The Dachshund

The cold wakes him before the light does.

The boy lies curled against the ewe’s warm side with his coat pulled over his head, and for a moment he does not remember where he is. Then he hears the flock breathing around him, a hundred small engines idling in the dark, and it comes back: the last green patch, the next dry valley after it, the sun already gone when he finally looked up. Too far to walk back with the sheep in the dark. Too far to leave them. He chose the sheep.

The camp was to move at first light. By now the tents are down, and it is walking, and every hour he stays here it walks farther from him. They move every few days at this time of year, before the snow, and they do not wait for anyone. At the end of the day they will be angry with him first and glad about the sheep later. That is the order in which such things happen. But there is water in his skin for one day, and bread for one, and he has already lost one.

He sits up. Frost has stiffened the wool of the nearest animals. Over the ridge the sky is the color of the inside of a shell, and his breath stands in front of his face and goes nowhere.

Two of the ewes are already on their feet, drifting toward the lip of the dry gully, where the ground falls away and, after rain, a little green sometimes hangs on. He does not like it here. The road is close. He whistles, and they ignore him. One of them stops at the edge and looks down, quite still, the way animals look at something that is not theirs.

He goes to see.

The car is at the bottom, nose against the bank, so far down the slope that anyone on the road above would have driven past without a glance. Someone put it there on purpose. He understands this before he understands anything else. Cars do not end up like this by accident. They end up on their sides, in the river, or not at all. This one has been hidden, the way you would push a coat behind a door.

The back window is gone. The lid of the trunk is stitched with holes, and he knows what makes holes like that. Everyone at the camp knows, and no one says it aloud.

He should go back up. The road is a place he keeps away from. Everyone does. The men in the trucks stop the flocks and make the families wait in the sun, count the animals twice, look under the tents, ask the same question in different words, and look at the people the whole time as if they had already done something. He drifted too near it last night without meaning to. The sensible thing is to gather the sheep and go, and say nothing, and not have seen. He has been taught the sensible thing all his life.

He slides down the slope on his heels instead, and the stones go before him. Because a car that has been shot at and hidden might still have something in it worth carrying home. That is what he tells himself.

He goes to the back first.

The rear seat is covered in small pieces of glass, bright as frost, and across it is a dark smear, as if something had been dragged. He does not think about it. The trunk has been torn open from behind. Suitcases, two, three, and a shoulder bag with a broken strap. A book has slid half out of one of them, its pages fanned, its cover a smooth, bright paper. He tries a clasp, and it will not give. He lifts a case, and it is heavy in a way that serves him no use. In the bag, under a folded shirt, is something flat in shining paper that smells of sugar. He puts it inside his coat.

Then he goes around to the front, and finds that the driver’s seat is not empty.

A woman is behind the wheel. Not sitting. Placed, like something set in a chair. Her head rests against the side pillar, her scarf has slipped, and the hair beneath it is the color of dry grass, dark and stiff along one side. He has seen that color only from a distance, on the tourists who wave from the windows of buses in spring. It is one more thing he has found in the car.

He looks for the rise and fall of the coat; the coat is still, then it isn’t. A small cloud at her lips in the cold. Once. And again.

In her hand, held against her chest so hard that its corners have bitten into her palm, is a small dark-red notebook. He cannot read, so it makes no difference what is in it. Whatever it is, she holds it as if it were the one thing in the car worth taking.

He reaches through the empty window and touches her wrist, the way you check a lamb. It is cold. She opens her eyes.

They are gray, and it takes them a long time to find him. Then she says something.

Words come out of her, low and quick and strung together, and none of them are anything. He has heard the speech of the soldiers, and the men at the market, and the sounds the tourists make when they point at a goat. This is none of those.

He unhooks the water skin from his belt. She looks at it without understanding, so he shows her: he tips it to his own mouth, lets her see his throat move, wipes his lips with the back of his hand. Then he holds it out. She drinks with her eyes closed, and most of it goes down her chin.

When she is done, she begins again, the same low stream, and he sees the moment she understands that he has not understood a word. Her face changes. She stops, and tries something else. The new words are slow and careful, set down one at a time like stones across a stream, and she watches his face after each one. They lean toward the speech of the towns, the speech of the radio, but they do not arrive. He does not know them either. She says them again, louder, as if the trouble were distant. It is not.

Then she gives up on that and goes back to the first words, softer, as if they were something she was holding on to and not something she was giving him.

The coat on her left shoulder is torn through, stiff, and black. When he tries to draw her out of the seat, she cries out, and it is the first sound she has made that he understands.

Then, far off, above them: an engine.

The heavy kind. The kind soldiers ride in.

He drops below the window and puts his hand flat on her arm, and she goes quiet, either from understanding or from having nothing left over. His heart is going hard. He knows what that sound is for, and what it does to the people it finds. The truck grinds along the road above and does not slow. The sound thins over the ridge and is gone, and the silence it leaves behind is not the same as the silence before it.

He stays crouched there longer than he needs to.

He could go. He could climb the slope now, gather the ewes, and be over the ridge before the sun is full. The camp is ahead of him and moving, and a woman who can barely stand will slow him to a crawl. He has water for one. He has bread for one. He cannot be late another day.

He tries to tell her. He points ahead over the ridge, then at the sun, and draws its path across the sky with a finger. He walks two fingers fast across his palm. He points at her, then at the ground, then shakes his head, and points at the sheep. She watches all of it with her gray eyes and understands none of it. She says something again, careful and rounded, and he does not know it. He stands there long enough for the sun to climb a hand’s width.

He does not pick her up. He would not know how to carry her, and carrying her is not something he could do and still reach the camp. He gets her onto her feet against the side of the car; she stands, swaying, and he puts his crook into her hands. She takes it with both of them, the red notebook tucked into her coat, and he thinks she will fall. She does not.

He leaves the suitcases.

Above, the flock has gathered along the edge of the gully, a wall of patient faces, watching. He clicks his tongue, and they turn as if they have been waiting to be told.

They go up the slope the way you go when one of you is hurt: a step, a stop, a step. At the top the valley lies open in the first light, ridge behind ridge, and the road, a pale thread that he does not look at.

She has not stopped talking. Two words, over and over, low and steady, in time with the crook in the dirt. He does not know them. Then other words come, a long run of them, and then the two again, like a rope she keeps finding in the dark.

Nicht einschlafen. Nicht einschlafen.

He does not know what the words mean. He can tell what they are for. As long as they keep coming, she is still walking.

He shortens his stride to hers and turns the flock along the path the camp took. Behind them, the sun clears the ridge, and the words keep coming.