A Boy in Winter

by Rachel Seiffert

  No one speaks; no one dares yet, but Osip knows that they all listen for the same thing: the roar of the trucks starting up again and driving. The sound of the soldiers leaving the town behind them.

  But the quiet goes on for so long.

  Why don’t they go now?

  Why can’t they leave us?

  Osip crouches and waits with his neighbours; and he sees it in their eyes, how they listen and wait, just as he does. But still they don’t hear it—and how long have they been waiting here like this?

  In the stove, the fire has burned down to embers; outside, the day is already darkening. The town is shuttered and bolted, all the townsfolk hiding, but there is only the silence, leaden and cold; nothing to tell them what the Germans will do now.

  7

  Yasia lifts her head at the sound of movement. A rustle of skirts, uneasy; a shifting and a standing around her.

  Stiff and slow from so long curled over, she squints and finds not Osip beside her: just neighbours, furtive in the half-light, and then the door being pulled ajar, and the wind blowing in across the yard.

  There are voices outside—Yasia hears whispers. Strange to hear them after so long spent in silence. She thinks the neighbours must have heard them; it must be those voices that have them standing, going to listen at the open door. But although she pulls herself to her feet as well, Yasia is slower than those around her; she is amongst the last to reach the doorway and to peer out into the darkening yard beyond it.

  Some of the neighbours are already on the yard bricks, others are darting forward, cautious, to join them. Still caught up with the rest, Yasia peers towards the workshop, looking for Osip: she doesn’t like this crowding, or how the whispers are getting louder, and she would sooner have him near her.

  The timber man is out there. His wife too: Yasia can just make her out in the shadows by the yard wall. Is she the one whispering? Her voice is a sharp hiss, but Yasia can’t see her face yet. Her husband is at her shoulder, as though he has to hold her—is she angry?—and the neighbours are clustered about them, a nervous half-circle, with Osip at the centre.

  Osip.

  As soon as she sees him, Yasia presses forward. Except the timber man’s wife is still getting louder, and then Osip throws his arms out.

  “Quiet now!”

  This has Yasia halting, holding back a moment.

  “Mind yourself.” Yasia hears Osip’s warning. She sees too, how he casts looks around himself as though for listeners at the windows. But the woman won’t be hushed.

  “I heard them,” she insists, stepping forward, taking Osip by the elbows. “You think I am the only one?”

  Is she talking about this morning?

  The last of the neighbours push past Yasia, but she stays where she is on the yard bricks, still only just grasping what is happening. What is the woman saying?

  “Why haven’t the soldiers gone now?” The woman is insistent. “They’re still looking, Osip. Don’t you see that?”

  Yasia can see how she holds him, forcing him to face her.

  “You have some here,” she tells him. “Don’t lie to me. I know you do.”

  And then she gestures to Osip’s workshop, and Yasia’s insides tighten.

  She is talking about the two boys: she must be. About the Jew boys under the rafters. Yasia glances up there, knowing she has left it far too long to go and see about them—that it may be far too late now.

  “And if the Germans come?” the woman demands. “What if they come calling?”

  “Enough now!”

  Osip pulls himself free of her, stepping back, shaking his head at the timber man, and then at all the neighbours who surround him.

  But even while Osip protests, Yasia sees—as he does—that already some are retreating. They are turning for his gate, or slipping through his broken yard wall, and already Osip looks less certain. He can see he stands alone here.

  “Be careful,” the timber man issues a warning, retreating himself now: “If we don’t say, then someone else will. You can be sure of it.”

  He pulls his wife after him, but she won’t back down yet, turning to Osip as she is leaving.

  “You look in your workshop. You ask that one.”

  The woman points at Yasia—straight at her—before she can duck away from the door frame.

  —

  So Osip sees her watching there.

  Soon Osip sees everything.

  He climbs the ladder and finds them: both boys in the straw bales.

  The small one cries out as he pulls away the blankets, but Osip barks at him sharply.

