Chapter Eight
Elsa set aside half of her bread to share with Klara later, tucking it deftly inside her clothing to keep it safe.
She glanced up and noticed the escaped prisoner was doing the same.
She hated him for having the same survival plan as her.
It somehow narrowed the differences between them, and their differences were what they had clung onto for years.
She stood up and looked through a knothole in the door.
The biting wind was lifting the branches and debris from the ground and swirling the freezing snow so it danced wildly as it tracked the base of the stone walls and the slope of the roof tiles of the barn next door.
No one would be travelling today. She turned away, glad that the thatched roof on their barn muted much of the sound.
She retreated with Klara into the furthest corner from the soldier. An uneasy peace descended.
‘Is the weather still bad?’
Elsa gave a curt nod.
‘Where are you going?’ Walker asked after some minutes. ‘Do you have a family? A husband?’
She glanced up. Why she was alone had nothing to do with him.
He must have read from the expression on her face how she felt. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be so impertinent. I just meant that you look like you have been travelling for days. Travelling alone in wartime is a risky thing to do, particularly a woman and child on their own.’
‘What I am doing is no concern of yours,’ replied Elsa. She thought better of it. She was being rude and rudeness wasn’t in her nature. ‘But I thank you for your concern. I would not choose to travel alone. I understand the risks. I can see that I am at risk now.’
He seemed surprised. ‘You mean from me?’
‘I mean from you.’
‘I can assure you, hurting a woman and a young child is not on my agenda.’ He looked at the pitchfork. ‘What is on yours?’
‘Right now?’
‘Right now.’
‘To leave here — and you — as soon as the weather improves.’
‘It seems we are both hoping for the blizzard to pass,’ he replied. ‘You, so you can travel, me so I won’t be prodded with a pitchfork in my sleep.’
They sat in mutual silence, looking at everything except each other. Eventually, Klara became a magnet for their gazes to rest on, neutral ground, a calming sight . . .
The barn door slammed open.
A woman stood in the entrance, her legs and arms braced, trembling as she surveyed her barn.
She was as tall as her husband but much stockier.
She wore an old flowery pinafore over her grey dress and no coat, as if she had run straight from the kitchen without even thinking of the blizzard.
Her thinning grey hair was swept up into a rudimentary small bun, which to Elsa seemed to carry far too many oversized pins than was needed.
Tiny wisps of stray, dry hair had already attempted their escape, flattened somewhat by the snow.
By night-time, Elsa thought, it would have enough to form a halo around her head.
The woman snorted when her gaze fell on Elsa’s curious expression.
Her cheeks, home to a mass of spidery rosacea veins, wobbled and reddened.
‘Three of them! Three!’ She turned to her husband, who had followed sheepishly behind.
She hit him, over and over, the slaps alternating on each side of his head.
The blows rained down on him in quick succession.
‘Have you gone mad?’ she shouted between each slap.
‘We don’t have enough food to feed ourselves let alone anyone else! No more refugees, I said!’
‘Come, Erna,’ he cajoled, warding her off with his forearms and splayed hands.
‘Don’t “Come, Erna” me!’ She stopped her attack and turned her venom onto Elsa. ‘Get out! Now! Before I report you for stealing!’
Elsa looked to Heinrich for help but found none forthcoming.
She calmly addressed the wife. ‘I didn’t ste—’
‘Out!’ She pulled Klara roughly to her feet. ‘Before I kill you!’ The woman grabbed the pitchfork and swung it wildly towards Walker. ‘You! Get up! Take your wife and brat out of here or I will stab you until you cry for mercy then I will stab you some more!’ She stabbed the air to prove her point.
Walker slowly stood.
‘Move!’ she shrieked. ‘Get out of here or I will kill you! What is your name? I shall report you!’
Elsa tried to placate her. ‘Please. We will leave when the weather is better.’
The woman turned on her again, furiously stabbing the air with her pitchfork so Elsa was forced to step back.
‘I want you out now!’
‘But the temperature is so cold out there. We could die.’
‘I don’t care.’ The woman jabbed the prongs of the fork towards Elsa’s chest. ‘Out! Or I’ll fetch my brothers!’
The farmer shook his head. ‘You’d better leave.’
