The object moved again. I knew what it was, and I gestured her toward a wide tree. She went to it and stood there, somewhat obscured by its huge trunk from the direction in which we’d seen the movement.
It moved again—a man. Impossible to define him in the snow, a ghost against a sheet. One tiny definer—his white headgear had a black something on it. He saw Kate’s movement. He changed his trajectory until he could see her better.
I stood beside her. She whispered, “We must move.” I heard her teeth rattle, iced castanets. With my finger to my lips I went in front of her. Not beside her; I wanted to keep looking toward danger. Was it danger? Oh, God it was.
Not a sound could I hear in that sparser part of the forest. Not even one of those far-off sounds that epitomize countryside atmosphere. No barking dog. No comforting owl. And not even a war.
Since the wind had dropped, the branches made no noise. Or else I had shut out everything in my concentration on this distant white figure. Who could tell in that depth of snow if somebody were limping? The white figure seemed to disappear, into the trees, walking laterally, but not toward us.
I didn’t move us forward; I said we’d wait to make sure that the figure in white had gone away. After too many minutes I heard a sound. What was that? said Miss Begley’s eyebrows. I shook my head, said nothing.
What was it? The sound of a deep—a deep something? A deep what? A deep crunch? Just once. I took the finger from my lips, put it tight on hers. Telling her silently, Not a sound. Don’t. Even. Breathe.
I turned my head forty-five degrees to the left and listened. Another. Yes, a crunch. A second crunch. Then another silence. Then a third crunch, nearer—not by much, but nearer. Identify it! Identify it! In crisis I’ve often found that my mind’s voice becomes unexpectedly articulate. It didn’t say, “What is it?”—it screamed, “Identify it!”
And I did. It was a “something” stepping toward where we hid behind the great wide tree. A human? Must be. Taking one great step at a time. Listening between steps. That was the identification I made. There! A fourth crunch. Getting nearer.
Crucial to know which side of the tree. Had it—had he—seen us? Well, of course he has! screamed my mind. Why do you think he’s crunching his way toward us?
Much closer now. Awful. The crunching stopped. Stopped completely. He’s ten yards away, and he’s puzzled because he can see nothing. Neither can I. He crunched again. One-crunch. Two-crunch. Three-crunch. Four-crunch. Nearer. Nearer. Nearer. Nearer. Now he’s at the other side of the tree.
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I saw him before he saw me. The insignia, that’s what I saw first, the black cross on the helmet’s forehead. And the black gun. He brought up his right arm as he steadied himself for the next deep step forward in the crunching snow. It was, I now know, a Luger, long slender barrel.
Another step forward once more. With his snow mask and goggles I never saw his face, only his hand with the gun. Pointed straight at my head. And he stepped forward with a much harder crunch now. I held my hands out. Cruciform. He stepped away to one side of me.
Christ! What has she done? Kate stepped out from behind the tree. Four feet from me, seven feet from him. What is she doing? She spread her arms in her own crucifix.
He said something. I didn’t know what it was. She said later it was, “Was ist?” How could I know? I didn’t even know for sure whether it was Volunder. I still don’t know.
“Nein,” she said, a gasp in her voice. “Nein, nein.”
“Ireland,” I said. “Irlande. Irlanda.”
“Nein, nein, nein,” she said, in the voice of a woman about to go crazy.
“No, no,” she said, and I said, “No!”
Such bizarre thoughts as we get. My parents didn’t prepare me for meeting a man with a gun in a snowy forest during a war. I can’t remember any other thought.
He raised the gun a little higher. Still pointed it at me. Straight at my face now.
He flapped a hand at her, beckoned her forward. It must have been Volunder—he’d kill me and take her back with him. Come here and stand beside me, beckoned the hand. He stepped forward. So concentrated. So focused on my face. And I couldn’t even see his eyes.
How did I do it? Height and reach. I have long arms. I hit him with my right fist. Where was his strength? Military rations, perhaps? As he staggered he fired. Kate fell with a grunt.
