My brother and I were small seeds deeply embedded in thick flesh and tough, outer skin, green seeds soft and fresh and encased in membrane that would shiver and slough away at the first exposure to light. And outside the tough, outer skin, near the sea that was visible from the roof as a thin ribbon glittering in the distance, in the city beyond the heaped, rippling mountains, the war, majestic and awkward now like a legend that had survived down the ages, was belching foul air. But to us the war was nothing more than the absence of young men in our village and the announcements the mailman sometimes delivered of soldiers killed in action. The war did not penetrate the tough outer skin and the thick flesh. Even the “enemy” planes that had begun recently to traverse the sky above the village were nothing more to us than a rare species of bird.
Near dawn I was awakened by the noise of a gigantic impact and a furious ringing in the ground. I saw my father sit up on his blanket on the floor like a beast lurking in the forest night about to spring upon his prey, his eyes bright with desire and his body tense. But instead of springing he dropped back to the floor and appeared to fall asleep again.
For a long time I waited with my ears peeled, but that ringing did not occur again. Breathing quietly the damp air that smelled of mold and small animals I waited patiently in the pale moonlight creeping through the skylight high in the storehouse roof. A long time passed, and my brother, who had been asleep, his sweaty forehead pressed against my side, began to whimper. He too had been waiting for the ground to quiver and ring again, and the prolonged anticipation had been too much for him. Placing my hand on his delicate neck like a slender plant stem I shook him lightly to comfort him, and, lulled by the gentle movement of my own arm, fell asleep.
When I woke up, fecund morning light was slanting through every crack in the slat walls, and it was already hot. My father was gone. So was his gun from the wall. I shook my brother awake and went out to the cobblestone road without a shirt. The road and the stone steps were awash in the morning light. Children squinting and blinking in the glare were standing vacantly or picking fleas out of the dogs or running around and shouting, but there were no adults. My brother and I ran over to the blacksmith’s shed in the shade of the lush nettle tree. In the darkness inside, the charcoal fire on the dirt floor spit no tongues of red flame, the bellows did not hiss, the blacksmith lifted no red-hot steel with his lean, sun-blackened arms. Morning and the blacksmith not in his shop—we had never known this to happen. Arm in arm, my brother and I walked back along the cobblestone road in silence. The village was empty of adults. The women were probably waiting at the back of their dark houses. Only the children were drowning in the flood of sunlight. My chest tightened with anxiety.
Harelip spotted us from where he was sprawled at the stone steps that descended to the village fountain and came running over, arms waving. He was working hard at being important, spraying fine white bubbles of sticky saliva from the split in his lip.
“Hey! Have you heard?” he shouted, slamming me on the shoulder.
“Have you?”
“Heard?” I said vaguely.
“That plane yesterday crashed in the hills last night. And they’re looking for the enemy soldiers that were in it, the adults have all gone hunting in the hills with their guns!”
“Will they shoot the enemy soldiers?” my brother asked shrilly.
“They won’t shoot, they don’t have much ammunition,” Harelip explained obligingly, “They aim to catch them!”
“What do you think happened to the plane?” I said.
“It got stuck in the fir trees and came apart,” Harelip said quickly, his eyes flashing. “The mailman saw it, you know those trees.”
I did, fir blossoms like grass tassles would be in bloom in those woods now. And at the end of summer, fir cones shaped like wild bird eggs would replace the tassles, and we would collect them to use as weapons. At dusk then and at dawn, with a sudden rude clatter, the dark brown bullets would be fired into the walls of the storehouse.…
“Do you know the woods I mean?”
“Sure I do. Want to go?”
Harelip smiled slyly, countless wrinkles forming around his eyes, and peered at me in silence. I was annoyed.
“If we’re going to to go I’ll get a shirt,” I said, glaring at Harelip. “And don’t try leaving ahead of me because I’ll catch up with you right away!”
Harelip’s whole face became a smirk and his voice was fat with satisfaction.
“Nobody’s going! Kids are forbidden to go into the hills. You’d be mistaken for the foreign soldiers and shot!”
