“So are you, Enzo. The best.”
“I wish I could keep living, just to see this war through with you.” He smiled. “How lucky I’ve been to have you for a friend.”
Roberto could hardly talk. “Me, too.”
The snow fell. Hour after hour. Roberto stayed awake, brushing it off the tips of Enzo’s hair, which stuck out from the headcloth. He rubbed Enzo’s back under the blanket. He kept him warm.
The snow still fell. When it stopped, the stars came out. They sparkled in patterns all over the heavens. Roberto didn’t recognize any of the constellations. It was as though he was looking at the sky for the first time. The brightness of the stars promised a clear day ahead. He slept at last, until the first weak streaks of sun crossed the sky.
Roberto shook Enzo.
Enzo didn’t respond.
Roberto rocked back and forth on the ground, holding Enzo’s body tight, keeping it warm, though it no longer mattered. Sadness blanketed their world. Roberto curled over and whispered hoarsely in Enzo’s ear, “You didn’t freeze. At least you didn’t freeze.”
THE WOODS
Roberto stood in German boots, in the boots Enzo had bequeathed to him just hours ago. He watched the bomber land. The boys had spent the morning clearing snow off the runway. They scurried around in practiced harmony. Everyone knew their duties without being told. Everything was getting done without Roberto’s help. Everything from now on till forever would get done without Enzo’s help.
Roberto hadn’t even been able to bury Enzo’s body. The ground was too hard to dig anymore—it was even too hard to pick. He had let the other boys take Enzo’s clothes, except his underwear. He’d screamed when someone tried to take Enzo’s underwear. He’d pummeled the boy with both fists. Roberto, who never raised a hand against anyone, had thrown himself into the scuffle last night and acted like a raging bull this morning. Then he’d insisted on wrapping Enzo in his blanket. He knew the living boys needed the blanket and Enzo didn’t. Everyone knew that. They looked at him as though he were crazy. But he wouldn’t leave Enzo white in the snow like that. And he couldn’t bear to look at Enzo’s crushed chest. The boys must have broken half his ribs last night.
One of them walked around now in German boots—the boots he’d stolen off of Roberto in the night. Roberto stared at the boy. The boy didn’t lower his head. He didn’t look ashamed.
The boys would steal Enzo’s blanket as soon as Roberto left his side. They would steal it without shame.
They would steal his underwear, too.
Then they’d know.
He wasn’t Enzo anymore—he was Samuele again. In death he could carry his true name.
Would it matter to the boys?
It would matter to the German soldiers.
And everyone knew Roberto and Samuele were like brothers. They had given up trying to hide their friendship when they’d come to the Ukraine work camp.
Roberto was doomed.
Two Germans got out of the bomber and consulted with the three German soldiers left in the work camp. The Italian boys immediately set to work on the bombs. No one looked at Roberto, standing with his legs in a straddle. No one had looked at him all morning. It was as though they had all agreed, both boys and soldiers, that Samuele’s death had turned Roberto temporarily insane and it was best to leave him alone. For now. It wouldn’t last, though. They’d get angry if he acted crazy too long.
A promise is to keep. Roberto would die fighting inside, as he had promised Samuele.
He walked over to the supply pile and grabbed a shovel. The snow was soft and fluffy, easy enough to dig with his hands. But his fingers would freeze. So he made a trench in the snow with the shovel and pulled Samuele into it. He took off the blanket. The Saint Christopher medal was frozen to Samuele’s broken chest. Roberto winced. Samuele hadn’t said one word about how much it hurt.
Samuele needed something more. He deserved something more. Roberto had been to only one funeral in his life—his grandfather’s. He was five at the time, and all he remembered now was that there were lots of words. That’s what Roberto could give Samuele—parting words, in Venetian dialect, just as Samuele would have wanted them.
“Goodbye, Samuele. I’ll miss you.” He swallowed to keep the tears from falling. “I miss you already.” Roberto didn’t look around. He wouldn’t know who witnessed him tending to the body of his Jewish friend—he wouldn’t care. No one could conquer the inside of him. He bent and put one hand on Samuele’s heart and the other on his own heart. “You’re my best friend. Rest now.”
