A Boy in Winter Read online

  The ones who ran them here have fallen behind them and, glancing back, still apprehensive, the schoolmaster sees they are gathering at the entrance to the passageway. Bent over, leaning at the door frame, they are catching their breath, and others are joining them out on the street beyond the doorway; did they chase down more of the townsfolk? Did more hide like him? The schoolmaster hopes—briefly—that more are still hiding. And that they hid well enough for the Germans not to find them.

  “Forward! Get moving.”

  The schoolmaster does as he is told as new shouts come from ahead of them, this time all in Ukrainian.

  “Get a move on.”

  Three policemen stand, coshes raised, at the passageway’s farthest end, and the old teacher moves his hands swiftly to his mother’s shoulders. He sees grey light leaking through the door there: dawn has come, and he wants this harrying to be over.

  The door is pushed open.

  He sees a room full of faces. Full of shoulders and coats, and hats and suitcases. But it is mostly the faces the schoolmaster takes in: pale and cowed, bewildered, they turn to the door and the latest to join them.

  There are a hundred in there. More. Perhaps it is nearer two, or even three: it is a press of people.

  The schoolmaster sees the small factory floor has been pressed full. Not just of townsfolk; it can’t be. It must be Jews from all over the district. Who knew we were so many? This throng of faces comes as a surprise to him, a sudden comfort, even. But then a cosh is pressed between his shoulder blades.

  The master is shoved into this crowd, his mother after him, so the nearest must jostle and shift to make room for them. Shoulders part, arms and backs, but there are too many in here already, there is no more room to be had, and the shove the old man got was too hard.

  He staggers forward, losing his footing. Lurching now, he lets go of his mother, for fear of her falling also.

  “Oh!”

  Then a hand comes out and grasps him.

  “Schoolmaster!”

  It comes from among the backs and elbows, and the old teacher reaches for his helper; he reaches in gratitude.

  Only for a cosh to fall behind him.

  A blow to the head that fells him.

  2

  Pohl drives too fast, and a different route than his usual, sending the car lurching across the town bridge to leave the place swiftly, his stomach tight with the shock and the shame of it—that his countrymen do this; that he is here to see it happening.

  The town spires recede first, in the fog in the rear-view mirror, then the factory chimney, and still he jolts further along the cart tracks into open country, putting the miles behind him. Pohl can’t see far through the lifting mist, but even when he reaches the line of the roadworks, he still drives onwards, crossing the rubble thoroughfare his labourers have laid so far, rather than skirting along it as he usually would. On any other day, he might drive from labour gang to labour gang on his inspection rounds, or head for his office at the encampment, but Pohl has no thoughts of work this morning, just of putting distance between himself and the soldiers.

  He has seen far too much of what they do—even just on the journey to take up this posting.

  —

  They crawled across this landscape to get here, Pohl and his small advance troop of workers. It took days of driving in convoy across Germany and Poland, and then the vast and rolling grassland beyond the Ukrainian border. Through the heat-haze and downpours of the August thunderstorms; on the heels of the invasion; over the tank ruts and across the craters.

  Pohl took these in with dismay: all the blast-holes and gouges left in the Wehrmacht’s wake, in the path of the Soviets’ retreat. The further east, the worse it got: after they crossed the river Bug, the roadside ditches were filled to overflowing, not just with floodwater but with slaughtered Red Army horses, Red Army corpses. Pohl had steeled himself for damage, even for carnage, but not on this scale; and he was unprepared, also, for how long it was simply left in place, to bloat and to decay. It seemed to him a desecration.

  He wrote to Dorle: There is nothing left of some places, just wreckage. Barns had been mortared, left blackened and roofless; where once had been farmsteads and grain-stores, outbuildings, only the gable-ends were left standing, charred and listing, their burned-out shells visible for miles across the wide plains.

  He saw looted churches, empty and open to the elements, their windows and doorways broken. Entire towns had been ransacked—such barbarity—crossroads and bridges blasted, wooden pylons left in splinters, cables in shreds and tangles.

