Now I hear her voice again, and although she’s speaking so low that the only thing I can distinguish is sound, her voice has the same monotonous tone of supplication I heard this afternoon. Niet, she’s saying, niet. The flashlight flicks on, goes out, and it’s the woman’s large body that has blocked the light. If I can work the stiffness out of my fingers and pick up the pistol and cock it before the men come to kill me, I might get at least one or two of them. When they shine the light in my face, I’ll raise my hand and shoot, and in the confusion maybe I can save myself. But that simple act is as impossible as if I were planning it in a dream. I do nothing, I lie rigid on the floor, half propped up against the wall, listening to those murmuring voices, counting the seconds I have left before I die in these desolate northern reaches of the world, less than one kilometer from Leningrad, the city we were always on the verge of conquering but never reached, the city I’ll never reach now, even though on clear days we see its golden cupolas gleaming in the distance, on the edge of the plain.
But there is no fear in me, not even now. I hope they come soon and that the pain doesn’t last too long. The flashlight goes out, is turned on again, and my heart lurches, thinking that now they will push open the door. Niet, the woman says, and after the muted sound of a male voice I hear a cry from the boy that sounds something like the mewing of a cat.
No more voices. They’ll come in, and I can’t move this hand to pick up my pistol. A door opens, but it isn’t the door in front of me, it’s the other one, of stouter wood, the door of the izba, and as it opens a blast of wind touches me. I feel the vibration of boots on the ground. I hear that slight noise of a rifle, the sling ring clicking against the butt. Now the door has closed, and everything is darkness and silence once more.
With faint gratitude, but also with the indifference that has been growing in him as the war proceeds, he understands that the woman has saved his life. She has convinced the guerrillas not to kill him, telling them that he isn’t a German and doesn’t act like them despite the uniform with the lieutenant’s insignia. Maybe she showed them the package of food, or what was left of it, maybe she gave them something to ease their hunger.
A German lieutenant takes his place in the hut a few days later, when he goes to serve in the front line. The first night, the German claims the iron bed, while the mother and child sleep on the floor of the lean-to, and the next morning he is found strangled with a wire and hanged from a telegraph post near the hut. The mother and child are barricaded in the hut and it’s set afire, and when everything has burned to the ground they flatten the area with a tractor and stick a sign in German and Russian in the mud reiterating the punishment reserved for those who collaborate with guerrillas.
Wait a minute. He shudders as a chill runs down his spine; he is huddled in the darkness, feeling the sheets, a pillow he should find a pistol beneath. These things haven’t happened yet. I can’t be remembering something that hasn’t happened. In April or May of 1936, my literature professor couldn’t know that at the end of that summer he would be shot and thrown into a ditch.
Confused again, he is on the verge of waking and doesn’t know where he is or who he is. Where am I if not in a Russian hut near the Leningrad front in the autumn of 1942? I’m wearing not a German winter uniform but lightweight pajamas, there is no rough cloth of a military blanket, no stink of manure or the rotted straw of the mattress I dropped onto a few hours ago, dead with fatigue, not roused from sleep by the stealthy sounds of guerrillas who came to kill me.
Now, yes now he feels panic, lost somewhere in the tangle of unreliable memories and the chaos of time, and vertigo, because in a single instant his mind has leaped more than half a century and an entire continent. He is tempted to reach over to the night table and turn on the lamp, but he chooses to lie quietly, curled up as he did that night fifty-seven years before, a whole lifetime in one lightning flash, in that instant when you’re dozing but jerk awake as your head drops. He listens attentively to the quiet whir of the alarm clock, the distant hum of the refrigerator, the muted night traffic of Madrid. He looks at who he was as if watching a stranger, seeing himself from the outside, feeling curiosity and a certain tenderness, as well as the satisfaction of learning that he wasn’t a coward, and the surprise of having survived where so many perished. He knows that his lack of fear, like his lack of envy, is not something to be proud of but simply a part of his character. He sees the youth who was so passionate about philosophy and literature and the German language in a public institute in Madrid, the young man who wasn’t born in time to fight in the Spanish Civil War but enlisted in a fit of reckless, toxic romanticism to go to Russia. He sees himself leaping over a trench, at the head of a squad, shooting a pistol and shouting orders, all the while feeling invulnerable. He sees coming toward him, emerging from a mist, a platoon of Russians with upraised swords.
But of all his successive identities the strangest, the most unreal, is the one he has experienced now, tonight, just awakened from a memory as vivid as a dream. Who is this eighty-year-old man turning clumsily in the bed, who knows he will lie awake until dawn, seeing the faces of dead men and places that don’t exist, the Russian woman and the benumbed child hiding in the folds of her ragged skirt, the flames of the fire glowing on the leveled plain of mud, the face of the executed professor without his eyeglasses? He wishes he could fall asleep and for a few minutes or seconds have now again become then.
valdemún
COMING OUT OF THE last curve of the highway, you will suddenly see all the things she never saw again, the last things, perhaps, she remembered and felt a surge of nostalgia for as she lay dying in her hospital bed, caged among machines and tubes in a room where the air was burning with July heat, the thin cloth of her sick-room gown clinging to her sweaty back. She was always thirsty, and she mumbled words, working parched lips that you moistened with a wet cloth, and she imagined or dreamed she was sitting on the bank of a river in the shade of large trees swaying in a breeze as cool as the current, the clean, swift water where she dabbled her bare feet one summer morning in her early youth. Irrigation ditches snaking through heavy shade, gurgling water hidden beneath thickets of blackberries and willows, scales of gold glittering in the sun, clean pebbles on the bottom shining like precious stones, and in the eddies, spongy masses of eggs brushed the feet with the same delicate feel as water or mud, and bubblelike protuberances, imperceptible to the untrained eye, betray the presence of half-submerged frogs. She swallowed saliva and her throat burned, and once again her mouth was dry, her rough tongue licking lips that you didn’t moisten because you fell asleep, overcome by the exhaustion of so many sleepless nights, now in the hospital and earlier at home, when they released her after her first stay and it seemed she would recover, would regain her health even though she was fragile and frightened. But once she was back home, it was obvious that she belonged in the hospital, for in those few days she had become a stranger to the place and things that once had formed the framework of her life. She would walk with a strange air through the kitchen or the living room in her bathrobe, as if she couldn’t find her way, get lost in a corridor or stand before an open closet, looking for something she didn’t know how to find, trying unsuccessfully to resume the domestic patterns of the time when she was well, the simplest tasks: preparing a snack in midafternoon, changing sheets.