‘But Klara is just a child. She could die out there.’
He shrugged. ‘I’m sorry. Erna’s brothers . . .’
Elsa angrily gathered her coat and food. Walker picked up her bag and she snatched it from him. ‘I don’t need your help.’ As the farmer’s wife began to order them out again, she snapped at her, ‘Calm down! We’re going! I wouldn’t stay here if you begged me!’
Elsa grabbed Klara’s hand and went to the threshold.
The angry blizzard spewed frozen sleet into her face.
She hesitated and looked back at Heinrich in the hope he would do something — anything.
He turned away. Walker gathered his things and roughly brushed past her as he left.
Elsa watched him stride across the yard and into the blizzard.
Heinrich jerked his head towards him. ‘You should follow him.’
‘I don’t want to travel with him.’
The farmer ignored his wife’s cursing and stepped closer, speaking quietly so that Erna couldn’t hear him. ‘What if you come across Russians, or the British and Americans? His company might save you.’
‘Like his letter?’
‘Exactly.’
‘He’s more at risk of capture than I am of coming across the British Army.’
‘We are losing the war. Every German is vulnerable. Especially German women and children. That is—’ he looked at Klara — ‘if she is German.’
Elsa pulled down Klara’s woollen hat. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘You are blonde and fair. Your child looks too dark to be related to you.’ He jerked his head to the door.
‘He has dark hair.’ She stared incredulously at Heinrich.
His face was lined with years of experience.
As his wife grumbled, she wondered if she should consider what he was suggesting.
She had already been robbed of her money in the most farcical way.
What if her next encounter was more dangerous?
Perhaps travelling with a man would give her protection and the illusion of a family.
The farmer nodded in the direction of the yard.
‘Look. He is waiting for you. He knows how important your company is to him. He can’t speak German.
He needs you as his friend. He can hide in plain sight if he is part of a family.
He knows what is best for him. You should accept what is best for you. ’
She followed his gaze to see Walker standing in the snowy blizzard, his collar turned up, his dark hair already white from fat flecks of snow.
She nodded stiffly, reluctantly.
Heinrich slipped his own hat from his head and gave it to her. ‘Give him this. Make peace with him.’
She thanked him, turning it over in her hands. ‘I don’t know what my family will say about this.’
Walker had started to move again. Gunfire rattled somewhere far away, muffled by the blizzard. The front was coming nearer every day.
‘I think your family would want you to do whatever it takes to reach Bremen safely,’ said the farmer.
She thought of her mother and knew he was right. She checked Klara’s coat was buttoned and braced herself. ‘Are you sure we can’t stay?’
He looked at Klara. ‘I’m sure.’
Elsa silently followed the soldier into the driving snow.
Whether it was his domineering wife, or that he was already in possession of the note of recommendation he needed, the farmer no longer had the drive to help them.
Surviving the next few hours until the storm died down was her priority now, and the man in the distance might just help her achieve it.
* * *
They did not exchange any words for the first two days.
It was as if an invisible barrier had come down between them, formed by the resentment of collaboration.
She refused to walk in his footsteps or by his side, as if by doing so she was in her own small way opposing their truce.
She also did not walk ahead, in case he attacked her from behind.
Instead, she walked a step behind him and slightly to his right, which allowed her to keep an eye on him and try to decipher what he might be thinking.
Occasionally her glance met one of his, and the invisible barrier between them grew thicker.
When they came upon a farm or isolated house, she was the one who begged for food.
If the inhabitants gave her some, that was good; if they did not, her distraction allowed Walker to steal what he could.
They shared their booty in silence, neither congratulating nor evaluating what they had done.
They stole to survive, but Elsa instinctively knew that he disliked having to do it as much as she did.
Their silent trek along the back roads, across fields and through densely wooded forests sometimes brought them up against larger convoys of refugees clogging up the roads.
Overladen wagons, pulled by ponies coated in mud, left tracks of churned brown snow in their wake.
People’s choice of emergency stores often astonished her.
A wagon that should have been loaded with warm clothing and food instead carried an accordion and neatly stacked tables and chairs.
Another was laden with a threadbare seat and a large mattress tied down with criss-crossed rope — what use was either, she wanted to ask her walking companion, without a roof to protect them?