when it came to my wounds. After every session, the swelling subsided and I didn’t feel so cold.
My toes are still moving at the far end of my body. I believe my bones are knitting together, my wounds are closing, and the penicillin is doing its job. But the pain is tenacious, constant, tireless. I pull away the cover to look at my legs. My splints are recycled wooden slats, and belts were nailed to them instead of the usual straps. On one of the slats, I can see saw-tooth marks. On the other the trace of a hinge pulled off with a claw hammer. I am a monster fashioned from cast-off wood, bolts, and pieced-together flesh. But that’s better than nothing.
The hospitals are far away. In space and in time.
FORTY-SEVEN
It is the end of the afternoon. When he came back from his walk, Matthias stoked the fire, then went looking for a book on the other side. He reads a lot, and since I show no interest in the books he leaves by my bed, he tells me stories. Like the one about the two tramps quarrelling beneath a tree as they wait for someone who never shows up.
Every time he crosses over to the other side, a cold draft rushes through the half-open door. And every time, the draft rouses me from my lethargy and I lift my head to look into the great lifeless house. But I can see no more than a dark hallway with a light at the end.
We live in the annex of a great manor, in the summer kitchen. A porch with a wood stove and a wide window facing south. When the sky is clear, the light enters and warms the room. But as soon as the sun falls behind the horizon, we have to stoke the fire. Though it shows signs of wear and a few stains caused by leaks, the room seems to have been designed with care. The moldings feature rosette figures. The floors are hardwood. On the walls, you can pick out spots where pictures once hung.
In the centre of the porch floor is a trap door. It gives onto a crawl space. Matthias uses it as a cellar. He stores meat there, and vegetables, and everything that needs to be kept cool but not freeze.
The ceiling is criss-crossed by broad wooden beams that follow the gentle incline. In the summer, I imagine the rain must drum upon the sheet-metal roof. A sort of roll that would recall the comforting interior of cars and the weightlessness of long trips. But for now the snow piles up without a sound. When I listen hard, I hear nothing more than the beams sighing above our heads.
Matthias stands in the doorway. He looks like a navigator in the prow of a ship.
Guess what I found, he says, eager for my answer.
For a moment, the door gapes open behind him. The corridor disappears into the shadows and appears to open into a spacious salon. I picture a manor with high ceilings, comfortable rooms, and hallways branching off. A labyrinth of sorts: some rooms lead into others, but some are dead ends. A wide staircase leads upstairs, there must be a chandelier above the dining room table, an imposing library, and a stone fireplace in the sitting room. One thing is for sure, the house is too big for us. It would be impossible to heat, we would burn up our wood supply in the space of few weeks. Then we would die of cold after burning the furniture.
You give up? Matthias asks.
He stares, waiting for an answer that never comes.
It’s a chess set, he says, sighing. I thought you might enjoy it.
He closes the door with his hip. The labyrinth on the other side disappears as quickly as it appeared and the walls of the porch close in on us.
FIFTY-SIX
The wind rose in the night. Squalls shook the porch. It has begun to snow. I hear it beating against the window like birds deceived by their reflections.
From this side of the dark glass, I observe my face. A large, dark stain of shadow, haggard eyes, greasy hair, unkempt beard. Under the covers, the flat outline of my prone body, thin, useless.
Matthias is in the rocking chair. He is repairing one of the straps on his snowshoes. The oil lamp shivers. Soot is slowly smearing the glass bell. The wick should be trimmed, but Matthias does not react, too absorbed by the task at hand.
We have finished eating. The dishes washed, the floor swept, the wood stacked. Everything as it should be. I don’t know how he does it. The hours run together, the days repeat, and Matthias gets busy. He never stops, except to read. From dawn to dusk, he toils, cleans, cooks. He works slowly, never hurried. The way the snow falls. And he is right. He has to do something. Winter roars, the blackout takes us further back in time, and losing touch is the most pressing danger.
Even if I won’t accept my fate, I have to accept that I am lucky to have ended up here. Maybe I will never walk again, I have lost all desire to speak, but I’m not dead. At least, not yet.
As he sews the leather strap, Matthias watches me from the corner of his eye.
You know, during the world wars, some conscripts refused to join the army, he begins. Some of them got married in a hurry, and others, like my father, went and hid in the woods and hoped they’d be forgotten. But taking to the forest wasn’t easy. The winters were harder back then. And bounty-hunters had all the patience they needed to watch the outskirts of the village for the slightest sign of life. A rifle shot, a plume of smoke, an unusual path in the snow. Military justice was generous when it came to denunciations or information that would let them locate and hunt down deserters. But most of the time, the villages supported them secretly. Provisions were left at strategic points. The poor guys came to get the stuff in the middle of the night, attracting no attention, and returned to the mountains to pursue their desperate survival. Even in the depth of winter, they lit a fire only once darkness had fallen, and when the nights were clear, it was wiser not to stir the embers from the previous day. Deep in their hiding places, the young men busied themselves the best they could as they stared at the forest moving in on them. They darned their clothes, played cards, and polished their hunting rifles. Sometimes tensions grew, and when they switched sentinel duty, they would cast wary glances at their fellows. Yet they knew they could not do without each other. If they wanted to survive, they would have to face the cold, hunger, and boredom together. They soon understood that the most important job was, without a doubt, to tell stories to each other.
The wind is still blowing. The squalls pummel Matthias’s story and make the walls of the porch groan.
Resisters and deserters, it comes down to the same thing, Matthias went on. All of them had to spend the winter in some shelter, hunkered down in the middle of nowhere, saving their energy as they waited for spring. Spring, with its liberation. With a guy like you, he tells me, it wouldn’t have worked. We would have been discovered or would have killed each other. No one can survive with someone who won’t talk.
FIFTY-SIX
I awake. The sun is high in the sky and the blanket of snow lustrous with cold. Blinding. I slept poorly last night, my legs hurt, pain seized my bones. I could not close my eyes.
Kneeling in front of the plastic basin, Matthias is doing the washing. He rubs our clothes hard with detergent and hangs them on the line above the stove.
He gets on my nerves. Not only is he indefatigable, he is surprisingly agile. He leans over, straightens, and pivots as if his age were a simple disguise. When he drops something, he often catches it before it hits the floor. He is flexible and energetic. Slow at times, but always flexible and energetic.
Often he works without a word, though sometimes he talks too much. When he changes my bandages, when he stokes the fire, when he stirs the soup, when he washes the dishes, he chatters, he chats, he recites. I never answer. After all, he is only thinking out loud.
He was brought up in a world buried under work and days, he often says. Just before the great wars. The streets of his village were unpaved. The houses were bursting with children who wore hand-me-down boots with holes. Life in its entirety revolved around hard work and a few prayers.
Those were different days, he goes on, I would slip