I was on him. On him, on him, on him. I stamped on the gun hand. Stamped and stamped. He didn’t let go, he fought me off. On his knees he fired again. This shot, not a loud crack, a strange, dull sound, a metal grunt, whistled past me.
I kicked him as he rose. Kicked him in the face. Kicked him with every ounce of my six-foot-four bulk. He went down, he dropped the gun, I picked it up, I knelt over him, and I shot him in the head. Twice. With the two bullets he had left, and if the gun had held two hundred and two bullets I’d have fired every one.
On the nights that I can’t sleep, the all-white snow outfit of a German soldier haunts me. If it wasn’t Volunder, did he have a wife? Did he have children? And a pleasant house with a staircase and pine banisters? And I killed him.
It’s right that I should care. I should wake at nights. I should be hurt. Even if he was Sebastian Volunder. But I didn’t look. Only a rose of black blood above his ear—that’s all I saw. One perfect rose.
At that moment I had but a single thought. Kate was sitting on top of the snow like a doll.
“I fell,” she said. “Ben, Death is God’s Remedy for All Ills. For All Ills, Ben.” She was losing her composure again. “Ben, I miss my father, did I ever tell you that?”
“Are you hurt?”
She shook her head. I lifted her to her feet. She was as limp as a glove. She didn’t look toward the dead man. I figured that she must have dropped to the snow in shock.
“Go,” I said. “Go!”
She moved. I picked up the damn bag and followed her, forward through the snow, and now I was the one making the deep and huge crunches—but in my soul, I was now and forever brutalized. I was in some part of me a dog of war.
No words can discuss the act of killing somebody. Nothing I can say will take me forward into a place of comfort on that topic. I can compartmentalize it, put it under the heading of “An Act Necessary to Stay Alive.” But I can’t sanction it. God, it hurts.
Through the goggles, I saw into his eyes; I tried not to, but I saw them, and snow-mad or not, he knew what was going to happen. He knew that he was about to lose his life, that his corpse would lie there in the snow, covered over and preserved until the spring, and some farmer or hunter or band of soldiers coming along these woods would find him as the snows thawed and he would be tagged and carried to some military graveyard, and if lucky he still had legible papers on him so that his family could be told in order to permit them to mourn him.
Other than that he would become a name listed as MIA, missing in action, and his family would forever wonder what had happened to him. How had he died? they’d ask themselves. And his wife, now alone with her body in bed at night, might console herself that her husband was the nameless hero in the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Even if he was Sebastian Volunder.
He had stiffened almost the moment the life left his body. I had been as tidy in the killing of him as I am with my notebooks and pens, the tools of my trade, but I didn’t know I was being tidy. One shot, then two—oh, dear Christ, do I still hear those dull echoes in the nights? And why is it always—this is some irony—why is it always the case that I most hear them in the balmy, twilight deeps of Irish summer nights?
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We moved through the snow, trying to be steady, but near to destruction. I felt certain that I had broken my own heart. At one moment, we halted because I heard in the distance behind us a long fusillade of shots. Rifle fire—my God, I could now tell the difference between guns! It lasted for long minutes.
If I had known that I was overhearing one of the foulest atrocities of Worl
d War II, the massacre of American prisoners of war at the crossroads of Malmédy—for which Jochen Peiper stood trial at Dachau—would it have healed my remorse at the killing I had just done? I doubt it. I was born to live life, not take it. Or was I? Would I, like so many, kill again?
“The woods can’t get deeper than this,” she said. Her tone had strengthened again. Whence came that girl’s resilience?
I said, “Listen!”
We listened. The gunfire ended.
For some moments we stood, exhaling, looking for some more recovery, listening for the next noises. It took some time for their pattern to soak into our minds.
A deep wood can sound like a sailing ship. It creaks. Things flap and fall. Or crash. I retraced five or six yards—no sound of pursuit, but they could be stalking us, waiting for us to tire. Finger still held to my lips, I went back to Kate—and again felt astonished; she seemed to have reenergized. She clapped her hands to keep them warm, she shook her head to clear her brain. Her energy, her composure—so rewarding, such a lesson.