I hung my head and stared at my bare feet on the cobblestones baking in the morning sun, at the sturdy, stubby toes. Disappointment seeped through me like treesap and made my skin flush hot as the innards of a freshly killed chicken.
“What do you think the enemy looks like?” my brother said.
I left Harelip and went back along the cobblestone road, my arm around my brother’s shoulders. What did the enemy soldiers look like, in what positions were they lurking in the fields and the woods? I could feel foreign soldiers hiding in all the fields and woods that surrounded the valley, the sound of their hushed breathing about to explode into an uproar. Their sweaty skin and harsh body odor covered the valley like a season.
“I just hope they aren’t dead,” my brother said dreamily. “I just hope they catch them and bring them in.”
In the abundant sunlight we were hungry; saliva was sticky in our throats and our stomach muscles were tight. Probably it would be dusk before my father returned, we would have to find our own food. We went down behind the storehouse to the well with the broken bucket and drank, bracing ourselves with both hands against the chilly, sweating stones jutting from the inside wall like the swollen belly of a pupa. When we had drawn water for the shallow iron pot and built a fire, we stuck our arms into the chaff heaped at the rear of the storehouse and stole some potatoes. As we washed them, the potatoes were hard as rocks in our hands.
The meal we began after our brief efforts was simple but plentiful. Eating away like a contented animal at the potato he grasped in both hands, my brother pondered a minute, then said, “Do you think the soldiers are up in the fir trees? I saw a squirrel on a fir branch!”
“It would be easy to hide in the fir because they’re in bloom,” I said.
“The squirrel hid right away, too,” my brother said, smiling.
I pictured fir trees covered with blossoms like grass tassles, and the foreign soldiers lurking in the highest branches and watching my father and the others through the bunched green needles. With fir blossoms stuck to their bulky flying suits, the soldiers would look like fat squirrels ready for hibernation.
“Even if they’re hiding in the trees the dogs will find them and bark,” my brother said confidently.
When our stomachs were full we left the pot on the dirt floor with the remaining potatoes and a fistful of salt and sat down on the stone steps at the entrance to the storehouse. For a long time we sat there drowsily, and in the afternoon we went to bathe at the spring that fed the village fountain.
At the spring, Harelip, sprawled naked on the broadest, smoothest stone, was allowing the girls to fondle his rosy penis as if it were a small doll. Every so often, face beet-red, laughing shrilly in a voice like a screaming bird, he slapped one of the girls on her naked rear.
My brother sat down next to Harelip and raptly observed the merry ritual. I splashed water on the ugly children drowsily sunning themselves around the spring, put on my shirt without drying myself, returned to the stone steps at the storehouse entrance, leaving wet footprints on the cobblestones, and sat there without moving for a long time again, hugging my knees. Anticipation that was like madness, a heated, drunken feeling, was crackling up and down beneath my skin. Dreamily I pictured myself absorbed in the odd game to which Harelip seemed abnormally attached. But whenever the girls among the children returning naked from the spring smiled timidly at me, their hips sw
aying at each step they took and an unstable color like mashed peaches peeking from the folds of their meager, exposed vaginas, I rained pebbles and abuse on them and made them cringe.
I waited in the same position until a passionate sunset covered the valley, clouds the color of a forest fire wheeling in the sky, but still the adults did not return. I felt I would go mad with waiting.
The sunset had paled, a cool wind that felt good on newly burned skin had begun to blow up from the valley, and the first darkness of night had touched the shadows of things when the adults and the barking dogs finally returned to the hushed village, the village whose mind had been affected by uneasy anticipation. With the other children I ran out to greet them, and saw a large black man surrounded by adults. Fear struck me like a fist.
