Stone Upon Stone Read Online Free PDF Page B

walled tombs and I won’t say it was all that comfortable. I tried imagining that I was a corpse myself, but it didn’t help. On top of everything else, probably to keep people out they’d made the entranceway small as a rabbit cage, you couldn’t even stand up or turn around. There was two of us, me and this other guy, Honeybee was his resistance name, and we had to squat facing each other the whole time. Our legs were all tangled up, his next to mine, mine next to his; it was like they all belonged to both of us at once, because there wasn’t room for us to each have our own legs. And we kept asking each other, is that your leg or mine? I’ve gotten the worst goddam pins and needles in it. I kept thinking it was yours. When one of us needed to stretch, he’d slide over into an empty space where there was room for a new body. Three of the places were still free and three had coffins. They weren’t even walled in, they’d just slid the caskets in there. But you couldn’t lie for long in those slots, you got stiff from the lack of room and from the concrete.
    We’d been on a recce to this one village and we’d gotten caught in a manhunt. Before we knew it the place was crawling with Germans. There was no woods and no river, and the village was right in the middle of a flat plain. Plus it was autumn, the crops had been harvested and the fields were bare. There were just a few orchards behind people’s barns, that was it. Luckilythere was an old man sitting outside his house, and when he saw us running away he shouted to us:
    “Go to the cemetery! The cemetery! Over there!” And he pointed with his stick at a stand of trees that looked as though they’d popped up in the middle of the flatness just to give us shelter.
    We ran there and crawled into the first tomb we found. We pulled the cover over and stayed there. They must have buried someone in it not that long ago, because on the top there was still a wreath made of fir and spruce and flowers, all dried up. Over the whole thing there was the most beautiful Lord Jesus I think I’ve ever seen. He had one hand on his heart and the other stretched out in front of him like he was checking whether it was raining out in the world. Inside, it was dark and smelly, but you just had to say to yourself, tough. Though it was actually hard to say anything at all, words just left a bitter taste in your mouth. Besides, what can you talk about in a tomb. You let out a fuck it or whatever and that’s pretty much all you have to say. Even when we tried to talk to pass the time, the only thing that came to our lips were more cusswords, like we’d forgotten all the decent words. But there are times when all the decent words in the world won’t do the job of a single fuck it. It’s like they’re all hollow and blind and lame. And too stupid for the whole situation, however decent they are. Decent words are good for when life is decent. But in there the lice were biting like there was no tomorrow, it was all we could do to just keep it together. Once they got properly going there wasn’t an inch of our bodies that didn’t itch. We were a paradise for them in that tomb. And in addition, it was like we were sharing the lice and our bodies were shared as well. When his body started to itch, mine upped and started to also. I’d scratch my belly or the back of my neck, and he’d start scratching in exactly the same place. Though it was hardly surprising. We were crammed in there, bent double, and they could hop about on us to their heart’s content. Besides, if we hadn’t had lice we would have itchedanyway. When a person isn’t talking or thinking or moving, they have to at least have an itch.
    I was tougher, I’d scratch and for a while it would go away. But he was a town kid and he’d probably never had to deal with lice before. He’d start scratching his head and all you could hear was
scrit, scrit, scrit
, like someone was planing a casket nearby.
    “Cut it out,”