Forest of the Hanged

by Liviu Rebreanu

  Half-way home he remembered that he had come to reconnoitre the front and to choose his route, and all he had done was to lose his time. He half thought of returning, then he said to himself that the plan with the positions would be sufficient guide and would show him the unoccupied places, which was what he needed to know. He could get as far as the first lines, and after that he’d trust to luck.

  He arrived in Lunca almost at sunset, his horse covered with foam. He wanted to thank the doctor, but could find him neither at the hospital nor at home. On going past the church he saw, over the way, ensconced in an arm-chair on the cerdac,1 the priest Boteanu, who was sunning himself happily and gazing down at the village as if he were viewing his own domain. From inside the house could be heard the furious, sharp voice of the priest’s wife scolding the servant, and in the courtyard a troop of children were playing at “war”, adorned with caps abandoned by soldiers quartered in the neighbouring houses. As soon as Bologa’s eyes had sighted the parochial house he forgot all about Doctor Meyer, and felt an irrepressible longing to speak with the priest. He hurried across to the little gate and rushed in as if a man’s fate were at stake for every minute’s delay.

  Popa Constantin, plunged as he was in vague and soothing bliss, suddenly saw an officer come up the five steps which led to the cerdac. A shudder of fear made him start up. He recognized Apostol, but the fear remained in his heart, and it made him utter his greeting in Hungarian:

  “Welcome to our house, lieutenant!”

  Bologa was so much moved that he did not at first notice that Boteanu was speaking Hungarian. His face seemed on fire and his blue lips trembled in a restless smile. When he spoke his teeth chattered and his voice had a harsh hoarseness:

  “Father Constantin, I have come to you for confession.”

  When he heard his own voice the sound of it seemed unknown to him, and instinctively he looked to see if it hadn’t been someone else who had spoken.

  “Please come in, come in,” said Boteanu, wondering and wavering.

  They entered into a white room, and Apostol noticed that on the wall between two holy ikons there was an empty place, caused by the removal of some picture. Then only he remembered that the priest’s greeting had been in Hungarian. He turned and looked at Constantin and became as confused as if he had inadvertently come across someone else’s secret. The priest asked him to sit down on the divan, in front of which stood an oval table covered with an embroidered cloth. Bologa sat down hesitatingly, ill at ease. His mind could not remember what he had wanted to say or how to start, although his soul felt crystal clear. The popa remained standing a few moments, waiting doubtfully, then he sat down on a rush-bottomed chair at a fair distance and murmured:

  “Here we can speak in peace, Apostol.”

  “And without danger!” added Bologa, glad to be able to ease the pressure on his soul by uttering these few words.

  The priest felt ashamed of his own suspicions, and said with real bitterness:

  “The man who has suffered as I have has a right to be on his guard even with his own shadow, Apostol!”

  “Then I who have been brought here to kill them from the distance, what must I be suffering? Can you imagine it, Constantin?” broke out Bologa suddenly, as if his heart had burst.

  Then he spoke for a quarter of an hour without stopping, with an alarming passion. He raved and stormed, converting his anguish and torment into a torrent of words. The priest listened with downcast eyes. As a matter of fact, Apostol did not look at him at all, and would have been infuriated had Boteanu dared to stop him or even to interrupt him. He talked to relieve his overburdened soul, just as one weeps to alleviate too great a sorrow. Only after he had regained some of his composure did he address himself directly to the priest, but with a changed voice and a new light in his eyes:

  “And now the cup is full, Father! I can stand no more! A deadly hatred gnaws at my heart. I loathe everything here, everybody—friends, comrades, superiors, inferiors, everything, everything, Constantin! The air here is unbearable and chokes me. If I stay among these people any longer I feel that hatred will be my undoing—it must, for it is bound to burst through sometime, even against my will.… And then …”

  Boteanu made an involuntary gesture: he put both hands crossed on the table. Apostol stopped a minute inquiringly. But because the priest had again turned to stone he went on more hurriedly, as if he had remembered that time was precious:

  “Listen carefully, Father! To-night I leave here. I am going across. You know where, for your heart, too, must … Yes! I am ready. Only I cannot let my mother know. I cannot write to her, my letter would be censored, and who knows what trouble it might get her into. That’s why I want to entrust you with the task of letting her know, Constantin—later on, when it will be possible. I’ll leave you mother’s address, and you’ll find a way to let her know that I have gone over. Perhaps through some trustworthy person later—when there might be a chance.”