Surrounding the catch solemnly as they surrounded the wild boar they hunted in winter, their lips drawn tightly across their teeth, their backs bent forward almost sadly, the adults came walking in. The catch, instead of a flying suit of burnt-ocher silk and black leather flying shoes, wore a khaki jacket and pants and, on his feet, ugly, heavy-looking boots. His large, darkly glistening face was tilted up at the sky still streaked with light, and he limped as he dragged himself along. The iron chain of a boar trap was locked around both his ankles, rattling as he moved. We children fell in behind the adults, as silent as they were. The procession slowly advanced to the square in front of the school house and quietly halted. I pushed my way through the children to the front, but the old man who was our village headman loudly ordered us away; we retreated as far as the apricot trees in one corner of the square, halted there determinedly, and from beneath the trees kept watch through the thickening darkness over the adults’ meeting. In the dirt floor houses that faced on the square the women hugging themselves beneath their white smocks strained irritably to catch the murmuring of the men who returned from a dangerous hunt with a catch. Harelip poked me sharply in the side from behind and pulled me away from the other children into the deep shadow of a camphor tree.
“He’s black, you see that! I thought he would be all along.” Harelip’s voice trembled with excitement. “He’s a real black man, you see!”
“What are they going to do with him, shoot him?”
“Shoot him!” Harelip shouted, gasping with surprise. “Shoot a real live black man!”
“Because he’s the enemy,” I asserted without confidence.
“Enemy! You call him an enemy!” Harelip seized my shirt and railed at me hoarsely, spraying my face with saliva through his lip.
“He’s a black man, he’s no enemy!”
“Look! Look at that!” It was my brother’s awed voice, coming from the crowd of children. “Look!”
Harelip and I turned around and peered at the black soldier; standing a little apart from the adults observing him in consternation, his shoulders sagging heavily, he was pissing. His body was beginning to melt into the thickened evening darkness, leaving behind the khaki jacket and pants that were somehow like overalls. His head to one side, the black soldier pissed on and on, and when a cloud of sighs from the children watching rose behind him he mournfully shook his hips.
The adults surrounded the black soldier again and slowly led him off; we followed a short distance behind. The silent procession surrounding the catch stopped in front of the loading entrance at the side of the storehouse. There the steps down to the cellar where the best of the autumn chestnuts were stored over the winter after the grubs beneath their hard skin had been killed with carbon disulfide yawned open blackly, like a hole inhabited by animals. Still surrounding the black soldier, the adults descended into the hole solemnly, as if a ceremony were beginning, and the white wavering of an adult arm closed the heavy trapdoor from inside.
Straining to catch a sound, we watched an orange light go on inside the long, narrow skylight window that ran between the floor of the storehouse and the ground. We could not find the courage to peek through the skylight. The short, anxious wait exhausted us. But no gunshot rang out. Instead, the village headman’s shadowed face appeared beneath the partly opened trapdoor and we were yelled at and had to abandon even keeping watch at a distance from the skylight; the children, carrying with them expectations that would fill the night hours with bad dreams, ran off down the cobblestone road without a word of disappointment. Fear, awakened by their pounding feet, pursued them from behind.
Leaving Harelip lurking in the darkness of the apricot trees, still determined to observe the adults and the catch, my brother and I went around to the front of the storehouse and climbed, supporting ourselves against the railing that was always damp, to our room in the attic. We were to live in the same house as the catch, that was how it was to be! No matter how hard we listened in the attic, we would never be able to hear screaming in the cellar, but the luxurious, hazardous, entirely unbelievable fact was that we were sitting on a sleeping platform above the cellar to which the black soldier had been taken. My teeth were chattering with fear and joy, and my brother huddling beneath the blanket was shaking as if he had caught a cold. As we waited for my father to come home dragging his fatigue and his heavy gun we smiled together at the wonderful good fortune that had befallen us.
Not so much to satisfy our hunger as to distract ourselves from the uproar in our chests with raising and lowering of arms and precise chewing, we were beginning to eat the cold, hardened, sweating potatoes that were left over when my father climbed the stairs. Shivering, my brother and I watched him place his hunting gun in the wooden rack on the wall and lower himself to the blanket spread on the dirt floor, but he said nothing, merely looked at the pot of potatoes we were eating. I could tell he was tired to death, and irritated. There was nothing we children could do about that.
