THE CRUNCH OF FROST

Nute and I were fooling around, as usual, walking back and forth along the path to the well. We had nothing better to do; we didn’t even have a cigarette to justify stopping for as long as it took to smoke one. It was bitterly cold, and the stubborn frost crunched beneath the soles of our shoes. Clouds of vapor escaped our mouths whenever we dared to open them.

“Don’t lean over, idiot.” I always call him an idiot when we get near the well. I know that one day he’ll fall in and we won’t be able to get him out, even with a crane.

“There’s a man in the well,” Nute said in his piping voice. When he shouts or cries, it’s worse: he sounds like the horn of a departing ship.

“There’s nobody there. Let’s ask old Frank for a cigarette; he gave me one once.”

“The man in the well is Hitler. Hitler’s down inside the well. Come on.” He said it with conviction. That frightened me. I only take Nute seriously when he says things like that.

When we reached the well and looked down, we saw that Hitler was indeed struggling to finish climbing out. The silt and moss clinging to the walls made them slippery. I looked around for something to hit him with and spotted a thick branch leaning against the door of Helga’s house.

“Don’t let him get away,” I said unnecessarily. Nute chuckled. Hitler seemed to be having a great deal of trouble completing the climb. I came back with the branch and struck him on the head four or five times. The fifth blow was pointless; the Führer had already fallen into the depths of the well.

“It isn’t deep,” said Nute, who can always read my thoughts.

“He’ll be back in a moment, idiot,” I muttered. Nute laughed again.

“He’s in for a surprise.”

“Oh, really?” Once Nute gets an idea into his head, not even Christ himself could pry it out.

“Yes. We’ll stand on opposite sides of the well and squeeze it until we mash him to a pulp.”

I shrugged.

“All right.”

When Hitler finished climbing and we saw the tonsure crowning his head, the size of a twenty-kopeck coin, we compressed the walls of the well with all our might. When we put our minds to it, Nute and I are a pair of beasts. The idiot is stronger than I am, but I’m not far behind. Once he broke my nose with a punch, but I played dead, and when the bastard bent over to see what was wrong with me, I bit one of his testicles. Not hard enough to tear it off, but I bit it. He howled like a wild animal and swore he would kill me, but he did nothing.

“That’s it,” said Nute after we had compressed the well to the size of a can of peaches. It still weighed a good seventy kilos, of course, but Hitler was inside, dead and crushed into a lump.

“What now?”

“Who’s the idiot now?” Nute glared at me, his black eyes full of rage. He always gets like that when he commits an assassination. “We have to hide this somewhere. As soon as the Nazis realize what’s happened, they’ll come looking for him.”

I nodded. We set the can in a cradle of braided ropes and carried it to a corner of the woods beside the village. It’s not as if Frampol has a great forest, a world-famous forest or anything like that, but a hundred beeches make a forest, even if that gives the purists a pain in the balls.

“We can’t bury it, idiot,” I said when I saw Nute beginning to dig with the shovel he had stolen from Henrik.

“Are we going to carry this seventy-kilo lump around until the Second Coming of Our Lord?” Sometimes, when Nute gets sharp, I feel like biting his other testicle.

“We can’t let it out of our sight. If the Nazis come into the woods and dig Hitler up, all we’ll have left to decide is whether we want to be fried, boiled or roasted.”

Nute lowered his head and threw the shovel a long way off. Less than a minute later, though, he went to fetch it. Henrik’s shovel incriminated us as much as the compressed body inside the well. In fact, the entire universe was pointing an accusing finger at us. But we had rid them of Hitler, hadn’t we?

“No,” said Nute. “They’ll put someone just like him in charge, or someone worse. All we’ve bought them is a little breathing room.”

“Says the idiot who pisses himself whenever he sees a woman.” That’s Nute’s weak spot, but since I know it humiliates him more than my constant remarks about his stupidity, I only fire that shot when it’s absolutely necessary.

We dragged the well containing Hitler from the woods back to the houses, leaving a dusty furrow behind us. That furrow was like a wound across the world’s chest, and as soon as we had put the mashed-up Hitler in the cabinet, I sent Nute to erase the trail.

For the first few days, we couldn’t leave the cabinet alone. It was as though we feared the bastard might come back to life and escape his prison. Every few minutes, one of us would say, to keep our spirits up:

“He’s dead. Good and dead.”

It didn’t matter which of us said it. One of us did. When Janche came to see me for her Thursday ration, I sent her away without letting her in. She could tell something serious was wrong with me, but subtlety has never been her strong suit.

“Have you finally become Nute the idiot’s boyfriend? Do you like doing it with an idiot like him? Do you stick it up his ass or in his mouth?”

I slapped her, and she left crying and hurling insults at me. She called me a sexist pig. I don’t know whether the cure was worse than the disease. But the Hitler business wasn’t something we could make a joke of, as we usually did with everything else.