  The priest’s face blanched with terror, and for a few minutes he was totally unable to speak, moving his lips helplessly. Then, as with a mighty effort, he burst out with tears in his voice, raising his right arm in timid protest:

  “Why do you wish to ruin me, Apostol? I returned only this morning from internment—you know very well—I told you in the train. I was innocent, and all the same I had to suffer. How can I now listen to your plans and even become an accomplice? I have a family and great worries as it is … and must you choose me of all people to …”

  “But you are a Rumanian, Father, my kinsman!” answered Bologa aghast.

  “To-day I am just a human being, Apostol,” answered the priest a little more calmly. “A wretched human being eaten up with want, with a never-dying fear in my heart and faith in the Divine Mercy. That’s all we can be—just human beings—and all we can do is to hope that God will look after us, since Fate has flung us here and has exiled us.”

  Apostol Bologa had risen to his feet, stunned, and had bent his head so that the priest’s words should not hit him in the face. His ears were buzzing, and the meaning of the priest’s answer drilled itself slowly into his brain.

  “You must do as God directs you, but you must not mix us up in it!” resumed Boteanu firmly. “We have enough dangers and difficulties of our own.”

  Bologa looked up quickly, so changed did the priest’s voice sound, and in his face he read an inflexibility which startled him. He had put his steel helmet on the table; he now stretched out his hand mechanically and pulled it towards him by the strap. Then he put it on, slowly, carefully, muttering vaguely:

  “You are right, Constantin … quite right … quite.”

  And he left the room with slow, dragging footsteps, leaving the door open; he went down the cerdac steps and passed through the courtyard where the children, gay and noisy, were still playing. Boteanu, seeing him go, took two steps forward, whether to stop Apostol or whether to accompany him to the gate he did not know himself. On the threshold he thought better of it, and he crossed himself and thanked the Almighty that He had given him strength to resist temptation.

  In the street Apostol no longer knew which way to go, he seemed to have forgotten where he was. But his feet walked on without guidance, and presently he found himself in his little back street.

  He felt so utterly weak that all he longed for now was one hour’s rest. In the courtyard the office sergeant stiffened to attention. Bologa tried to say something to him, but he was too tired. In the doorway, leaning against the framework, he saw Ilona, who seemed to be waiting for someone. He looked at her as at a stranger, with dark, vacant eyes.

  “Sir, you are ill!” exclaimed the girl, changing colour.

  Bologa, without knowing he did so, stopped and looked at her inquiringly.

  “You look ghastly and you are dead-tired. You must rest,” added Ilona firmly.

  The voice seemed to him so soothing that he thrilled with pleasure. But simultaneously a strange fear stabbed at his heart whi
ch made him answer angrily:

  “Look here, my girl, haven’t you anything better to do than to worry about me?”

  1 In peasant houses the cerdac is a sort of covered verandah, usually built over the entrance to the cellar.

  VI

  Apostol had intended to go into the office to see what work the men had done all day, but instead he found himself opening the door of his room. The grey twilight filtered in through the windows adorned with geraniums. In the dim light the walls seemed to curve and the things in the room rocked strangely. Bologa closed his eyes and sank into a chair, an inert lump of flesh. The buzzing and ringing in his ears made him so dizzy that he grabbed the table with both hands and held on lest he should fall over.

  “Long may you live, sir. I have had your dinner ready all day,” said Petre from the stove, thinking that his master was waiting for him to speak.