“Is the rice gone?” he said, staring at me, the skin of his throat puffing like a sack beneath the stubble of beard.
“Yes….” I said weakly.
“The barley too?” he grunted sourly.
“There’s nothing!” I was angry.
“What about the airplane?” my brother said timidly. “What happened to it?”
“It burned. Almost started a forest fire.”
My brother let out a sigh. “The whole thing?”
“Just the tail was left.”
“The tail…” my brother murmured.
“Were there any others?” I asked. “Was he flying alone?”
“Two other soldiers were dead. He came down in a parachute.”
“A parachute …” My brother was entirely lost in a dream. I summoned up my courage.
“What are you going to do with him?”
“Until we know what the town thinks, rear him.”
“Rear him? Like an animal?”
“He’s the same as an animal,” my father said gravely. “He stinks like an ox.”
“It would sure be nice to see him,” my brother said with an eye on my father, but my father went back down the stairs in grim silence.
We sat down on the wooden frame of our sleeping platform to wait for my father to come back with borrowed rice and vegetables and cook us a pot of steaming gruel. We were too exhausted to be really hungry. And the skin all over our bodies was twitching and jumping like the genitals of a bitch in heat. We were going to rear the black soldier. I hugged myself with both arms, I wanted to throw off my clothes and shout—we were going to rear the black soldier, like an animal!
The next morning my father shook me awake without a word. Dawn was just breaking. Thick light and heavy fog were seeping through every crack in the wall boards. As I gulped my cold breakfast I gradually woke up. My father, his hunting gun on his shoulder and a lunch basket tied to his waist, watched me as I ate, waiting for me to finish, eyes dull yellow from lack of sleep. When I saw the bundle of weasel skins wrapped in a torn burlap bag at his knee I swallowed hard and thought to myself, so we are going down to the town! And surely we would report the black man to the authorities.
A whirlpool of words at the back of my th
roat was slowing the speed at which I could eat, but I saw my father’s strong lower jaw covered in coarse beard moving incessantly as if he were chewing grain and I knew he was nervous and irritated from lack of sleep. Asking about the black soldier was impossible. The night before, after supper, my father had loaded his gun with new bullets and gone out to stand night watch.
My brother was sleeping with his head buried under a blanket that smelled of dank hay. When I was finished eating I moved around the room on tiptoes, careful not to wake him. Wrapping a green shirt of thick cloth around my bare shoulders, I stepped into the cloth sneakers I normally never used, shouldered the bundle that was between my father’s knees, and ran down the stairs.
Low fog rolled along just above the wet cobblestones; the village, wrapped in haze, was fast asleep. The chickens were already tired and silent; the dogs did not even bark. I saw an adult with a gun leaning against the apricot tree alongside the storehouse, his head drooping. My father and the guard exchanged a few words in low voices. I stole a look at the cellar skylight yawning blackly open like a wound and I was gripped by terrific fear. The black soldier’s arm reaches through the skylight and extends to seize me. I wanted to leave the village quickly. When we began walking in silence, careful not to slip on the cobblestones, the sun penetrated the layers of fog and struck at us with tough, heated light.
To reach the village road along the ridge we climbed the narrow path of red earth into the fir forest, where once again we were at the bottom of dark night. Fog that filled my mouth with a metallic taste slanted down on us in droplets large as rain, making it hard for me to breathe and wetting my hair and forming white, shiny beads on the lint of my grimy, wrinkled shirt. The spring water that seeped up through the rotten leaves so soft beneath our feet to soak our cloth shoes and to freeze our toes was not so bad; we had to be truly careful not to wound our skin against the iron stalks of ferns or to surprise the adders watchfully coiled among their stubborn roots.
When we emerged from the fir forest onto the village road, where it was brightening and the fog was burning off, I brushed the fog out of my shirt and short pants as carefully as if I were removing sticky tickseeds. The sky was clear and violently blue. The distant mountains the color of the copper ore we found in the dangerous abandoned mine in our valley was a sparkling, deep-blue sea rushing at us. And a single, whitish handful of the real sea.