Hubert Mingarelli - A Meal in Winter

The bits of shelf I’d put in had already burned up. It was going faster than I’d expected. I shoved the rest in before the flames died down completely.

‘That wood must be made of paper,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing left now. What shall we do? The bench or the table? We need to decide.’

They got up, and Bauer touched the table appraisingly.

‘It’s thick,’ he said. ‘We’d need a saw.’

Emmerich lifted up the bench. ‘This too. We won’t manage otherwise.’

‘With three of us, we’ll manage,’ I said.

But no matter how hard we threw it on the floor, or from what height, it didn’t break. I thought about the fence outside for a moment, but then I gave up the idea. Why go back outside and freeze my blood to wrestle with a fence that wouldn’t move anyway?

So, we would be eating broth. Hot, of course, but not very filling. Leaning on the stove, smoking Emmerich’s cigarette, the Pole watched us impassively. His dog was asleep. The snow sleighbells on its neck had disappeared.

‘What about the door to the storeroom?’ Emmerich said suddenly. ‘What use is that?’

‘He’s right!’ Bauer shouted.

Emmerich and I shoved it wide open. Seeing us coming, the Jew sat up and moved away from us, against the back wall. He watched us while we took the door off its hinges. It was heavy, but it looked easier to break than the table or the bench. We leaned it with its top propped on the bench.

‘Go ahead,’ I told Emmerich. ‘I’ll hold you.’

I took hold of his coat. He bent his knees, jumped up and landed on the door. It did not move. Not a crack appeared.

‘You need to jump from higher up,’ I told him.

He climbed up on the bench. Bauer and I each got hold of one of his shoulders. He jumped, and this time we heard something.

‘Keep going!’ we shouted, practically at the same time.

He did it again, I don’t know how many times. He jumped, picking up momentum by jumping upwards from the bench. Each time, we heard the door crack a bit more. Fissures appeared. He was putting so much effort into it, you could tell, as much for us as for himself. We held him tightly, each by a shoulder. Finally, he went through it. We’d been afraid he would injure himself, that a big splinter would pierce his boots. Luckily, although he was winded, he ended up standing and unhurt, in the middle of the broken door. We gleefully smashed it into smaller pieces because there was now no doubt: with all this wood, the soup would be thick and we would eat it sitting on the bench. What a door it was! We had enough wood to fill the stove five times over.

HOW WELL THE fire burned after that! The smell of it was in our nostrils, the sound of it in our ears. It gave us light too, as the sun was going down outside. Steam rose from the soup. It would be thick and nourishing — we were sure of it now. Among all the different smells, the onion was the strongest. We each drank a mouthful. It burned our tongues, but transported us to a gentler world. So we drank another. The Pole had put one elbow on the bar of the stove and was resting his temple on his hand, as easy in his mind as we were now that he knew he would be getting some soup. I no longer thought about the flash of malice I’d seen on his face. His dog sniffed occasionally.

Suddenly I realised that, without the door that we had taken down and which was now cheerfully burning, the house had changed. Was it the storeroom that had entered our space, here around the bench? Or was it the other way round? Either way, it felt very different now.

While I looked around, attempting to pinpoint the cause of this change, the Jew in the storeroom began to unbutton his coat. And then, after a moment’s hesitation, he took it off, rolled it up, put it on the floor and sat on it. Because, of course, even if it was warm now in the storeroom, the floor was still freezing. It would have taken a day and a night with good coal in the stove to warm up the concrete slab.

He still wore a heavy reefer jacket under his coat, orange and dirty but very thick, and quilted, which was unusual. There were undoubtedly other layers beneath that. But it was his reefer jacket that had saved him in the forest. He had pushed his wool hat even further up his forehead. It was folded now, and from here the embroidered snowflake was invisible.

We no longer stirred on the bench, we no longer spoke. Not a single movement or sound. Each of us had been isolated from the others by the heat, the smell of the soup and the potato alcohol, and sleep was calling to us. Even the Pole was beginning to fall asleep, while leaning against the stove.

I closed my eyes for a few seconds. My imagination began to see things that weren’t there. Better open them, I thought. The Pole’s dog had woken up. It was still lying with its head on its front paws, and it was observing Emmerich, Bauer and me, and its kindly blinking eyes reminded me of a dog I’d once had, a long time ago.

In order to think about something else, I whispered, ‘I hope he has a spoon.’

‘What?’ Emmerich asked, also in a whisper.

‘The Pole,’ I said. ‘What’s he going to eat with?’

‘If he hasn’t got one, we’ll chuck him outside,’ replied Bauer. ‘I don’t want that ugly mouth of his touching the soup.’

‘Me neither,’ I said.

We looked at him. He was almost asleep, leaning on the stove. Up to this point, we had been able to stand him. But soon his disgusting mouth would be eating at the table with us.

Emmerich leaned towards me with a questioning expression.

‘We’ll see,’ I replied. ‘Maybe he does have one.’

But suddenly Bauer said, ‘No, we won’t see. I’m going to chuck him outside, even if he does have a spoon.’

‘I’ll give him mine if he doesn’t have one,’ I joked.

But Bauer was on the warpath now. ‘I want to chuck him outside. Are we scared of him?’

‘Hang on, let’s wait and see,’ I said, putting a hand on his leg.

He calmed down a little, but not for long.

‘I don’t care what he does, but that mouth is not going near our soup,’ he said.

All of this had been said in a whisper. The Pole was still dozing, his eyes half-closed. Suddenly Bauer yelled: ‘Hey, you! What are you planning to eat with? Not with your filthy gob, I’m telling you that now. Because it makes me want to puke.’

The Pole had jumped at this. Now he was looking at each of us in turn, trying to work out who had spoken.

In a nasty voice, Bauer repeated, ‘Hey, what are you planning to eat with?’

The Pole replied in his own language. We didn’t know what he said, but it sounded nasty too.

We weren’t afraid of him, of course, but he wasn’t afraid of us either. He replied to us the way we’d spoken to him. Bauer took his spoon from a pocket and showed it to the Pole. Moving it around, he said, ‘Show me yours!’

The Pole’s gaze moved from the spoon to the soup to us. He was trying to understand. To help him out, Bauer pointed at him then moved the spoon closer towards him. This time, the Pole shook his head and patted his quilted jacket to say that no, he didn’t have one.

‘Well then, little man, you’d better go home,’ said Bauer, ‘because we don’t want you touching our soup. You make me sick.’

The Pole, I am sure, did not catch a single word of this, yet he understood anyway. He had sensed a threat in Bauer’s voice and eyes. He began to twitch. Then he replied to Bauer, unleashing a sort of bitter, fearful litany. We did not catch a single word of it, yet we understood it anyway.

‘Yeah, yeah, go ahead and cry, little man,’ Bauer said.

The Pole continued to whine. Bauer nodded sympathetically and smiled sadly at him. Then suddenly the Pole moved away from the stove and crouched down in front of the remains of the storeroom door. He started searching through the bits of wood, his litany unabated. But when he found what he was looking for, he stopped talking, showed it to us, then returned to the side of the stove. He took a hideous little knife from his pocket and began feverishly sculpting his bit of wood, glancing up at us fiercely from time to time. His lips peeled back from his gums occasionally too, and his vile mouth was more terrifying to us than any evil stare.