken.

WE CAME DOWN from the hill where we had smoked. Bauer whined like a dog that he should never have sat down in the snow, that he felt cold all over now. Emmerich told him to stop, though he said it lightly, not really meaning it. Bauer yelled at us that he’d decided to whine until dark. We found another road and stayed on it for a while. It was a relief not to sink into snow at every step. On the whole, we preferred the frozen potholes, even if they were dangerous.
    But eventually we had to go back to the tractor paths that wound their way through snowy woodland.
    Just before midday, we stopped to get our breath back and rest our limbs. Bauer looked at the sky and thought he could tell that the weather was going to change, that it would be even colder tomorrow. But I didn’t believe him.
    I was beginning to feel hungry, but I didn’t dare bringthe subject up yet. None of us had dared mention it since we left this morning. My stomach ached. Sometimes, when I turned my head too quickly, I felt dizzy. It must have been the same for Emmerich and Bauer.
    There was a wood, about two hundred yards away, on the other side of the field, white with frost and really quite beautiful. Emmerich looked at it for a while, and even though we saw no smoke rising and though the snow between here and there was smooth and unmarked, something about it seemed to attract him. Then suddenly he went into the field and began walking across it without saying a word to us.
    â€˜Off for a piss?’ Bauer joked.
    Emmerich paid him no heed. He kept walking away from us. Sometimes the snow held his weight, sometimes it yielded and Emmerich sank up to his knees in it.
    â€˜What’s got into him?’ Bauer asked. ‘Where’s he