But the light filtering from beyond the door doesn’t come from a fire or candle. It’s a flashlight being turned on and off; he can hear the click of the switch, which someone is sliding very quietly: not the woman, because he is sure she doesn’t have a flashlight, she didn’t even have candles until he brought her a handful from the commissary, or matches to light the fire. There was nothing at all in the straw-thatched log hut stranded in the midst of the mud and the chaos of the roads to the front, untouched by the disaster, nothing but the large iron bed that ended up there through God only knows what whim of fate, the bed that he’d refused to sleep in, despite instructions from the officer in charge of billeting.
He hears voices in the hut, barely whispers, but men’s voices, not the woman’s or the child’s. Footsteps too, boots, which he doesn’t exactly hear but rather feels as vibration on the ground where he’s lying. The flashlight is turned on again, and again he hears the sound of a rifle against cloth or a leather belt — specifically, the sound of the ring that fastens the sling to the rifle butt. Now the beam is turned in his direction, and the straw and the nest of blankets and greatcoat in which he’s lying are striped by threads of light coming through the cracks. Something blocks the light, a body brushing against the planks of the door. It’s the woman, he’s sure; he recognizes her voice, even though she is speaking very quietly, repeating one of the few words of Russian he’s learned. Niet.
Now he guesses, understands, but still isn’t afraid. Russian guerrillas. They operate behind our lines, sabotage installations, execute and hang from telegraph poles known collaborators with the Germans. They make raids at night, and at dawn there is no trace of them except for the corpse of someone they’ve hanged or strangled in silence. They don’t run, they vanish in the darkness, in the limitless expanse of plain and woods, a space that no army can encompass or conquer.
He thinks coolly, trying to make the numb fingers of his right hand respond and find the pistol; they’re carrying rifles, but they’re not going to shoot me, they won’t want to waste a bullet or have shots heard so near our guard posts. How strange to remember Jorge Manrique at this moment: How death comes, silencing everything. They will push open the plank door, and one of them will shine the flashlight on me and point a pistol at me, and maybe before I can get up another will bend over me and slit my throat, expertly stepping to one side to avoid the spurt of blood. The blood will steam in this cold. Everything soaked, heavy with blood: blankets, greatcoat, rotted straw mattress, and me dead… no, not me, someone else, because the dead lose all trace of identity. I will be dead without having touched my pistol, paralyzed by the cold that stiffens my hands, my entire body, as if I were wrapped in a premature shroud that prevents me from moving, as when you are sleeping and your muscles don’t respond to your will, and you wake up with one arm so numb that you have to move it with the other arm as if it were made of wood.
What terrifies me is not dying but being mutilated. At the moment I’m safe from that. I won’t be blown up by a howitzer or have my legs ground into the mud under the tread of an armored car. Someone, at any moment now, will push open that old plank door and cut my neck with a Russian Army machete, or with a nicked kitchen knife, or a rusty old sickle, and I won’t move or do anything to prevent it. I’m lying here in the dark, staring at the streaks of light still in my eyes even though the flashlight was turned off, and I’m waiting like a steer to be slaughtered by some Russian guerrilla who’s never seen my face, who will forget it as soon as he’s cut my throat, because no one can remember a dead man’s face, it becomes anonymous as soon as the life has left it, and that’s why we have so little sense of the death all around us, rotting in the barbed wire, bloating in the mud, the piles of dead that we sometimes sit on to rest as we eat our rations.
Now he understands why he can’t find the pistol. The woman took it while he was asleep; she must have slipped her hand beneath the doubled-up greatcoat he uses as a pillow and then crept away on her large bare feet, broad like her face and hips, in which there is a kind of stubborn, mulish strength despite the hunger and misfortune of the war that has upended the only world she knew and taken her husband. Shot by the Germans, she explained sketchily with gestures and mimicked sounds, as the child clung to her like a limpet, clutching her skirt with tiny, filthy hands so thin they were delicate, his frightened eyes fixed on the uniformed stranger, eyes huge in the starved face, as was his broad forehead, his entire head, compared to the scrawny torso and the skinny legs and arms as fragile as the limbs of some amphibian creature.
I offered them food, both mother and child, one of my rations or a tin of conserves, and they looked at my extended hand as warily as beaten dogs. The woman pushed the little boy, said something in a low voice, but he didn’t budge, didn’t take what I was offering but merely clung more desperately to his mother’s skirts, never taking his eyes from the slice of bread or packet of crackers I’d brought. I could see the thread of saliva running down his scrawny neck, which didn’t seem capable of supporting the weight of that enormous head. I put my offering on the table and went into the lean-to to rest, or I walked away a bit from the hut—izba is the Russian word. When I returned, the food was no longer on the table, but neither the mother nor child was chewing, they’d eaten it all, gulping it down with the choking haste of hunger, or else they’d hidden some in their clothing or beneath the bed, and they looked at me as if they feared that I wanted something from them, that I would demand they give back what no longer existed: two pairs of blue eyes bored into mine, staring at me with the knowledge that I could kill them without thinking twice.
Until this evening, I’d never seen them eat. I’d been out several days with guards and patrols on the front line; there’d been rumors of a Russian attack, and I hadn’t been able to go back to the izba to sleep. I’d barely slept at all in the last three or four nights. Worse than the hunger and cold in war is the lack of sleep. When I went past the battalion command post to start my watch, I was handed a package of food my family sent from Spain. I reached the izba dead with hunger and weariness and found with relief that neither woman nor child was there, though I couldn’t imagine where they might have gone. They must have been scrabbling through the mud somewhere, looking for food like stray dogs around some of our camps. But the fire was going, so I opened my package, which was filled with delicious sausages — almost impossible to believe they’d traveled untouched across the whole of Europe and half of Russia to reach me — and began roasting a few. What incredible delight in the midst of such misery, the sputter of the red grease bursting the casing, the smell of the seasoned, roasting meat. Then I became aware that the woman and her child were standing in the doorway, looking at me, looking at the sausages I was roasting over the fire. Maybe all they’d had to eat on the days I didn’t bring anything was potato peels. I set the package on the table and motioned for them to come in. This time when the woman pushed, the boy didn’t resist. With both hands he picked up a sausage I’d put on a plate and gobbled it down without lifting his head, grunting like an animal.
The woman watched but didn’t come closer. I let her see I was leaving. I came in here and closed the door, I wrapped myself up in my blankets and folded the greatcoat to use as a pillow. I’d barely closed my eyes when I was swept away by the sleep I’d missed for so many days. Then the woman knocked very softly at the door. I could see her large body through the openings in the planks. I told her to come in and got to my feet. She came in, words tumbling out in Russian and making strange gestures as if crossing herself. She had red grease all around her mouth. Before I could say anything, she was kneeling before me and covering my hands with kisses, with tears and saliva and sausage drippings.