Roberto straightened. He swallowed over and over. Finally he grabbed the shovel and piled snow over Samuele until he was completely covered. He rolled the potato-sack blanket into a ball and walked back to the supply pile and dropped the shovel. Then he kept walking, through the stand of trees beside the camp.
He hadn’t known what he was going to do until he found himself doing it. It was like the time he walked to the fence when the Polish Jews were first put in the pen at the farm work camp. He hadn’t even realized he’d stood up. And it was like the final time he went into the chicken coop—when he just did it without looking around first. Other forces pushed rational thought aside and moved his body forward without reason.
Roberto thought of pushing the material on his head up to expose his ears so that he could hear shouts from behind and prepare himself for the bullets. But he didn’t. It would be less scary to just get shot and drop dead.
He walked slowly at first, but he didn’t trudge. An energy pulsed through him, an energy born out of knowing that, quite simply, he had nothing to lose. In that knowledge lay a delicate but undeniable triumph.
He walked, head high. And the triumph turned to exhilaration.
He walked.
Then, when the bullets didn’t come, and when he finally realized they weren’t coming, he went faster. He ran. And now he was deep, deep into the trees and he couldn’t hear the noises of the camp any longer. He stumbled to a stop. His heart pounded and he couldn’t catch his breath. He looked around. He was alone; no one had followed.
He shook out Samuele’s blanket and threw it across his shoulders, covering his bare arms at last. His blood raced with the surprising knowledge that he had a chance at escape. How stupid he’d been not to have given escape any true forethought. He could have tried to take something along—the shovel, at least. But it never crossed his mind that he would actually get beyond their view alive. He hugged himself in the blanket. He’d brought Samuele’s blanket just to have a part of Samuele with him when he died. Now it would be his best chance at survival.
He knew directions from the rise of the sun, so he headed due south. Italy was far to the south and to the west, as well. The shortest path would have been southwest. But his thought now was to get someplace warmer as fast as possible. And due south was warmer.
His mind made the calculations. From all these months of manual labor, he’d grown strong. He was used to working ten to twelve hours a day. And he had a good sense now of how far a kilometer was. If he walked for as many hours as he worked every day, without slowing down, he could cover a good seventy to eighty kilometers in a single day, at the least. How far could he be from the Black Sea? Three days? A week? Not more. For sure, not more.
The trees finally ended at a huge open expanse. The sun got stronger. Last night’s snow melted away. Walking became a slippery affair. Roberto had to slow his pace. But he never stopped. And he never looked back.
Midmorning he worked his hand into his pocket under the cement-sack blanket tied around his abdomen and took out the Brot from breakfast. He’d almost given it to the boy next to him because he felt like he never wanted to eat again. Thank heavens he hadn’t. His hunger ravaged him now. But he kept control: He put half back in his pocket; then he ate the other half in small nibbles, making it last as long as possible.
At lunchtime he ate the rest of the Brot—no, the bread. He wasn’t with the Germans anymore; he would use V
enetian words for everything.
At dusk he took out his old soupbone and gnawed on it.
He never stopped walking. But dark came earlier these days, and he had to find a place to spend the night soon. He resented the night. He needed to get to the Black Sea fast. Then he would follow the coastline westward to Turkey and through the strait to the Mediterranean. Once he got to the Mediterranean, he knew he could make it home.
How far was it to Venice?
So far. Oh, so far.
But that was the wrong way to think about it. He had to keep control, to set his sights on one goal at a time. The Black Sea. He could reach the Black Sea. That was manageable.
He scanned the horizon. A little to the east he saw a line of trees. He didn’t want to go east. He would veer to the west if he had to, but going east only took him away from everything he needed.
Still, he needed to get out of the open before night. The unbroken wind at night could freeze him, even with two blankets.
He went east. He forced himself to go fast. He didn’t run; he wouldn’t risk falling. The ground was soggy from melted snow, and he couldn’t risk getting his clothes wet. He swung his legs in large, even strides in those big German boots.
