Now He Can't Escape

“The man was striding quickly through the forest. He was going straight north, away from the border. The stacks of firewood stood close together here and could be made out farther on in the darkness. The gloom was thickening rapidly. Having approached one of the stacks, he wanted to bend down, but looked back as if he had heard something. A little farther away in the forest stood a woman in a ski suit under a brown sweater, bareheaded. She had stepped on a dry branch; that crack was what he had heard. She waved to him not to be afraid, but it was too dark, and he did not notice her. He bent down and, thrusting his hand under the logs, pulled out a jumpsuit and a sweater, then stripped off his uniform; left in nothing but underwear in the cold evening wind, he quickly stuffed the German uniform inside the woodpile and carefully hid it. Then he pulled on the civilian clothes and did all this so deftly and quickly that it seemed as though another man had simply risen out of the ground. All the while he acted with only his left hand, but the woman could not notice this in the darkness; she knew only that before her was a man who had secretly accomplished a splendid feat, and now he had unexpectedly transformed before her eyes. He had probably spent the whole day in the forest. He did not even have a backpack with him. She could see that he was shivering in his light clothes. Then he looked around in confusion — a Resistance fighter, he was acting at his own peril and risk near the border at an hour of mortal danger, when those who lived in these parts almost every day became frightened witnesses to tragedies...”