The Matchmaker of Kenmare (39 page)

Now Volunder began to come into his own standing. In January 1940, he went with Himmler deeper into Poland. Leaving Peiper behind on purely military matters, Volunder watched Himmler carry out a symbolic execution of a Polish intellectual—and then took over.

Some people he killed quickly, with a gun. He slit the throats of others.
And some he killed slowly, especially the women, the wives of the professors and the doctors and the teachers.

In which case, why had he been Peiper’s friend, Peiper the consummate soldier, Peiper the remarkable commander? Who can say? Nothing makes stranger bedfellows than a uniform. Especially in war.

For ten minutes, ten surging, running minutes—and maybe more—we ran and scrambled and stumbled through that forest in the Ardennes. I had a dilemma: Should I lead and make smooth a path—insofar as I could—or should I follow and protect Kate’s back? I compromised—we went side by side. I held her bag; she held my other hand. Hansel and Gretel. Running from Death.

We made progress. The terrain proved less difficult, more level than I’d expected, and this wood hadn’t been recently planted—the trees had been there thirty years and more.

She stopped, to draw breath. I tried to look behind, but could see no more than maybe twenty yards. And I shuddered at how clear a trail we’d left in the deep snow. How far behind could they be?

Not far. Not “they.” Him. One man. No others. Do I want to say that he had a limp? And that he wore a black-and-cream silk polka-dot handkerchief in his white uniform cuff? Yes, I do want to say that, but I can’t—or to be more truthful, I don’t know.

I do know that when I looked back I saw something. Something that moved. Not a branch, not a black tree, not a deer or some animal sliding down the deep snow. This was quicker. And it stopped. Kate saw it too. She struck my arm with hers. By now the cold was once again limiting the use of her hands. She used them to balance, her arms held out. A stumble might mean a ravine we hadn’t seen. This was a foot, maybe two, of old snow.

The object moved again. I knew what it was, and I gestured her
toward a wide tree. She went to it and stood there, somewhat obscured by its huge trunk from the direction in which we’d seen the movement.

It moved again—a man. Impossible to define him in the snow, a ghost against a sheet. One tiny definer—his white headgear had a black something on it. He saw Kate’s movement. He changed his trajectory until he could see her better.

I stood beside her. She whispered, “We must move.” I heard her teeth rattle, iced castanets. With my finger to my lips I went in front of her. Not beside her; I wanted to keep looking toward danger. Was it danger? Oh, God it was.

Not a sound could I hear in that sparser part of the forest. Not even one of those far-off sounds that epitomize countryside atmosphere. No barking dog. No comforting owl. And not even a war.

Since the wind had dropped, the branches made no noise. Or else I had shut out everything in my concentration on this distant white figure. Who could tell in that depth of snow if somebody were limping? The white figure seemed to disappear, into the trees, walking laterally, but not toward us.

I didn’t move us forward; I said we’d wait to make sure that the figure in white had gone away. After too many minutes I heard a sound.
What was that?
said Miss Begley’s eyebrows. I shook my head, said nothing.

What was it? The sound of a deep—a deep something? A deep what? A deep crunch? Just once. I took the finger from my lips, put it tight on hers. Telling her silently,
Not a sound
. Don’t. Even. Breathe.

I turned my head forty-five degrees to the left and listened. Another. Yes, a crunch. A second crunch. Then another silence. Then a third crunch, nearer—not by much, but nearer.
Identify it! Identify it!
In crisis I’ve often found that my mind’s voice becomes unexpectedly articulate. It didn’t say, “What is it?”—it screamed, “Identify it!”

And I did. It was a “something” stepping toward where we hid behind the great wide tree. A human? Must be. Taking one great step at a time. Listening between steps. That was the identification I made. There! A fourth crunch. Getting nearer.

Crucial to know which side of the tree. Had it—had he—seen us?
Well, of course he has!
screamed my mind.
Why do you think he’s crunching his way toward us?

Much closer now.
Awful
. The crunching stopped. Stopped completely.
He’s ten yards away, and he’s puzzled because he can see nothing. Neither can
I. He crunched again. One-crunch. Two-crunch. Three-crunch. Four-crunch. Nearer. Nearer. Nearer. Nearer. Now he’s at the other side of the tree.