The Nazis came a week later. They didn’t say a word about Hitler. They merely looked high and low with those hard, sharp stares that take your breath away. But they touched nothing. The leader of the patrol, a twenty-five-centimeter-tall Swede named Sven Svergensson, barked orders in his own language, which we didn’t understand at all. It took the intervention of a corporal who looked so much like Nute that I nearly called him “idiot” three times before we understood the purpose of the visit. They wanted to take a census of layabouts, and we fit the bill perfectly. Why don’t you work. Because it makes us tired. Ah. Write that down. Would you like to work. No. You know the State wants everyone to work. Yes. But we don’t want to. All right. Write that down.

The one doing the writing was Chinese. You won’t believe it. The whole time, the sly fellow kept looking toward the cabinet, as if he could see through its thick oak doors. He couldn’t possibly know we had Hitler packed away in there. They would only accept that Hitler had been turned to paste on the day they could measure and weigh him.

“Write your names on this form,” said the Swede. Actually, the corporal said it, translating the patrol leader’s orders. The corporal was rather hard of hearing, so he perched Sven Svergensson on his shoulder. They made such a funny sight, with the Nazi’s little legs swinging in the air and both hands clutching the lapel of the corporal’s coat to keep from falling, that Nute had to tape his mouth shut to stop himself from bursting out laughing. Idiot!

But if the Swede was afraid of falling, we were even more afraid they would discover that we had not only killed Hitler but reduced him to pulp. We kept glancing at the cabinet so conspicuously that the Chinese man grew suspicious.

“Why do you keep looking at the cabinet?” he finally asked.

“Because we’re afraid you’ll open it and discover we’re hiding a corpse inside.”

The Chinese man let out a laugh like a tsunami, and the corporal immediately joined in. It caught the Swede off guard, and disaster followed. Sven Svergensson fell headfirst from the corporal’s shoulder and smashed into the ceramic floor. Once he had brought his laughter under control, the Chinese man kicked the Swede’s corpse into a corner and took command.

“Open the cabinet!”

“(Idiot),” I whispered.

“(It wasn’t my fault),” Nute replied.

I opened the cabinet. The compressed well, with the shapeless mass that had once been Hitler inside it, gleamed as though it were the Holy Grail. Or as the Holy Grail might have gleamed if it had been a chalice. But the Chinese man couldn’t have cared less. His eyes lit up greedily when he saw the four bottles of potato schnapps I was saving to celebrate the birth of my future daughter.

“So that was your secret, you pigs!”

I lowered my head and began fingering my cap, just as I had seen a character overwhelmed by shame do in a film.

“Confiscation!” howled the corporal. He made a gesture, and four soldiers marched up to the cabinet, their heels clicking, and seized the bottles.

“In the name of the Party,” said the Chinese man, “we confiscate these four bottles of potato schnapps. Were you saving them to celebrate the birth of your daughter?” Everyone laughed again, including that idiot Nute, who had removed the tape from his mouth. Perhaps he wanted to show the whole world that he still had six teeth and gums blacker than tar.

“Sign here,” said the corporal, spreading a filthy sheet of paper on the table. As might have been expected, the confiscation included two cows, a samovar and a cart. The Nazis were beginning to put their earlier expropriations on the books. I had to admit it was a sensible policy.

We signed so they would leave. As the Nazis headed toward Bilgoraj, Janche appeared from the chicken coop, where she had been hiding.

“What did they do to you?” She had already forgotten the slap I’d given her the week before and had come back for more.

“I can’t see to you, Janche,” I told her, trying to look distraught.

“I don’t want you to,” the girl said. “From now on I’ll be Nute’s lover.” It’s strange: I can’t say Janche is stupid like Nute, but the two of them made a much more convincing couple than she and I did. Or so I think.

“The little toys are gone,” said Nute.

“The little toys?” Janche stuck a finger up her nose and withdrew it, disappointed: she hadn’t caught even the tiniest bit of snot.

“Tiny!” We remembered the Swede’s corpse at the same time. Now it wasn’t just the lump of Hitler we were hiding in the compressed well inside the cabinet. If we were discovered, we would end up in the crematoria at Auschwitz or the gas chamber at Majdanek.

“Wait a moment.” Nute reached into an inside pocket of Sven Svergensson’s coat and pulled out the Nazi’s papers. They looked like toys. “It says here, ‘Class E simulation; serial no. 370285.’” Janche covered her mouth.

“He isn’t human. I was afraid of that.”

“You were?” said Nute. “When did you say so?”

“Don’t be stupid; I thought it. I thought you could read my mind.” I bent over the little Swede’s body and pushed two fingers into the slit in his chest. The doll sprang open like a trap, with a click.

“Did the Nazis make these contraptions?” Janche is a country girl; she doesn’t even watch television, though now and then she shows a shrewdness that throws me off balance. This time her suspicion was well founded.

