Hunger was our greatest enemy. Matis had a few military rations in his pack: dry bread, a can of meat, a water bottle. He divided everything equally, even though I could see in his eyes that he was hungrier than I was. The second night, we took refuge in an abandoned barn outside a village whose name I never learned. The barn smelled of moldy hay and rat urine, but it was warm, or at least less cold than outside. Matis spread his coat on the floor, gestured for me to lie down, and sat against the wall opposite me, his rifle resting on his knees. He never slept at the same time as me, always alert, always on the lookout. I watched him in the darkness, trying to understand who this man was. He was my age, perhaps 22 at most. His face was thin and lined, his hands calloused and dirty. He wore a Wehrmacht uniform, but without insignia, without decorations, just a simple, low-ranking soldier, one of those thousands of men the war had swallowed up without glory. Why had he saved me? What did he want from me? These questions swirled in my head until exhaustion finally overcame me.
On the third day, he finally spoke. We were sitting by a frozen stream, breaking through the ice to drink the water underneath, when he said in hesitant French, “My name is Matis. Matis Keller. I come from Bavaria. My father was a carpenter, my mother died when I was 10.” He said it as if reciting a military report, without emotion, just facts. Then he looked at me and asked, “And you?” I hesitated. Saying my name was like becoming human again, like stepping out of number 34. “Éliane,” I whispered, “Éliane Vauclerc, from Lille.” He nodded. “Lille, a pretty city. I was there in 1940.” He didn’t add anything, and neither did I. We drank the ice-cold water in silence and then continued walking south, always south, away from the German lines, away from the patrols, away from everything.
As the days went by, I began to understand that Matis wasn’t a hero. He wasn’t an infiltrator in the resistance, he wasn’t an idealist disguised as a soldier. He was just an ordinary man who had seen something he couldn’t bear and had made an impulsive decision whose consequences he probably didn’t yet grasp. He confessed this to me one night while we were hiding in an abandoned cellar beneath a farmhouse destroyed by bombing. “When I saw you tied up between those trees,” he said in a low, trembling voice, “I thought of my sister. She was 17 when the Russians took our village in Poland. They took her away, and we never saw her again. My father went mad; he hanged himself in the workshop.” He paused, his eyes lost in the distance. “I joined to avenge my family, but I didn’t avenge anything. I just killed people who hadn’t done anything to me. And when I saw you there, pregnant and terrified, I thought that if I let you die, I would become exactly what I’ve always hated.”
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