  “Hold your mouth now!”

  Shocking him into silence.

  He stares at the children first, curled together like mice under his rafters, and then at Yasia, come to a standstill at the trapdoor. Osip sits down, hard, on one of the leaking bales, head in his hands and groaning, fingers gripped to his forehead, appalled at what he has uncovered here.

  “I didn’t know,” Yasia starts.

  But Osip does not look at her; he does not even lift his head. He is so quiet, Yasia doesn’t know what she can tell him.

  The boys needed hiding so she hid them, they needed feeding so she fed them; that was all she was doing. She didn’t know about them. She didn’t know. Or what the soldiers would do to the others.

  But Yasia can’t let herself think of soldiers, because then she will think of Mykola. She looks to the two boys instead, but that just makes it worse: seeing them held tight to each other between the straw bales. Their white and stricken smallness. Did they hold tight like that all morning? The two boys must have heard it, just as she did.

  As soon as Yasia thinks that, she has to turn her face away.

  Below them, the last of the neighbours are scattering: a clattering of boot-soles out into the alleyways. They heard Osip shout; that was enough.

  “She will bring the police,” Osip breathes, pointing down into the yard, in the direction the timber man’s wife ran, just a few moments ago. “She will bring the Germans,” he says. “She will bring the Germans. If someone else hasn’t already got there.”

  The older boy has already understood as much. He heard the neighbours turning tail, and now he starts crawling past Yasia, tugging his things together on the floorboards: his jacket and hat, his brother’s scattered toys. Stuffing all he can into his pockets, throwing the rest down to the workshop floor below them—boots and blankets tumbling—he pulls his brother from the straw and onto his shoulders.

  Osip won’t look at Yasia. Head in his hands and wretched, he doesn’t look at the two boys either, as the older one clambers down the ladder with the young one clasped tight around him. Osip only holds his face gripped in his fingers, so Yasia gropes her way behind the boys; half falling down the last rungs in her confusion, she follows them almost blindly.

  The older one is grabbing at the blankets when she gets to the workshop floor, tying them into a bundle, his face aflame, eyes averted, as though he expects her to shout now and send him running. Yasia watches him, the way he turns from her: not defiant, not any longer, only frightened. He didn’t know either: that the soldiers would do that.

  But Yasia has to fill her thoughts with something else now.

  She tugs one of the cloths from her mother’s basket, laying two apples in the middle; eggs and a heel of bread to send the boys away with—except how long that will last them? Not even a day, not without hunger. And how long will they need to hide for?

  She looks up again to find the older boy at the doorway. He still has his young brother clutched to his shoulders, and he is trying to hold him there, tying a blanket around them both to bind him; so he can run with him, maybe. But the knots are difficult and the younger one shrinks from the wind blowing in damp from the marshes. Where can they hide where they will be warm enough?

  “You have to go now.”

  Osip cut across Yasia’s thoughts. He is standing, stone-faced at the trapdoor.

  “You have to
leave,” he tells the two boys, as he comes clambering down the ladder’s rungs, lumbering across the workshop floor. “You should never have been here in the first place.”

  He still can’t bring himself to look at them in more than glances, though Yasia thinks he must see how frightened they are, surely. He can’t just send them out onto the town streets; they can’t just do nothing for them. But when she makes a move to implore him, he brings her up short.

  “We have to go as well, child,” he tells her.

  Osip gestures at his yard, now empty of neighbours, and his fingers shake with anger.

  “You think we can stay here?”

  Yasia still has the food she wrapped, she holds it dumb in both her hands, while Osip tells her, “You’re not safe, child. I’m not safe either. Don’t you see that?”

  And then she sees he is fearful; it is not just fury making his fingers tremble.

  Osip steps towards her. “If the Germans find they were hiding here. What do you think they will do to us? To us, child?”

  Yasia has no answer to that. She can only shake her head, while Osip takes a step back again, his eyes darting around himself.