We held hands again, and as we moved on we heard a new sound. Running water—hard, fast, running water, meaning that in this climate, in that season, something was big enough and tough enough not to be frozen over by the weather.
Rivers have to go somewhere. We went forward, found it, and surrendered to its leadership. This stream, powerful as a lateral cataract, had enough size and importance to need a destiny. We had no idea where we were. Belgium, yes, and therefore this river wasn’t going to the sea, yet it surely must lead us somewhere.
But did it have shallows? I had no idea of its depth at the middle. Could we cover our tracks by walking in the actual water? I calculated that if we stayed as close to the bank as possible, we’d be stepping in six inches of water, which would then erase our tracks.
The riverbank gave us easy passage down to the stream, which measured maybe six, eight yards across, and it flowed high, rough and fast, white spume everywhere. I made Kate stand in the shallow water, and I stepped into the middle. The water came to my waist, then my chest, then down to my waist again.
I made it to the far bank, where I created two sets of footprints up the slope and into the trees. Putting my feet carefully into one set, I came back down and crossed the river again. Now it looked as though we’d gone deeper into the forest on the far side.
We walked in the shallows of that stream for what seemed like an hour. The miracle of circulation kept our feet alive—and the river erased our footprints almost as soon as we’d made them. Were this a legend that I’d collected in, say, Donegal, or Mayo, the myth would have been, “The river spoke, and the god of the stream came to their aid.”
Kate walked ahead of me, and the shallows, little mudflats, continued; the river must have carved out a deep furrow over the centuries. And then—it vanished. It went underground, and Kate, in better spirits than I could have expected, said, “Now we’re high and dry.”
“Look up,” the god of the river said, “look up and see how the trees are thinner here. This means that you may be coming to an edge of the wood. And now look ahead and see brighter light.”
I did indeed look up, and ahead saw brighter light. The snow had ceased falling, or else we’d gone in so deep that the branches had kept it from us. In some places, it lay three or four inches high, and we couldn’t guess where the drifts might be; in other, denser stretches of the forest, the ground lay bare. To those patches we kept, leaving as little spoor as possible.
Following this brightening light, we found ourselves almost in open ground again. We had come to the innermost border of a huge U-shaped plantation that spread for miles and miles over the booming hills.
I guessed the time at around one o’clock in the afternoon. We’d walked about three hours. Clouds somewhere thinned a little, and a weak sunlight strengthened—not by much, but by enough to let us see that we must have come far away from the roads and the troop movements. As though to confirm, we heard, from a great distance off to our left, the sound of heavy guns. I looked up, found the sun, and said to Kate, “Whether we knew it or not, we’ve been going west.” We stood on the top left-hand spur of the U, the eastern side.
Over her shoulder I saw something. I walked past her, to the very edge of the wood, to a sign on a tree. It said, amid smudges, DIR. BAUGNEZ, but no arrows, nothing else, nothing to give us direction. From behind a tree I looked out across the U and saw nobody, nothing but a wide, white, silent plain of thin snow. Looking back, I heard no sound of pursuit.
We agreed to stay just within the trees and pursue the forest line to take ourselves west. What choice did we have? We needed to stay as concealed as possible. Side by side this time, we set off along one leg of the U, more conscious now of how wet we were, and how cold, and how incongruous we would look to anybody who found us. And the wind was coming up, whistling here, sighing there.
After an endless, stumbling trudge, and just as I began to panic about my freezing clothes, Kate stopped.
“What’s that?” She pointed—a hut, twenty yards inside the tree line, a not insubstantial hut. We had reached the belly of the U—and the center of this legend that our lives had become.
Neither of us could read the language on the door notice, and in alarm we wondered again where in God’s name we had been traveling. (Later, when my mind came back to me, I reasoned that it had been printed in one of the Belgian dialects.)
