Nothing he ever suffered meant anything. Even losing Astrid. What a goddamn fuss over nothing. The loss of her didn’t starve him. He lived to see another day and even fuck some other girls.

“Damn fool boy…”

He half turned to look through the trees toward the camp. Over there were men who had to answer for this world where mothers went up the chimney in smoke and young boys were worked to skin and bones and made to flog each other. They followed the GIs around, these flea-bitten ragged boys. Blackened teeth in their sardonic grins. How was it possible they grinned? They smiled and shouted and conducted trade with the chocolate and cigarettes the GIs carried in their breast pockets.

Shadows and burrs.

Fisha moved closer to Kennet’s leg and closed his eyes. He wasn’t smiling.

Kennet put a hand on the boy’s head. The shaved, scraped head, rigorously deloused. Now sprouting a crop of gold hairs. This extraordinary boy was a gullgosse—a golden, blond boy. Like Kennet. Like all his brothers, save Nalle.

He’s with Ma. She met his train.

He thought about Fisha’s mother.

Who met her at the station when there’s no one left?

He stared at the sun through the trees, his mind loosening.

Up in smoke.

Hitler has only got one ball.

Shadows and burrs.

A metal burr to dig your fingers against while your father gave the well-deserved hiding of your life.

A living burr who clung to you for life.

Stairs of death. The edge of a choice.

They’re hanging a guy in there.

Take a walk in the woods.

The clouds parting over Wolfe Island.

Chocolate and cigarettes.

The river has enough gold.

And Hook isn’t here to see this.

“Okay, Captain Feesh?” Fisha said, sitting up and smiling.

“Okay,” Kennet said, trying to make the corners of his mouth lift.

There were accidental deaths.

The dynamite, still live in the caves.

The parachute cliff by the infamous stairs of death—its edge unattended.

A section of fence, unknown to still be wired and live until someone stumbled against it.

Lethal mishaps when boys tried to clean the guns of the soldiers they idolized.

Other children found live grenades and dumped the powder out to light it, often with deadly results.

Typhus. Dysentery. Cholera. The effects of starvation. The shock of too much to eat. The final breaking of a heart.

The inability to go on.

The bodies kept piling up.

Fisha’s fingers kept reaching for Kennet’s buttoned breast pocket for chocolate. Or into his own pocket for the Zippo lighter, for the keeper of the flame had somehow procured proper trousers, which had pockets where he could stash the first personal possessions he’d known in years.

“Keneet Feeskar,” he said slowly, reading the engraving on the lighter. “Twenny-wun-ay-eye-bee.”

“Molodets,” Kennet praised, for he was now the keeper of a few Russian words. “Molodets, well done.”