I saw him before he saw me. The insignia, that’s what I saw first, the black cross on the helmet’s forehead. And the black gun. He brought up his right arm as he steadied himself for the next deep step forward in the crunching snow. It was, I now know, a Luger, long slender barrel.

Another step forward once more. With his snow mask and goggles I never saw his face, only his hand with the gun. Pointed straight at my head. And he stepped forward with a much harder crunch now. I held my hands out. Cruciform. He stepped away to one side of me.

Christ! What has she done?
Kate stepped out from behind the tree. Four feet from me, seven feet from him.
What is she doing?
She spread her arms in her own crucifix.

He said something. I didn’t know what it was. She said later it was,
“Was ist?”
How could I know? I didn’t even know for sure whether it was Volunder. I still don’t know.

“Nein,”
she said, a gasp in her voice.
“Nein, nein.”

“Ireland,” I said.
“Irlande. Irlanda.”

“Nein, nein, nein,”
she said, in the voice of a woman about to go crazy.

“No, no,” she said, and I said, “No!”

Such bizarre thoughts as we get.
My parents didn’t prepare me for meeting a man with a gun in a snowy forest during a war
. I can’t remember any other thought.

He raised the gun a little higher. Still pointed it at me. Straight at my face now.

He flapped a hand at her, beckoned her forward. It must have been Volunder—he’d kill me and take her back with him.
Come here and stand
beside me
, beckoned the hand. He stepped forward. So concentrated. So focused on my face. And I couldn’t even see his eyes.

How did I do it? Height and reach. I have long arms. I hit him with my right fist. Where was his strength? Military rations, perhaps? As he staggered he fired. Kate fell with a grunt.

I was on him. On him, on him, on him. I stamped on the gun hand. Stamped and stamped. He didn’t let go, he fought me off. On his knees he fired again. This shot, not a loud crack, a strange, dull sound, a metal grunt, whistled past me.

I kicked him as he rose. Kicked him in the face. Kicked him with every ounce of my six-foot-four bulk. He went down, he dropped the gun, I picked it up, I knelt over him, and I shot him in the head. Twice. With the two bullets he had left, and if the gun had held two hundred and two bullets I’d have fired every one.

On the nights that I can’t sleep, the all-white snow outfit of a German soldier haunts me. If it wasn’t Volunder, did he have a wife? Did he have children? And a pleasant house with a staircase and pine banisters? And I killed him.

It’s right that I should care. I should wake at nights. I should be hurt. Even if he was Sebastian Volunder. But I didn’t look. Only a rose of black blood above his ear—that’s all I saw. One perfect rose.

At that moment I had but a single thought. Kate was sitting on top of the snow like a doll.

“I fell,” she said. “Ben, Death is God’s Remedy for All Ills. For All Ills, Ben.” She was losing her composure again. “Ben, I miss my father, did I ever tell you that?”

“Are you hurt?”

She shook her head. I lifted her to her feet. She was as limp as a glove. She didn’t look toward the dead man. I figured that she must have dropped to the snow in shock.

“Go,” I said. “Go!”

She moved. I picked up the damn bag and followed her, forward through the snow, and now I was the one making the deep and huge crunches—but in my soul, I was now and forever brutalized. I was in some part of me a dog of war.

No words can discuss the act of killing somebody. Nothing I can say will take me forward into a place of comfort on that topic. I can compartmentalize
it, put it under the heading of “An Act Necessary to Stay Alive.” But I can’t sanction it. God, it hurts.

Through the goggles, I saw into his eyes; I tried not to, but I saw them, and snow-mad or not, he knew what was going to happen. He knew that he was about to lose his life, that his corpse would lie there in the snow, covered over and preserved until the spring, and some farmer or hunter or band of soldiers coming along these woods would find him as the snows thawed and he would be tagged and carried to some military graveyard, and if lucky he still had legible papers on him so that his family could be told in order to permit them to mourn him.

Other than that he would become a name listed as MIA, missing in action, and his family would forever wonder what had happened to him. How had he died? they’d ask themselves. And his wife, now alone with her body in bed at night, might console herself that her husband was the nameless hero in the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Even if he was Sebastian Volunder.