  He surveys his surroundings: eyes flitting from the horse in his stall to the boys in his doorway, and then to the half-repaired cart by the workshop wall. Yasia can see how frightened he is, but that he’s working something out now. So even if he is angry, she hopes that Osip will help still: he might know how to help the boys. When he goes to lift the harness from the workshop hooks, Yasia takes a step towards him.

  “Who can we go to?” she asks, low and careful. She doesn’t know the town nearly as well as Osip does, or the townsfolk; who would keep them safe now?

  “I will find someone,” he mutters over his shoulder. “I will have to.”

  Then he turns to her. “But you can’t come with me,” Osip warns, stopping her from coming closer.

  “No, girl,” he halts her. “You can’t come with me. I said it already: you’re not safe for me to be with.”

  He keeps his distance—not just from the boys, but from her as well—and then he tells her, “You can’t go home, either. Don’t you be thinking that you can go there.”

  Yasia stares at him, dismayed: What is he doing? What is he saying? But Osip will not give way.

  “How can you go home now?” he asks, turning on her, his eyes sharp, hands gripped hard to the harness. “What if you bring the Germans after you? Would you do that to your mother, your brothers? Like you’ve done to me, girl. Over those two?”

  Osip points at the boys by the doorway.

  “They were heard,” he says, despairing. “You were seen, child. How could you do it?” he demands, throwing up his arms.

  Yasia thinks he will throw the reins at her, and she holds herself in readiness.

  But then he falls a little quieter, dropping his arms again, checking around himself. Osip stands, slack-shouldered, in the silence that follows this. At a loss. As if he can’t find the words. What more he can say to her?

  The boys stand silent also: the younger one pale inside his blanket binding, the older one no longer making to run; his face no longer turned away from them either. His eyes are dark and frightened, but his gaze shifts, alert, between Osip and Yasia.

  “You have the horse,” Osip says at last. “You can have the cart too.”

  He points across the workshop, holding out the harness.

  “You go to your uncle’s,” Osip mutters. “Your mother’s people. You go to the marshes; you’ve been there enough times.”

  It leaves Yasia helpless. She stands on his workshop floor as he casts about himself.

  She knows the tracks to her uncle’s village: Yasia has trekked the two days, three days, almost every year of her childhood, overnighting by campfires, under blankets, with her mother and her brothers sleeping around her. But only ever in the late-summer warmth, in the dry weeks after the harvest, before the leaves start turning.

  “It’s too far,” Yasia starts: it is too late in the year for such a journey.

  “So? So?” Osip cuts across her, throwing the harness to land beside her. “You have to. You have to go where no Germans are. Don’t you see that?”

  He has no time left for arguing, and he strides away from Yasia’s pleading. The older boy ducks from his anger, but Osip shoves at him as he passes, forcing the brothers into the yard before him.

  “Get away from here,” he orders, rough now, a low growl. “You stay away from me—and away from her.”

  The older one scrambles away from him along the yard wall and Yasia wills him to be faster, even as she sees his face turning, still keeping watch on her from the dusk outside. She wants the boys to run far away, and for Osip to turn and help her.

  But Osip tugs the yard gate open, he slips out into the darkness, without another glance in Yasia’s direction; and then all she can see is the cart by the workshop doorway, listing on its axles, and the harness before her on the floor in tangles. All that she can think is that she has to go to the marshes. That it is too far, it is too cold and dark.

  But how long till the timber man’s wife finds a German, finds a policeman—how long until they get here?

  —

  Unwashed, still in yesterday’s clothes, Pohl emerges from the boarding house into the lane beside it.

  He has been waiting for quiet and nightfall; Pohl needs to be far from here, to get to the encampment where he can think again. When he sees the car is still where the SS driver parked it, under the dripping overhang of the house front opposite, he checks the lane around him, taking a firm grip of his cases, and then he slips across cobbles towards the vehicle.

