Jo Baker - A Country Road, a Tree

He lights the gas under the cold coffee pot, lights a cigarette from the gas to save on matches. He heats up the liquid, sloshes it into a cup, drinks it black. It looks like coffee but it tastes like watery burnt toast. He dreads the day when they start to ration cigarettes.

At the table, he holds his ink bottle up to the light, sloshes the fluid from side to side. The glass base is domed and thick. It’s deceptive. He pulls out a pocketful of coins and drops them on the table, sorts them into heaps, tidies the heaps into columns. He writes the word ink on a scrap of paper torn from a cigarette packet. That itself, he thinks, is a waste of ink. There may not be any more ink to be got.

On the corners there are new signposts; there are new signs on the shops. It’s obvious they’re in German even before you read them — the print shrinks to fit all the letters of lengthy compound words. On the front of the neighbourhood cinoche it now says Soldatenkino. So the locals cannot go to see a film there any more.

Bread, though, remains the most pressing issue. They take it in turns to roll out of bed and heave on layers of clothing and go to join the queue. Before the shop opens, the line has grown behind him; it now stretches down the street and round the corner. The press of bodies before and behind, the stink of old clothes. He pulls his collar up, wraps his arms around himself. Stamps his feet in his thin boots. Closes his eyes and does his best to take himself elsewhere.

Consider well the seed that made you. You were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.

When he surfaces again, there is Lucie Léon, struggling home in a buttoned-up coat with a muffler wrapped round her mouth and chin. He hails her and she tugs the muffler down and they talk. She and Paul have been back in Paris for some time now, with the family. She’s a journalist, she has her work, and work is work and must go on. He feels an ache of anxiety for her. It is not going to get any easier for them. The family is Jewish.

“How are the children?” he asks.

She shrugs, smiles. “Always hungry. Outgrowing their clothes.”

She, herself, looks translucent in the winter sun.

—

Suzanne has unravelled an old sweater. She is knitting him mitts, the fingerless kind, so that he can continue to write despite the cold — so he can at least hold his pen. It’s complicated work, the separation of the fingerholes, the angling of the thumb. She’s counting stitches, tongue protruding from the corner of her mouth. She will not allow him any excuses: there can be no reasons not to write.

“I saw Lucie Léon today,” he says.

She lets her hands fall, the knitting bundled in her lap. “Lucie! How is she getting on?”

“She seemed all right.”

He gets up, prowls out to the pantry, where he opens cupboards, stares at the bare shelves. A quarter-full bag of barley-coffee, an inch or so of brandy, a small packet of saccharine. A tin of toothpowder.

“I bought a swede,” Suzanne calls. “And there are two carrots left. I’ll make a purée later.”

He nods, in the little pantry, where she cannot see him; he calls back to her, “Thank you.” But it wasn’t his own hunger that he had been considering.

—

The next morning, they wake to an apartment of ice. They fumble into their clothes, clumsy, skin bristling, their breath clouding the air. The heating-pipes are cold to the touch.

“The boiler must have packed up.”

Huddled in her little cubbyhole off the lobby, the concierge just shakes her head, her hands stuffed into her armpits. She has her husband’s old coat pulled on over layers of sweaters, wraps, aprons and cardigans. She has a blanket over her knees.

There’s nothing wrong with the boiler; the boiler’s completely fine, or it would be, if they had anything to feed it with.

This is, she informs them, the drop that made the vase overflow. Simply put, there is no coal. There is none to be had. Not from their usual supplier, nor from any other, and believe her, she has tried. Between them, she and her husband have telephoned to or trudged round every coal yard in the quarter, and there’s nothing in them but horse dung and black dust. The coalmen are in trouble: it should be their busiest time of year, but they have nothing left to sell.

Suzanne’s not having it. “That’s ridiculous.”

The woman shrugs. “That’s the way it is.”

“But why?”

“The coal’s gone the way of the potatoes and the wheat and all the blessed wine.”

“What way’s that?”

“To Germany.”

—

But life is not impossible, not yet. There’s a fireplace in the apartment, though he has never thought to use it before. Suzanne crouches to peer up the chimney, pulls out damp balled newspaper, which is followed by a fall of soot and twigs and the mummified body of a bird. They drop the corpse in the waste chute, then flatten out the paper and read the news from March 1936. There in grey and paler grey is news of the remilitarization of the Rhineland, an obituary for Jean Patou. That one could feel nostalgic for that!

Stiff with cold, they scavenge fallen wood and fir cones in the parks and squares and from the trees that line the avenues. They build inexpert smoky, spitty little fires in the grate and huddle close to them, wrapped in blankets. But the parks are soon picked clean; all the lowest branches are torn clear off the lindens and the plane trees; the boards are dragged down from the windows of boarded-up shops. People — people who are clearly much better equipped for this than they — start to cut down trees, so that there is nothing left but sawdust, and the disc of a stump, and an absence up into the air that the tree had used to fill.

—

She gives up her apartment: impossible to keep both places.

He tries to work. There’s a tickling at the back of his brain, an irritation, something squirming and wanting to be noticed, but there’s too much else going on for him to feed it, to grow it, to tug it out into the light to be examined. The complaints of the body can’t be dealt with, and so become insistent, intrusive, far noisier than the quiet need to write. Hunched at the table, the little crocheted blanket over his shoulders, mitts on his paws, his empty stomach whines and pops; his feet are a torment of chilblains, his nose is ice. He finds himself staring for he doesn’t know how long at the blank page in front of him, or out of the window at the grey sky, his thoughts caught up in his body’s and his friends’ distress. His being here has merely added to the general burden. Another mouth. He is disgusted with his hunger, with his needs.

“Sorry, I didn’t want to disturb you, but…”

He holds the door wide with one hand, grasps his blanket at his throat with the other. Suzanne is carrying a bundle of something; she lugs it into the apartment, dumps it down on the floor.

“I’m going to need your help with this, if you don’t mind.”

She is shifting furniture now.

“It’s too cold to move,” he says.

“It’s too cold to stay still.”

She’s lining up chairs, backs turned to each other, six foot or so apart. As though they’re about to march away across the rug, then stop, and turn, and fire.

“What’s all this?”

“I had an idea.” She jerks her head towards the bundle. “Just lift that for me, would you? Help me shake it out.”

The bundle unfurls into a hefty sheet of canvas; it smells of damp and is spotted here and there with mould. A forgotten dust sheet, or a tarpaulin used in some long-ago déménagement. When they shake it out, dust motes spin into the cold winter sun.

“Where’d you get it?”

“It was in the basement.”