He had stiffened almost the moment the life left his body. I had been as tidy in the killing of him as I am with my notebooks and pens, the tools of my trade, but I didn’t know I was being tidy. One shot, then two—oh, dear Christ, do I still hear those dull echoes in the nights? And why is it always—this is some irony—why is it always the case that I most hear them in the balmy, twilight deeps of Irish summer nights?

We moved through the snow, trying to be steady, but near to destruction. I felt certain that I had broken my own heart. At one moment, we halted because I heard in the distance behind us a long fusillade of shots. Rifle fire—my God, I could now tell the difference between guns! It lasted for long minutes.

If I had known that I was overhearing one of the foulest atrocities of World War II, the massacre of American prisoners of war at the crossroads of Malmédy—for which Jochen Peiper stood trial at Dachau—
would it have healed my remorse at the killing I had just done? I doubt it. I was born to live life, not take it. Or was I? Would I, like so many, kill again?

“The woods can’t get deeper than this,” she said. Her tone had strengthened again. Whence came that girl’s resilience?

I said, “Listen!”

We listened. The gunfire ended.

For some moments we stood, exhaling, looking for some more recovery, listening for the next noises. It took some time for their pattern to soak into our minds.

A deep wood can sound like a sailing ship. It creaks. Things flap and fall. Or crash. I retraced five or six yards—no sound of pursuit, but they could be stalking us, waiting for us to tire. Finger still held to my lips, I went back to Kate—and again felt astonished; she seemed to have reenergized. She clapped her hands to keep them warm, she shook her head to clear her brain. Her energy, her composure—so rewarding, such a lesson.

We held hands again, and as we moved on we heard a new sound. Running water—hard, fast, running water, meaning that in this climate, in that season, something was big enough and tough enough not to be frozen over by the weather.

Rivers have to go somewhere. We went forward, found it, and surrendered to its leadership. This stream, powerful as a lateral cataract, had enough size and importance to need a destiny. We had no idea where we were. Belgium, yes, and therefore this river wasn’t going to the sea, yet it surely must lead us somewhere.

But did it have shallows? I had no idea of its depth at the middle. Could we cover our tracks by walking in the actual water? I calculated that if we stayed as close to the bank as possible, we’d be stepping in six inches of water, which would then erase our tracks.

The riverbank gave us easy passage down to the stream, which measured maybe six, eight yards across, and it flowed high, rough and fast, white spume everywhere. I made Kate stand in the shallow water, and I stepped into the middle. The water came to my waist, then my chest, then down to my waist again.

I made it to the far bank, where I created two sets of footprints up the slope and into the trees. Putting my feet carefully into one set, I came
back down and crossed the river again. Now it looked as though we’d gone deeper into the forest on the far side.

We walked in the shallows of that stream for what seemed like an hour. The miracle of circulation kept our feet alive—and the river erased our footprints almost as soon as we’d made them. Were this a legend that I’d collected in, say, Donegal, or Mayo, the myth would have been, “The river spoke, and the god of the stream came to their aid.”

Kate walked ahead of me, and the shallows, little mudflats, continued; the river must have carved out a deep furrow over the centuries. And then—it vanished. It went underground, and Kate, in better spirits than I could have expected, said, “Now we’re high and dry.”

“Look up,” the god of the river said, “look up and see how the trees are thinner here. This means that you may be coming to an edge of the wood. And now look ahead and see brighter light.”

I did indeed look up, and ahead saw brighter light. The snow had ceased falling, or else we’d gone in so deep that the branches had kept it from us. In some places, it lay three or four inches high, and we couldn’t guess where the drifts might be; in other, denser stretches of the forest, the ground lay bare. To those patches we kept, leaving as little spoor as possible.

Following this brightening light, we found ourselves almost in open ground again. We had come to the innermost border of a huge U-shaped plantation that spread for miles and miles over the booming hills.

I guessed the time at around one o’clock in the afternoon. We’d walked about three hours. Clouds somewhere thinned a little, and a weak sunlight strengthened—not by much, but by enough to let us see that we must have come far away from the roads and the troop movements. As though to confirm, we heard, from a great distance off to our left, the sound of heavy guns. I looked up, found the sun, and said to Kate, “Whether we knew it or not, we’ve been going west.” We stood on the top left-hand spur of the U, the eastern side.