A Meal in Winter by Hubert Mingarelli

Author:Hubert Mingarelli
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620971741
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2016-05-28T04:00:00+00:00

IT WAS NOT the first evening, nor the second, but the third evening after the first shootings that Emmerich started fearing for him. And since then, the fear had never left him. It was probably his son that Emmerich saw when he stared at Bauer and me, later, in the spring, while he was dying under the bridge in Galicia. No, in truth I don’t know if it was him that Emmerich saw when he looked through us. But I hoped it was him, so that he could have seen him one last time while he died, to help him. And, through hoping, I ended up believing it.

But on that evening – the third after the first shootings – we came back from outside, where Graaf had called us, the whole company, for no good reason: to tell us about some coal that had been stolen and sold to a Pole. Emmerich had sat on his bed, face pale, and sighed pitifully, then told us – Bauer and me – about his son, with such intensity in his voice that we didn’t dare take off our coats, as if by doing so we would have deprived him of something.

We listened to him. He had a lot to say. Emmerich had been holding this in for three days. We understood that the distance between his home and our base here in Poland had grown longer, stretched out. It was almost as if a wall had risen up between them.

Like everyone else, Bauer and I were still living through the shootings, the killings; they flashed endlessly before our eyes and reverberated in our ears. So much so that listening to Emmerich talking so helplessly seemed strange to us. Could we tell him that? But thankfully, he was not asking us for advice, at least not yet. We listened to him. We understood him and we did not understand him and we were too hot in our coats, and after three days the killings were still filling up our minds, boiling away inside them, and spilling over. And on top of this, all Emmerich’s fears for his son, instead of making us forget our own worries, just made them worse.

We had never thought about his kid before then. We knew he existed, and that was all. He’d talked about him, of course, the way friends always talk to each other about their wives if they’re married or their children if they have any. But from that evening on, Emmerich’s son became part of our lives. He was, so to speak, sitting on Emmerich’s bed. He slept with us that night, and every night after, and he was there with us every morning too, at breakfast. It was as if Emmerich had caught a disease.

After that evening, Emmerich managed to use each event here to talk to us about his son. Not only about his fears, thankfully, but also memories, details. And that was fine. But it was a real disease, all the same. Sometimes Bauer and I couldn’t stand it any more.

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