It was pitch black by the time he reached the first tree. A spruce. The whole stand was spruces. He had seen spruces far to the north when he’d traveled to this work camp in the back of the truck. But once they’d headed south, the trees had turned to oaks and pines. Now here suddenly was a stand of spruce. Bad luck. It was impossible to climb a spruce. He’d have to sleep on the ground. Without the protection of the other boys.
And now the awful thought came to him: Alone he was perfect wolf meat.
He stood stupidly in the dark, not knowing what to do. An owl hooted. There was no wind here among the trees. And the air was different—heavier, wetter. He was suddenly exhausted.
Something moved quickly through the trees to his right. Low to the ground. Roberto’s heart leaped.
Whatever it was, it passed. It didn’t notice him.
Why not?
Because there was no wind to carry his scent. Samuele had taught him how important scent was to predators like wolves. Only if they crossed the path he had traveled would they smell him. Roberto had to find a way to break the scent trail.
He relieved himself against a tree. The smell of his urine was strong. Passing wolves couldn’t miss it. They’d come to this tree. Even if he could climb it, they’d know he was there. They’d circle the bottom and trap him.
Roberto looked around. He couldn’t stand there forever. Noises came from the tops of the trees. The night creatures were moving into action. The cold on his cheeks grew perceptibly stronger. The scent of spruce overwhelmed.
That was it: the spruce scent. If he could mask his path with spruce scent, nothing would find him.
Roberto broke off two densely needled bottom branches. He held the thick end in each hand, with the needles flopping on the ground. He slapped a branch down in front of him, still holding fast to one end. He stepped on the branch. He slapped the other branch down in front of him and stepped on it. He traveled that way along the edge of the spruce thicket for a long time. If he was lucky, the wolves would think they’d treed him back where he’d relieved himself. If he was lucky, the spruce branches under his feet would hide the scent of his boots.
Some of the spruces at the very edge of the thicket had boughs that reached to the ground. He crawled under one, to the small pocket of space close to the trunk. The branches scratched at the back of his head. Not a perfect lair. Still, the ground was surprisingly dry. He made a bed of the broken branches he had carried there. Then he untied his own blanket from around his chest and rolled himself up in both blankets, covering even his head. Within minutes he felt snug. The thick branches above offered good protection if it snowed again, the broken branches below offered a cushion against the hard ground, and the blankets did the rest. He wouldn’t freeze tonight.
He told himself a Bible story Samuele had told him, of the three Jews that King Nebuchadnezzar sent into the furnace. He described out loud the flames that licked at the three men and at the angel who joined them. He felt their victory when they emerged from the furnace unsinged. It was the hottest story he could remember. It warmed him to his ears. Then he fell asleep.
Roberto woke in the dark. He pushed up on his elbows with a start. His head hit a branch; his stomach growled. Was it just hunger that woke him or something else? He listened. He heard birdcalls from what seemed far away. He crawled out from under the branches. It was late morning already, but the branches were so thick, they’d kept out the sunlight. He tied his blanket to his abdomen, like always, and wrapped Samuele’s blanket around his shoulders and arms.
He walked through the trees searching for pines. Pine nuts wouldn’t make a bad breakfast. But all were spruces. He picked up a spruce cone and split open the back of a section. The cone was dry. He couldn’t even tell if there had ever been a nut there—the whole thing crumpled away in his hand.
He heard something welcome, though: water. Nothing soothed Roberto faster than the presence of water. He followed the sound through the trees and came out on a stream. The placement of the trees and the slope of the land told him that in spring the stream ran wide. But now it was shallow and narrow and icy.
Roberto walked along the bank, looking carefully at the larger rocks that stuck out of the water. Finally he found one that was flattish on top, with a little pool in an indentation near its center. There was a smaller rock between the bank and that rock, so he leaped from the smaller one to the other. Then he stooped on the flattish rock and drank the water from the pool. It was cold, still—but the sun had done its job on the shallow pool and warmed it enough so that it didn’t hurt his throat as it went down.
