When he regained consciousness, he felt at ease there in the shack, amid the piled corpses. He found it an appropriate place to wait for death, for deliverance, at the end.
19
Death did not come, and deliverance appeared in the guise of a young soldier wearing a red star whose bulging eyes bore witness to the horrors he had just discovered. Having realized that the corpse staring at him was still alive, the young starred soldier pressed the mouth of his canteen to those lips and biscuits into those hands, then gathered him in his arms, snatching him from the mass of death and laying him outside the shack on a patch of ground without corpses, beneath the reawakening spring sun.
In the very place that, only yesterday, was ruled by snow and boots and riding crops, by caps emblazoned with Death’s Heads, the grass now grew, lush and thick, speckled with crowds of small white blossoms. It was then that he heard a bird sing, a hymn welcoming him back to life. And it was then that tears flowed from the eyes that had grown as dry, he thought, as his heart. The tears reminded him that he was a living being once more.
How did he find the strength to stand, to walk, and walk, and carry on walking? Had the song of the nightingale been enough to kindle the thought that his daughter, his beloved, unknown little daughter, might also have survived? And that if she had survived, then he had a duty, a responsibility, to do everything in his power, everything in his power, to find her.
And so he set off walking, following the Reds as they marched steadily west. He collapsed from starvation outside a church. He was helped to his feet by a priest who fed him, prayed for him. Then he set off again, walking, walking.
At length, he came to what was called a reunification camp filled with refugees and displaced people who had fled the Reds, only to be overtaken by their rapid advance. His ghostly appearance, together with the number tattooed on his forearm, served as his passport. Here he had room and board, but no sooner had he settled in than he found himself reliving that fatal moment, the train, the snow, the forest, the prayer shawl, the old woman, and also the hope. But mostly, mostly, the eyes of his wife as she turned away from him forever and for always. Why, why had he not allowed fate to obliterate the four of them together, together?
The poor woodcutter’s wife did not notice that the cargo trains no longer crisscrossed her forest, so enraptured was she by the sight of her little cargo, growing and thriving before her very eyes. The little girl was constantly laughing, singing, babbling, and dancing with the goat that had become more than a sister to her, beneath the watchful gaze of the man with the rifle and the shattered face.
The poor woodcutter’s wife could not remember ever experiencing such happiness in all the long, long course of her life. As for the man with the rifle, he kept a watchful eye and kept his ear cocked to the east. He knew the Reds were advancing. He rejoiced even though he feared them. He feared the Reds as he had feared the Gray-Green of the Death’s Heads with their minions and their collaborators. Once a week, he visited one of the villages that bordered the forest in order to barter his goat cheese for basic necessities. There people talked only of the looming end of this terrible war, with hope or with regret. Before long, planes emblazoned with red stars were bombing the positions of the Gray-Green, and then the roar of cannon fire took over. The hunters of the heartless had gone to ground or had fled to the west.
Rifle in hand, the man with the shattered face patrolled the eastern flank of his fiefdom, determined that his right of property be respected by the new invaders. Two Red soldiers stole stealthily into the forest. Seeing a man armed with a rifle, they laid him low with a burst of machine-gun fire. Then, warily, one of the soldiers approached, turned the body over with the toe of his boot, and, seeing nothing appealing in the man’s face, shot his comrade-in-arms a disgusted look and said in a contemptuous voice: “An old man, ugly.” Noting that the man lying on the ground was alone, they departed to rejoin the main phalanx of Red Stars who had elected to skirt around the forest rather than go through it.
The following morning, after an anxious night, the poor woodcutter’s wife discovered the body of the man with the shattered face and the tender heart. She wept bitterly, which caused her little cargo to weep too. Even the tender-eyed goat wept. Deciding not to bury it, the poor woodcutter’s wife covered the body with blossoming branches, then she contrived a prayer that expressed both her gratitude and her wish: may this good man finally find the peace and happiness denied him here on earth among the gods that welcome him. She thought about the gods of the train but did not mention them: she no longer trusted them.
She realized that if the child, her child, had survived, it was no thanks to them, it was thanks to the hand that had dropped her from the train into the snow, it was thanks to the righteousness of the man with the rifle and the goat. “May they be blessed,” she said at length.
She gathered up the few old clothes, carefully wrapped the freshly made cheese and the tools for making it in the prayer shawl, and, taking her daughter by the hand and leading the goat like a pack animal, set off. Not knowing where to go, she walked straight ahead, toward the east, the place where, they say, the sun still rises.
Along the way, she passed hundreds of tanks and trucks emblazoned with red stars. She wandered through countless ruined villages, and, after a time, she stopped in one of the village squares, chose a ruin that looked inviting, and there she settled. She spread the prayer shawl on a section of wall that was still standing, and on it she laid the few cheeses that had survived and sat to wait for customers, her daughter comfortably settled on her lap while the little goat grazed on a bank.
20
In the so-called reunification camp, former victims commingled and clashed with their former tormentors, the former seeking to “start afresh,” as people did not say in those days, the latter seeking to melt into the throng of refugees. Do not stay here, go, flee again, but go where? Where could he go, wondered our hero, former shaver of heads, former medical student, former father, former living creature turned shadow. Back to the country he came from by train after being rounded up by the police of that same country? Which way to go? To the north, the east, the west?
And once there, was he to take up his medical studies again? Open a hairdressing salon so that he might impose upon the world a close-cropped style, a fashion for shaven heads? No, no, besides, he could not leave the region without knowing whether his daughter, his fragile little girl, his little . . . what was her name again? What name had he given her? What was she called? He no longer knew, no longer remembered his daughter’s name.
That same day, he left the camp, his pocket jingling with a pittance given by the camp authorities so that those who wished to leave could leave and thereby free up space by vacating the straw mattress they occupied. He walked, he walked, he walked some more, reaching for the railway, the forest, the bend in the line, the old woman kneeling in the snow. Finally, he found an abandoned railway line, already overgrown with weeds.
He followed these tracks. He came to a forest and carried on, he came to another, he carried on, he came to another. There was no longer any snow, nothing seemed familiar except the old women, who never responded to his greeting. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. He abandoned the railway, which had already been abandoned by its trains, and wandered through towns and villages. Everywhere celebrations were in full swing. The war was over for everyone, except for him and his kin.