“Is anybody there? Say something!”
I didn’t step out, I swear. All at once something happened that couldn’t have been predicted. The pile of potatoes I was sitting on collapsed with a crash, and I came tumbling down with them. No, it wasn’t fate. We’d been taking potatoes again and again from the pile, it was bound to tumble sooner or later. All it would need would be one more potato being taken, and the pile wouldn’t hold together anymore. The only question is, why at that particular moment, not some other time. The bough of a tree breaks off right at the second someone’s passing by. Is that fate? I heard her shout up above me:
“Oh my lord!” She scrambled out and started shouting:
“There’s someone alive in here! There’s someone alive!”
There was nothing I could do, I had to show myself alive. When you hear an almost angelic voice above you, at a moment when it seems the world doesn’t exist, and you don’t exist in it — it’s as if the voice was summoning you and the world to life. What was I supposed to do, shout out that I wasn’t there? I started to clamber towards her, the light flooded my eyes, so the first thing I saw was an armband with a red cross on her sleeve, before I saw the rest of her. She said in a shocked voice:
“Lord, you’re nothing but a child!”
I must say she cut me to the quick with that comment about being a child. I thought, damn girl. And it turned out I was right. She was really young, with such fair hair, though in her army greatcoat and forage cap she might have seemed a lot older than she was. Especially because the coat was much too big for her, the sleeves were rolled right up to here, and the cap would have also been too big if it hadn’t been for her hair. Her voice was the only indication of how old she might be. As you know, appearances can deceive but the voice, never. All the more so in uniform. In uniform the youngest soldier always looks much older than he actually is. Even children — when they’re in uniform it looks like it’d be no problem for them to kill, slaughter, burn. Besides, even aside from the uniform, when you were as young as I was then, even someone who’s just a few years more than you looks virtually old. Later it changes, the years draw closer together, and the closer you are to death the more everything evens out. In particular since death doesn’t choose among us according to age. I wouldn’t say it’s random. Death has its own wisdom.
She was a medic, you could tell from the armband with the red cross. When I came out from the cellar I saw that over her shoulder she was carrying a bag that also had a red cross. The bag was too heavy for her, her shoulder drooped. There was a whole drugstore in there. Actually, it wasn’t just the bag that was too heavy for her. She was the only medic for the whole unit, can you imagine. I never heard her complain, but it was clear that the whole thing was beyond her strength. Constantly she was washing bandages, dressing wounds, handing out pills for aches and pains and fevers, she’d wipe the men’s foreheads, clean away the blood and the dirt — often from head to foot — when one of them was too weak to stand on his own two feet and kept calling her to come here and go there, day and night.
Even today, when I think of her I find it hard to imagine that someone could be so young and work without any relief — anyone her age deserves a break. I couldn’t tell you exactly how old she was, she never mentioned her age, maybe she was embarrassed, but she put up with it all like someone much, much older.
Actually, in the depths of my soul I wanted her to be a whole lot older. Not for the reason you think. It’s only up to a certain age that you want something like that, then your desire starts to turn back. You think that from that moment we become worse people? I don’t think I agree. We’re already worse when we play in the sandbox.
Did you ever play in a sandbox when you were a child? Me neither. Why would anyone have made a sandbox for children in the village? There was sand everywhere, in abundance. Wherever the river turned, one bank would be sandy. You could roll in the sand, bury yourself, build things in sand, whatever you felt like. And not just by the Rutka. Though village kids aren’t drawn to sand the way children in the city are. You’ve got fields, meadows, woods, everything is wide open in every direction, above you, in the distance, who would want to play in sand? You could play anywhere. Like living, people lived wherever. Big houses weren’t necessary, no one needed to be apart. People lived in the yards, in the barns, in the cattle sheds, the orchards, the fields, on the meadows, under the sky, by the Rutka. The whole world was our home, while our actual home was only there so we could all come together at the end of the day. So everyone wanted to be as close as possible to the next person. In some houses there wasn’t even a separate living room, just one big room, then you were closest of all. It was only when you were tightly crammed in that you could truly feel you were together. Who would have made a sandbox for the children, when the children also wanted to feel they were part of everyone else. If it had occurred to anyone to build a sandbox like you see in the cities, do you think any child would have wanted to play in it? You could have tied them there on a chain, they would have broken free. And the sandbox would have become a home for chickens and geese and ducks, they like to play in sand, they would have made a big old mess in there and that would have been the end of the sandbox.
When I was abroad I spent a lot of time watching sandboxes. Wherever I lived, in among the apartment buildings there were always sandboxes. As I mentioned, I like children, and so whenever I had a little time I’d sit on a bench by one of the sandboxes, among the nannies and mothers and grandmothers. And let me tell you, when I watched the children playing in the sandbox, I’d sometimes be moved, but also fearful.
Believe me, a sandbox is a whole world. A couple of square yards, but it’s an entire world, humanity, future wars. Nice rosy little faces, you’d think they were all quite innocent, but you could already tell who would bury who in the sand, and who would hide from who in the sand. Which of them would one day find the sandbox too small, and which of them would soon get lost in it. Was the sandbox really to blame? Some people reckon so. But when I think about it I sometimes have the feeling that we’re all exiles from the sandbox, whatever our age. Me too, though I never played in a sandbox.
You know, when I was abroad I even saw sandboxes with colored sand. Green, blue, pink. I think it was dyed. Where could they have found sand in those colors. But can colored sand make us different? It’s true that we’re affected by colors. But not everyone is influenced to the same extent by the same colors. And we’ve no idea who is more affected by what color. Or which color fades in which person or which one grows brighter. And are the colors we see the same when they’re within us? Besides, tell me this: Can anyone come up with a wiser color for sand than the color of the sun? A wiser color for leaves than green? Or blue for the sky? White for snow? Of course colors are wise. Didn’t you know that? If it hadn’t been for the white snow back at that time, then …
What’s my favorite color? What are you, a journalist? No, that much I know for sure. You don’t even look like a journalist. What color? Oh, I don’t know. I wasn’t expecting that question. I don’t have a favorite color. Anyway, would it mean anything if I said, for instance, green? Because which green would it be? Each tree in the woods, each bush, each leaf, even moss, is a different kind of green. And in you, all of that turns into a different kind of green again. So can you say that something is green? Green is an infinity. Each color is an infinity.
As I stared through that crack in the cellar door, I was amazed to see one kind of whiteness turned into another, then a moment later into a different kind again, without ever going back to the previous one. It was like waves of whiteness rolling over the white snow. So what do you think the color white is? You’re messing with me. You’d like to see me spend my whole life in the sandbox. I’d want that too. Except that no color is forever. Color is change, like everything else.