He jumped back to the bank. Even though his stomach had clearly shrunk since he’d been in Ukraine, hunger squeezed his insides. It hurt worse now than even at the farm work camp.
He searched for rocks about the size of his hand, half embedded in the mud at the edge of the stream. If there’s one thing a Venetian boy knew, it was that water held food. He stuck his hands in the frigid water and turned over rocks, and more often than not, little things scurried off or dug themselves quickly into the mud. He had to be fast to catch any. On the next rock he was ready. He snatched instantly. Pinched between his thumb and index finger several pairs of little legs wiggled at him, sticking out from an almost translucent body in a thin, soft shell. His nostrils flared in disgust at the idea of eating it alive. He closed his eyes. He’d eaten raw clams before—lots of times. And raw sea urchins. They were probably still alive when he put them in his mouth. He opened his eyes and looked again at the flailing legs. It was the legs that made eating the creature alive seem awful—just the stupid little legs. “You can’t be worse than a raw chick,” he said aloud. He held his hand toward the heavens. “To you, Enzo.” He ate. It wasn’t so bad. The thought was worse than the act. So the trick was not to think.
He jammed his fingers down into the half-frozen mud and came up with a clump. He washed it in the water. It was some sort of shell-less snail. A slug. It was too big to eat all at once. Roberto took a deep breath. No thinking, he said to himself. He chomped the slug in half and swallowed. He waited a minute. He was okay. He looked down at his hand. The half of the slug that remained wiggled.
Roberto vomited.
He rinsed his mouth out with the cold, cold water. He couldn’t act this way. Not if he wanted to live. He couldn’t afford to be squeamish. He went to the next rock and lifted it and grabbed. Then he ate without even looking at what he caught. It didn’t matter. After that, he ate blindly. Some of the creatures crunched in his teeth. Some slithered down his throat. It didn’t matter. It was food.
He spent maybe half an hour on breakfast. Then he decided he had to move on. His hunger wasn’t satisfied, but it would probably take constant eating all day to get satisfied on these tiny water creatures
.
The stream ran southeast. Roberto wanted to go due south. But if he left the water, he might leave trees for a long time again. And how could he sleep without the protection of trees? How could he eat without the guarantee of water creatures?
He followed the stream all day, stopping only twice to eat. The woods thinned and thickened and thinned again.
When night came, he climbed a tree. He wedged himself between a wide branch and the main trunk. He felt fairly secure until he looked down: It was a long way down. He hugged the trunk, but the dizziness wouldn’t go away. He took off the rope around the blanket on his abdomen. He arranged both blankets so that they covered his middle and arms and formed a hood he could retreat his whole head into. He secured them by making tucks at strategic points. Then he passed the rope behind his back and around the trunk of the tree and knotted it. There. Now he couldn’t fall.
He had done everything he could to keep himself safe. He had moved almost mechanically, without hesitation. But now he sat silent in the tree and looked around. Roberto was alone. In the woods. In late fall. Far from anything familiar.
If only Samuele were with him. But he had done it the night before—he could do it again. He could bring Samuele by his side with the help of stories. He could raise Samuele from his own heart. What story would Samuele tell tonight, out here? Roberto knew. He spoke aloud again. He described Moses going up onto Mount Sinai. Sitting in a cover of clouds, alone and hungry and without direction, for six long days. Then the Lord came in all His glory and gave Moses so many directions—how to build the tabernacle, what the priests should wear, how to keep the Sabbath.
Roberto was no Jew. But the Lord of those stories was his Lord, too. It would become apparent what Roberto should do next. He let his neck curl till his chin rested on his chest. He slept.
* * *
Oohoo!
Roberto woke to the call. Two beats, the first one louder. He had been dreaming of one of Samuele’s own stories about a child high in a prison, looking down at the ground he couldn’t reach. And now it was Roberto looking down. The ground shone white in the soft, waning moonlight. It had snowed.
Stones in Water Page 8