The hut, closed but with no lock, contained nothing. Worst of all, it had no fireplace. And no lighting of any kind, not even a window. In fact, it seemed to have no purpose that we could define, and there we stood, in a wooden building, measuring about twelve feet by ten, with four walls, a roof, a moist dirt floor, and nothing else.
Its builder, however, had made it windproof. I held my hands to the walls here and there, and not a draft could I feel. And so soundproof; we cocked our heads and listened and heard nothing. We could hardly see each other in the gloom.
Everything I wore had become as wet as the sea.
Kate said, “I’m soaked too. To the skin.”
We had no materials to light a fire. We had no means of drying or changing our clothes. We had nothing on which to sit. All we could do was look at each other and shrug.
I opened the door, then shut it fast. The howling of the wind made us appreciate the shelter.
“There must,” I said, “be a purpose to this hut.”
“A woodsman? A forester?” She walked around touching the walls. “It’s very dry.”
“Except for the floor,” I said.
“My belly is touching my backbone I’m so hungry,” she said.
“We should probably stay here until morning,” I said.
“And anyway, if we had a fire”—she looked up at the planked ceiling—“we wouldn’t be able to see each other for smoke.”
I opened the door again, not quite knowing why, and asked out loud, “What is it used for? What’s the point of it?” Something was arresting me. “There must be a purpose.” I stepped out into the wind; a branch somewhere cracked, and I jumped. “I’m going to look around,” I said.
Hugging the walls, I walked down one side to the rear, where loose branches almost tripped me. Looking into the woods, I saw extraordinary effects—some trees waving like crowds, the rest tranquil and still. In the clearing, snow began to fall again, whipped by the wind. Treetops waved, and white scuds flew from them. I worried about animals, predators; I worried about soldiers. For any of them we made a fine prize, and easy to catch.
By now I knew that I was searching for something—perhaps a toolbox, where foresters stored axes; perhaps another shed, more fitted for habitation. Looking down, I saw no footprints—and yet somebody had spread broken and heavy branches at the rear wall of the hut; I could see white fangs of wood where they’d been cut from their trees. I bent and lifted two of the branches—and found the unknown thing for which I’d searched, a wooden trapdoor, as in a fairy tale or a pirate’s yarn; it even had an i
ron ring with which to open it.
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With the trapdoor open, I could see nothing, other than a small ladder, down which I climbed. A flashlight hung from a rung halfway down. When I shone the beam, I saw that the underground room ran the length of the hut and underneath it. It had recently been inhabited. No stove here either, no fireplace, but masses of blankets and clothing, enough for a dozen people. It felt safe. I ran back up, fetched a shivering Kate, and when she had descended I closed the trapdoor on her. Snow had begun to fall, powerful and thick.
As I feared, the ring almost shone, the planks of the trapdoor looked inviting; how could I camouflage that? I must have spent two or three minutes pulling branches so that they covered most of the trapdoor in a natural sort of way. When I squeezed myself down, I kept the trapdoor opening as narrow as possible. I hoped that the angle at which I’d left some of the branches would jerk them across to cover the trapdoor if I took it down fast. On the ladder I heard the branches fall over; I pushed up gingerly and felt that sufficient weight had fallen; the snow would do the rest.
Now everything felt still—and unexpectedly warmer. I soon discovered the reason for the warmth—double walls, a thick wooden floor, a dense ceiling. Whoever had designed this place meant people to stay in it for long periods, or in terrible weather.
With the flashlight I explored, found another flashlight and a carbide lamp. Now we had light, and we inspected the place. We found bone-dry clothing for men, women, and children, and we began to change. Somebody had even supplied rough towels, and I could hear Kate’s teeth chattering as she undressed from her sodden clothes.
With her back to me, she began to towel herself dry, and then she turned and said, “No. You do it. And I’ll do it for you.”
We might have been husband and wife, so tenderly but naturally did we dry each other.
The Matchmaker of Kenmare Page 31