  In whole days of driving, they saw no people. Or no one living. They passed through villages, and all who could had fled, it seemed, or gone to earth; just a few animals straying, bewildered; scrawny goats scattering as Pohl and his men drove past. This is what an army does, my Dorle. This is the aftermath.

  Well, what did you expect? Pohl imagined his wife’s reply. It is a war you’ve gone to, no?

  She never wanted him anywhere near it. Dorle told him as much before he came out here: You needn’t think I can approve of this.

  She can’t lie to him: that’s just the way she is, so Pohl knows how much it hurt her that he took this posting. But still he talks to her inside. When he wakes in the mornings, and when he lies down to sleep again; it helps him to think of home at the start and end of each working day. Pohl often finds himself talking to Dorle in between times too: at his desk, in the lulls at his site office, or in the solitude of his car. Even now, ploughing on through the fog, still overcome by this morning, feeling the shortness of his sleep and the sour lack of breakfast inside him, Pohl thinks that if he could be set apart with her, just for a short time, then it would surely help him. Because they talk things out, the pair of them: this is how they’ve always been.

  Pohl had to talk and talk with her when they were courting, walk and walk with her. Fond as they were by then, she’d thought it too late for them to think of marrying. Old friends and fossils: that’s what Dorle called them both. He was forty and past his prime years as a suitor; Dorle was not so much younger and accustomed to her own ways; you know how I am by now. She had long had her own clear-eyed look on life.

  But for that boldness, her parents would have seen her married in her twenties, to a son of a solid Münster merchant, preferably, or one of the younger bachelors among her father’s associates. When Dorle went to university, her mother despaired that she wasn’t marrying material; and when she took up teaching after she graduated—her classes full of daughters from good Rheinland families just like her own one. But Dorle said she worked to keep herself, so she could please herself; beholden to no one, she had the long school holidays free to spend walking, or on endless card games at friends’ apartments. Or just to spend idling: Dorle liked to read in the bathtub for hours at a time. She had time enough, she said, to do that, and for talking and laughing, and thinking her own thoughts, which was the best life had to offer. She told Pohl, smiling, that the two of them could talk their thoughts out loud with one another; had they not known each other since childhood days? What more could they ask? But that smile had been encouragement, and Pohl had wanted no other wife.

  Dorothea deserves a sainthood, Pohl’s brother-in-law wrote to him after their Emmy was born, only a year after the wedding. Such a solemn and pretty little baby, and such a surprise to both of them: they had expected companionship, not to be a family. Fossils no more, Dorle called them Abraham and Sarah instead, and she laughed over her family’s confusion: joy and embarrassment in almost equal measure that the two of them should become parents when they were greying at the temples.

  Pohl’s brother-in-law told him to be careful not to land Dorle with another baby, not at her age, and not when you might be enlisted, you should take care of my sister—it irks Pohl to remember. And to think that the man will soon be a father again himself, for the fourth time over. His wife will get a medal for this next child, bronze, the nearest thing to sainthood the Party confe
rs; but Pohl knows Dorle has no such aspirations.

  “Who has children for their sake?”

  She is as sharp as a knife blade, and cuts just as cleanly; Dorle sees her many nephews as blessings, certainly, but not from the Führer.

  “Does he presume such powers now?”

  Time was, when friends came over in the evenings, they used to roll their eyes and shake their heads in shared contempt for the brown crowd who ruled them. Now, too many friends shrug their shoulders.

  “What can we do? We are stuck for the meantime with this Führer.”

  “Yes, we have to stick with him now it is wartime.”

  “Remember the last war. That disaster.”

  “No good ever came our way from losing.”

  Make the best of a bad job, they say. And: Just until this is over. And: At least we have the Wehrmacht.

  “At least Hitler has the generals to guide him.”

  But Dorle has no time for such contortions, for such distorted thinking: “Who can put their faith in generals, I ask you, when they serve such criminals? Marching into Poland, into France now. Whatever next?”

