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Darkness, and snow again. Hannibal among the corpses, how much later he did not know, snow drifting down to dust his mother’s eyelashes and her hair. She was the only corpse not blackened and crisped. Hannibal tugged at her, but her body was frozen to the ground. He pressed his face against her. Her bosom was frozen hard, her heart silent. He put a napkin over her face and piled snow on her. Dark shapes moved at the edge of the woods. His torch reflected on wolves’ eyes. He shouted at them and waved a shovel. Mischa was determined to come out to her mother—he had to choose. He took Mischa back inside and left the dead to the dark. Mr. Jakov’s book was undamaged beside his blackened hand until a wolf ate the leather cover and amid the scattered pages of Huyghens’ Treatise on Light licked Mr. Jakov’s brains off the snow.
Hannibal and Mischa heard snuffling and growling outside. Hannibal built up the fire. To cover the noise he tried to get Mischa to sing; he sang to her. She clutched his coat in her fists.
“Ein Mannlein …”
Snowflakes on the windows. In the corner of a pane, a dark circle appeared, made by the tip of a glove. In the dark circle a pale blue eye.
7
THE DOOR BURST OPEN then and Grutas came in with Milko and Dortlich. Hannibal grabbed a boar spear from the wall and Grutas, with his sure instinct turned his gun on the little girl.
“Drop it or I’ll shoot her. Do you understand me?”
The looters swarmed Hannibal and Mischa then.
The looters in the house, Grentz outside waved for the half-track truck to come up, the truck slit-eyed, its blackout lights picking up wolves’ eyes at the edge of the clearing, a wolf dragging something.
The men gathered around Hannibal and his sister at the fire, the fire warming from the looters’ clothes a sweetish stink of weeks in the field and old blood caked in the treads of their boots, they gathered close. Pot Watcher caught a small insect emerging from his clothes and popped its head off with his thumbnail.
They coughed on the children. Predator breath, ketosis from their scavenged diet of mostly meat, some scraped from the half-track’s treads, made Mischa bury her face in Hannibal’s coat. He gathered her inside his coat and felt her heart beating hard. Dortlich picked up Mischa’s bowl of porridge and wolfed it down himself, getting the last wipe from the bowl on his scarred and webbed fingers. Kolnas extended his
bowl, but Dortlich did not give him any.
Kolnas was stocky and his eyes took on a shine when he looked at precious metal. He slipped Mischa’s bracelet off her wrist and put it in his pocket. When Hannibal grabbed at his hand, Grentz pinched him on the side of the neck and his whole arm went numb.
Distant artillery boomed.
Grutas said, “If a patrol comes—either side— we’re setting up a field hospital here. We saved these little ones and we’re protecting their family’s stuff in the truck. Get a Red Cross off the truck and hang it over the door. Do it now.”
“The other two will freeze if you leave them in the truck,” Pot Watcher said. “They got us by the patrol, they may be useful again.”
“Put them in the bunkhouse,” Grutas said. “Lock them in.”
“Where would they go?” Grentz said. “Who would they tell?”
“They can tell you about their sad fucking lives, in Albanian, Grentz. Get your ass out there and do it.”
In the blowing snow, Grentz lifted two small figures out of the truck and prodded them toward the barn bunkhouse.
8
GRUTAS HAD A SLENDER chain, freezing against the children’s skin as he looped it around their necks. Kolnas snapped on the heavy padlocks. Grutas and Dortlich chained Hannibal and Mischa to the banister on the upper landing of the staircase, where they were out of the way but visible. The one called Pot Watcher brought them a chamber pot and blanket from a bedroom.
Through the bars of the banister, Hannibal watched them throw the piano stool onto the fire. He tucked Mischa’s collar underneath the chain to keep it off her neck.
The snow banked high against the lodge, only the upper panes of the windows admitted a grey light. With the snow blowing sideways past the windows and the wind squeal, the lodge was like a great train moving. Hannibal rolled himself and his sister in the blanket and the landing carpet. Mischa’s coughs were muffled. Her forehead was hot against Hannibal’s cheek. From beneath his coat, he took a crust of stale bread and put it in his mouth. When it was soft, he gave it to her.
Grutas drove one of his men outside every few hours to shovel the doorway, keeping a path to the well. And once Pot Watcher took a pan of scraps to the barn.
Snowed in, the time passing in a slow ache. There was no food, and then there was food, Kolnas and Milko carrying Mischa’s bathtub to the stove lidded with a plank, which scorched where it overhung the tub, Pot Watcher feeding the fire with books and wooden salad bowls. With one eye on the stove, Pot Watcher caught up on his journal and accounts. He piled small items of loot on the table for sorting and counting. In a spidery hand he wrote each man’s name at the top of a page:
Vladis Grutas
Zigmas Milko
Bronys Grentz
Enrikas Dortlich
