A Meal in Winter Read Online Free Page B

going?’
    We watched him and waited. We thought he was going to come back. We waited a long time. Two hundred yards is a long way in the snow. Emmerich was struggling to move forward. But he was moving forward – he was moving away from us – and from where we stood, it looked as if he was leaving us. When he had almost reached the edge of the woods, we grudgingly followed his tracks.Bauer moaned out loud, and I moaned in my head. Even where the snow had not yet yielded, it did so under Bauer’s weight, and he was walking in front of me. So we crossed the whole field up to our knees in snow. We entered the wood, where we walked another dozen yards before finding Emmerich.
    He was crouched in front of the entrance to a hole. He had one hand on a chimney which was barely raised above the ground. It was made from real flue bricks. The snow had melted around it, revealing a circle of dead leaves, pine needles and old, faded scraps of paper.
    Bauer and I were so surprised that we needed a moment to ourselves. We contemplated Emmerich’s discovery in silence.
    Then, patting the flue brick, Emmerich said, ‘Look at that. Pretty clever.’
    â€˜Well, not that clever really,’ I said, ‘seeing as we found it.’
    â€˜I’m talking about the idea. That’s what is clever.’
    â€˜Sure, it’s a clever idea. But if it had been me, I’d have dug something further from the field, deeper inside the woods.’
    Emmerich nodded his agreement. It was strange, but we were whispering.
    â€˜How did you find it?’ Bauer asked, looking back at the white, unmarked field, towards the path that we’d taken. ‘You couldn’t see anything from back there.’
    â€˜You could, a little bit. There was less frost on the trees, because of the rising heat.’
    Bauer and I looked up at the trees.
    We waited for a long time after that. I looked at the chimney that rose above the ground and the circle of melted snow around it. The silence was so profound, it seemed that if we leaned close enough to the narrow entrance in the earth, we might be able to hear breathing down there.
    Finally, we called out. Only once, and not very loud. The holes, we knew, were not deep. There were never any tunnels branching out from the main part. He came out soon afterwards, using his elbows, made slow and clumsy by the layers of clothing he was wearing. The top layer, the one we could see, was a town coat with a lined collar. It was misshapen, as if inflated by all the layers underneath.
    He stood up and immediately put his hands in the air. We heard nothing – not a word of protest. As if he’d been expecting it. We didn’t see anything in his eyes either – no fear, no despair. We could hardly even hear him breathing through his headscarf. All we could see of his face were hiseyes beneath his woolly hat. They were ringed with dirt and fatigue, but not enough to hide his youth. Despite the tiredness they showed, they still shone with life.
    In that silence, which was almost the same as the silence before we had called him out, we looked at him and smiled behind our scarves. We had been walking since daybreak without believing this would happen, and now Emmerich’s sharp eyes had brought him to us. I looked once again at the entrance to the hole, and wondered what had led him to hide here, so close to the edge of the woods, rather than deeper inside them. And I would never know the answer, because I couldn’t see how to ask him that question through gestures, nor how he could reply to me.
    I signalled for him to lower his hands. Pointing at the entrance to the hole, and using his hands, Bauer asked him if there were any others down there. He shook his head to say no, and we believed him. We did not doubt his word at all.
    The sound of wingbeats made us all look up, even the Jew. Frost fell from the trees while a grey shape flew between the branches and vanished. ‘It