  She throws up her hands, after friends have left again, and it is just the two of them in the parlour chairs.

  “Who is there left we can invite now? Who can we talk to without fuming?”

  Dorle is scornful, and while Pohl has minded her to be careful (if you talk of our esteemed leaders, then with the windows closed, please) it gives him some of the succour he is craving, thinking of her forthright ways as he is driving; of his wife’s plain-spoken disdain for the powers-that-be-now.

  But if she knew what those powers are doing here?

  Pohl takes a harder grip of the steering wheel.

  He is on a marsh route that he’s unfamiliar with; he has never driven this far before, but still he presses onwards. Only when he sees no more houses, no more field boundaries, does he begin to slow the car, relieved to be alone now. But despite the emptiness, his thoughts keep crowding in on him.

  By the time friends were drafted—or friends volunteered, even—they’d already agreed, he and Dorle: he would not fight in service of the Party. The idea of this was intolerable.

  So Pohl went from office to office with his petitions, sitting for hours on end in the draft bureau waiting rooms; all small-windowed and airless, designed to demoralise. But he persisted—taking his letters of reference and his engineering certificates, spreading out his neatly typed lists on the desks, when his turn was eventually called, naming all the roads and road-bridges he had worked on since he qualified.

  The officials looked all his papers over, glancing up at the wire rims of his glasses, then down again at his prescription for short-sightedness (Dorle said he should leave nothing out: leave nothing to chance).

  The officials narrowed their eyes at Pohl’s lapels, too: his Party badge, conspicuous in its newness. This was his brother-in-law’s contribution: You can wear the blasted pin and keep your scruples; of course you can, you innocent. (Pohl had begun to fear it might, in fact, be the only way left to keep them.)

  The officials knew a flag of convenience when they saw it; they must have seen any number of front-avoiders decide to fly the swastika on sufferance. But they conceded all the same: Pohl would be more useful behind the lines.

  The Party badge is still a sore point between him and Dorle. (“Tell me you haven’t.” She gave him such a dark look, when he returned from taking her brother’s counsel. “Oh, tell me you haven’t, please.”) But the unease that comes over him now is about more than that; this creeping guilt is far worse. It has Pohl steering to the roadside, his tyres now sinking, now bumping, and then stopping the car entirely, sitting hunched and uncertain with the engine turning over. There is just so much about this place he hasn’t told her.

  Pohl could write so little of what he really felt in his early letters, he confined himself to practicalities. Telling Dorle how he and his men surveyed the land in the first weeks, and set up construction posts: large encampments, for materials and for labourers, at fifteen-kilometre intervals. Once enough of these were in place, the work gangs began quarrying a path, wide and level, excavating a trench through the rough lowlands.

  The thoroughfare he is building is to be a grand one: Himmler has decreed it. But Pohl spared his wife the SS bombast, sticking to the engineers’ brief he’d received with his contract: that the road should be wide enough for two-way traffic, and high enough to withstand winter flooding. No small task in these wetlands, I can tell you.

  Heap a ton of rubble onto the mud here and, come the morning, it will have sunk without trace again; the mire forever sucking at the duckboards they have to lay and re-lay between the workers’ quarters.

  “Marsh” was amongst the first Ukrainian words Pohl learned here, simply through repetition. Bolota, bolota. The labourers blamed the swampy ground for all their building woes, and not without justification: a road in this terrain—at least a solid and even one, which is the only kind Pohl can allow himself—will be quite some test of his engineering skills. But why come all this way to build something if you’re not going to build it properly?

  You build it well, then. If you must be out there.

  Dorle’s replies have confined themselves to the shortest and sorest of paragraphs; and Pohl knows he will not be able to talk it out with her until his next home leave comes—until construction here is nearing completion—and this seems such a long time.