“The Nazis aren’t real, Janche,” said Nute.

“Can you tell reality from fantasy, Nute? The boss, that Hitler. He was at my house the other day,” said Janche, “the day you slapped me. He told me you two are idiots.”

“Both of us?” I asked in surprise. “Or just him?”

“Both of you. He said he’d have this village bombed in retaliation for what you did to him in the well. What did you do to him?”

“Nothing,” said Nute. “We didn’t do anything to him.”

I dropped into a chair, defeated. No wonder the Nazis hadn’t been interested in the Hitler we had mashed up and stored in the cabinet. They must have dozens, hundreds of Hitlers. If we had dared to examine him properly, we would have found a plate reading “Class H simulation; serial no. 456705.”

“Then we didn’t kill him,” said Nute with relief. “We didn’t kill a human being.”

“Hitler isn’t a human being. I was sure you knew that,” I protested. But it was a feeble protest; I didn’t believe it myself.

“I can’t know everything,” said Nute.

“Could you get me a cigarette?” I asked Janche.

“All right, but don’t say they’re just toys again. Will you be my lover again?”

“Well… yes. Once you get me the cigarette, we can be intimate again.”

Nute shrugged. He didn’t like Janche; he said she was dirty and smelled of rotten onions. He scratched the top of his head for a few seconds, then went over to the cabinet.

“Could you help me?”

I helped him take Hitler out. We decompressed him with difficulty—much more difficulty than we’d had pressing him flat—and laid him on the table. Wheels, belts and gears rolled everywhere, and Janche began setting aside pieces she thought would be suitable for making herself a bracelet.

“That means there’s a flesh-and-blood Hitler somewhere,” said Nute. “They wouldn’t have simulations otherwise.”

“No, idiot. That’s one of the many senseless ideas you come up with. It’s possible Hitler never existed.”

“You’re completely wrong, moron. This is just how we wanted to catch you: red-handed.” Framed in the doorway stood the imposing figure of the real Sven Svergensson, supreme commander of the Nazis in Lublin. He was nearly two meters tall and was pointing a 9 mm Parabellum, model 1908, popularly known as a “Luger,” at us.

“Can I be your lover?” said Janche. She approached the Nazi without fear and danced around him. It was a grand gesture on her part, risking her hide to save us from the Nazis. But we were sure it wouldn’t work. When Janche tries to cover up the smell of rotten onions, she douses herself in the mushroom perfume old Brane makes; then she smells like an abandoned tannery. And although it has nothing to do with anything, I should mention that the Swede had a nose as big as an avocado.

“Of course!” said Sven. “Give me proof of your love.”

“For example?” Janche stopped dancing, puzzled. The Nazi put the pistol in her hand and gently closed her fingers around it.

“Kill these two, and you shall be my lover.”

“Certainly!” Janche aimed at us. Nute pulled his shirt open in a stupid, useless gesture. I closed my eyes, so when the shot rang out, I expected a sharp pain in my chest or something of the sort. I opened them and was bewildered by the scene. Janche had shot the Swede between the eyes and then killed herself.

“Why did she do it?” said Nute.

“Out of love for us, idiot.” I looked at the pools of blood and mopped them up with a rag. I picked up the Luger and slipped it into my pocket.

“But are they toys, are they real, or are they both?” said Nute, suddenly as sharp and penetrating as a drill bit.

“What’s with all these questions? Do I owe you something?”

Nute lowered his head again; the effort of understanding the previous line of reasoning had exhausted him. But I wasn’t going to let things slide like mud flowing down a hillside on a stormy day. I imagined myself walking along the path to the well. I had nothing better to do; I didn’t even have a cigarette to justify stopping for as long as it took to smoke one. It was bitterly cold; the stubborn frost crunched beneath the soles of my shoes, and clouds of vapor escaped my mouth whenever I dared to open it. I imagined Nute climbing the walls of the well, but it never occurred to me to do anything as bizarre as compress him, as we had done with Hitler. In my hallucination, I was much more direct. I drew the Luger, aimed between his eyes and fired. His body seemed to fall backward so slowly that I could finish my speech before I heard the dull thud as he hit the ground. I shook my head to dispel the images, went over to the well and touched Nute’s shoulder. He was staring into space as though he had been deactivated.

“I don’t want to see you around for a while, idiot. For the rest of the day, in fact. Janche is coming to see me today, and we want to do what you’re already thinking of, in peace.”

“Didn’t Janche kill herself?” said Nute, bewildered.

“Where did you get that idea? Women like Janche don’t kill themselves to save two idiots like us.” I pulled a handful of banknotes from my pocket. There were zlotys, rubles and a few pounds; there wasn’t a single euro. I gave him enough money to go to the cinema. Just then Hitler climbed out of the well and looked at me with an angelic expression, pleading for me to extend my charitable gesture to him. I sighed and added a couple of bills. “Don’t show your faces until tonight, idiots,” I said.