  But a noise—in the lane ahead—has him halting. Startled, he lifts his face; Pohl thinks he hears movement. He stays where he is, stiff and guarded.

  All day he has felt watched. He has feared that Arnold or the Gestapo would come calling. Pohl lay in his quarters, reeling, after what he heard this morning.

  First came the shock, and then the slow and dread realisation: if they are capable of that—if they are capable of that—then he too might be taken.

  Out here, they can do anything they want. There is no law or truth or trust, no sense of reason; there is no one he can turn to either. He’s left himself wide open. So Pohl stands now, taut and alone, facing the gloom in the lane beyond him.

  But the houses here lean in to one another, and he cannot see anything between those dark walls; all he hears is the dripping from the eaves, water trickling along the guttering.

  “Who’s there?” Pohl whispers, hoarse, accusing.

  His voice is loud in the quiet, but gets no answer.

  All day, Pohl did not rise or dress, or eat or wash; he could not even close his eyes. It was cold enough in the room to see his breath, but he lit the stove only long enough to burn his letters, the words he wrote to Dorle, just the night before, which now seemed so hollow to him.

  He could have taken twenty, thirty, forty. He could have selected so many—men and women both: they wanted to be chosen. But he refused them. He did nothing. And Pohl could see nothing on the pages but his own pride and blindness; nothing but a rope to hang him with. So he stuffed the papers in amongst the kindling, holding a match to the nearest, watching them catch and curl and blacken before retreating.

  Those words will not be read now, by anyone. As soon as he gets to the encampment, he’ll burn the rest; the authorities will have no written proof of his dissent. But Pohl knows, too, they will not need that.

  And now—again—he hears something moving.

  But not ahead of him in the darkness, as he’d first thought; Pohl feels the noise is coming from behind him, from beyond the lane mouth.

  Someone is approaching from the town square.

  Pohl turns his head at the sound of footfalls: not just one or two—it sounds to him like a group—and his stomach lurches at the thought of those coming for him.

  He knew there would be patrols in the town this evenin
g; Pohl had reckoned on policemen enforcing the curfew, and he’d steeled himself for clearing at least one checkpoint. But if this is not policemen. If this is Gestapo, he is lost now.

  He opens the car door, throwing his cases across the driver’s seat, but Pohl knows he has no way of escaping, so he straightens up again, to brace himself for questions—for arrest, even.

  And—just then—Pohl hears the first noise another time.

  A muffled shifting; a stifled breath, perhaps.

  It is closer to him, this first noise—and it is coming from the dark in the lane beyond the car, where he’d first heard it. Pohl turns towards it, unnerved to feel it so near now; to feel himself surrounded. There is a unit on the square behind him—police or Gestapo—and someone ahead too, in the darkness.

  “Who’s there?” he repeats, a frightened hiss. And then: “I can hear you.” He wants no one playing games with him.

  Pohl gets no answer, but someone is there and waiting. Maybe it is even more than one person, readying themselves to taunt him. Pohl reaches inside the car, fumbling for the lever, flicking on the headlights.

  The lane is bathed in white light.

  And it is children: three children he finds there.

  Dishevelled and frightened, peasant children by a horse-drawn cart, leaning crooked on its axles.

  They are pressed to the house walls, half hidden by the turn in the lane, but Pohl sees a girl—almost grown—at the horse’s head, and two boys following. One of school age, nearly as old as the sister, but the other far younger, squinting and frightened, swaddled in blankets, bundled on to his brother’s shoulders.

  The horse’s hooves are wrapped in sacking, the girl’s boots also. They have been caught out under curfew, caught in the headlights of an SS car, and the girl stands frozen. The older boy only hesitates a moment—just long enough to seek Pohl out, to see who he is faced with—and then a shout from the town square has him alerted. Already the boy has his head up, eyes wide and darting. The footfalls are closer, the voices louder; it is too late to run now, and the child turns his gaze on Pohl again, fierce in the white light, as though Pohl has snared them.