  But the backfilling has been successful. On the western-most stretches, the workers are already layering sand and gravel, bedding in the aggregate. Pohl’s labour teams here will follow on, in due course; after they have finished digging out the drainage trenches and shoring up the embankments, they can begin preparing for the asphalt, finally; they can smooth their way through these new and vast territories.

  It is a road for when this war is over. No more tanks will have to roll then. Pohl has told Dorle this, over and over—in his thoughts this time, not in his letters to her: that would be too dangerous. It is for when Hitler loses, as he surely must, my love. Just look at all his over-reaching madness—the man means to conquer Russia now: I ask you! It can only be a matter of time. Still aware of her soreness, and how his letters can do little to soothe it, Pohl has assured her repeatedly—even if only inwardly—that he has come to build a road here, good and broad, and fit for civilians. Fit for civilisation, not some thousand-year abomination. And even if he’d sooner tell her in person, it has still eased him to say these things.

  It eased him too, when the people began returning out of hiding: farmers to their farms, peasants to the allotments they tended. Pohl told Dorle, so he would remember it all to tell her later, how they were still shaken at first, and cautious, after what they’d suffered under the retreating Russians. Pohl was shaken himself—by the rags they wore; by their weather-worn faces and toothlessness, old beyond their years; by their dirty and barefoot children. Honestly, I am living among people from another century. He didn’t like, either, the onion stink of them (if I am truthful, Dorle, as I know I always should be with you). But it was a relief that the countryside he drove through from boarding house to roadworks was soon dotted again with people. Women greeting the morning with a scatter of grain and a cluster of hens at their ankles; the men, too, were early risers, already out at first light, carrying planks and adzes, making repairs, tilling the black earth.

  Everything grows here, like you couldn’t imagine. Sugar beet and winter wheat; Pohl drove out to the labour camps each morning through acres of dry-gold rye and barley, and the landscape that had seemed so flat and empty at first soon revealed itself as bountiful—a place of goat- and swineherds, and of ancient orchards under wide skies. In the peasants’ gardens, the weeds were cleared again from potatoes and garlic—the latter in pungent over-abundance in all his boarding-house evening meals, of course, but Pohl felt himself adjusting.

  September was glorious; October began likewise, and he described the ch
ange of season for Dorle: the new cool of the mornings, the slow-turning yellow of the birch leaves. There has even been a harvest; thanks be for the fields left untouched by the Soviets. Farmhands strode through the crop into the evenings, and Pohl watched the steady swing of the scythe blades in the low sun as he returned from working to the town again. He saw whole families at the reaping: boys striding behind their fathers, children bending and gleaning, old women sitting companionable in the stubble, tying the stalks into sheaves to dry. And on Sundays, after waking late, Pohl walked at the riverside. It’s where they baptise their children; I wish you could see that. All the children in the district, it seemed, were brought to the water; more every passing week, a streaming procession of families. Toddlers and ten-year-olds, wading hand in hand; babes-in-arms carried into the river’s flow; all born under Stalin, only now allowed their immersion. These people had so much denied them.

  It would take months, well into next spring, for the priests to reach the outlying villages; in the meantime, all those within walking distance went to the river services, rising long before dawn to bring their children to the water at long last. The priest stood in the shallows to receive them, the hems of his robes spreading pale across the river’s surface and his arms held out to his young charges. Solemn, ceremonious, he blessed them and he lifted them. And how the people sing then, Dorle; if you could only hear them; the massed congregation on the riverbank. Even days afterwards, just recalling this, Pohl found himself uplifted.

  But it doesn’t help him to remember this morning.

  His hands gripped to the steering wheel to steady them, Pohl is still too appalled at what he saw outside his boarding-house window; at being witness to such brutality.

  His Dorle was right about this posting. He should have tried harder, resisted longer. He will not fight in this war—but perhaps this is not enough to save him.

  Ahead of him are the marshes. Partisan territory, still unconquered by his countrymen; Pohl can see it through the fog-held stillness. And he can see too, now, how Himmler’s men have made full use of this.