  Bologa shuddered as if his orderly’s voice had stabbed his wounded nerves. He stared at him as if he didn’t know him, surprised that someone was in the room and that he hadn’t known it. He tried to ask him something, but before the question was born in his brain a new, peremptory thought forced him to mutter:

  “Make up my bed, Petre, and draw off my boots. I want to rest for an hour, only an hour, because in an hour I must …”

  While he was drawing off the boots the soldier said something more to him. Apostol could not grasp what he was saying. He was thinking he’d like to tell Petre how frightfully tired he was, but he couldn’t find the necessary words, and he no longer seemed to have the strength to express any thought. He got up from his chair, dragged himself to the bed and lay down. As soon as his head touched the pillow he felt his body go numb. At the same time his brain began to race wildly. Thousands of thought-fragments flashed into being in the same second, hurtling against one another, mixing, becoming entangled. And through them all, like a red drone, buzzed backwards and forwards—now loudly, now more softly, and continually assuming different shapes—the obsession that to-night it should end, end without fail. He was sleepy, he longed to sleep, but the more he strove to quieten the ferment in his soul the more tempestuous became his thoughts. Then, tired of trying, he let them go their own way, and it seemed to him that they all raced on, trying frenziedly to get ahead of one another, towards a luminous, shining goal, as towards a haven of real peace. He noticed that in this mighty race time remained behind, unrolling itself like a coloured canvas, and he was filled with an immeasurable satisfaction, as if little by little his whole being were melting into an immense revelation.

  Then abruptly, without transition, the red thought that he must go that night reappeared and continued to dodge in and out among thousands of senseless thought-fragments. But now they all seemed encompassed by a burning feeling of regret. He felt he was still awake. It seemed to him that time had stood still like a watch out of order, and that because of this he could not go to sleep, and never again would he be able to go to sleep. Then he heard Ilona’s voice near the bed saying, in a mixture of Rumanian and Hungarian:

  “Ill, can’t you see? Go for the doctor. I’ll stay with him so you need not worry.”

  He couldn’t catch what the orderly answered, but soon he heard the door creak and a gentle rustling. He thought: “A fine thing if I am ill and can’t …” His thought trailed, unfinished, and on his forehead he felt a light hand, cool and rather rough-skinned. Under that touch the ferment in his mind quickly subsided as under the influence of a spell, and sleep came like a soothing balm. When he awoke he heard a strange voice near him. He felt terribly tired, so tired that he could not even lift his eyelids, and he tried hard to recognize the voice that was mumbling near his ear.

  “It is Doctor Meyer!” he gasped presently. “So I am ill.”

  He opened his eyes to convince himself. His eyes rested on Ilona, who was standing at the foot of the bed, and who, on seeing him move, cried out joyfully:

  “Look, doctor, he is awake!”

  Doctor Meyer bent over the sick man, gave him a friendly tap on the cheek, and asked with kindly reproach:

  “Well, what’s the matter with you? What has happened to you? Is that what you call being strong? After I had warned you yesterday to take care of yourself and to …”

  “What’s the time, doctor?” whispered Bologa with a sad foreboding.

  “It is morning, friend. What does it matter to you? Just keep quiet. It’s nothing serious—nothing. You are just overtired and overwrought, that’s all! But you’ll have to keep very, very quiet.”

  Apostol’s lids drooped as if they had been weighted with lead. He felt something give way in his soul and he longed vaguely for death. After a while he murmured, scarcely moving his lips:

  “Doctor, I want to die.”

  “What, what?” shouted Meyer with unusual energy. “To die? Better say you want some sick-leave, to which you are certainly entitled.”

  Then, busying himself at the table, he added lower, in a natural voice and to himself:

  “What a wicked thing to do, to send sick people to the front! Sometimes one really feels inclined to run away and let them all go to hell!”

  Bologa’s heart was filled with despair. The value of life lies in the future, and his future seemed to him to be padlocked like an iron gate on which he had bruised his fists by hammering in vain. One’s powerlessness in face of life frightened him now more than it revolted him. The consciousness that all his endeavours and efforts were as powerless and aimless as the writhings of an earth-worm sank more and more deeply into his soul, together with the bitter certainty that a man’s life was unbearable unless he had a solid prop to keep straight the balance between the inner world and the outer.

  When he reopened his eyes some time later he again saw, sitting at the foot of his bed, the grave-digger’s daughter, her head bent in thought. As if she had felt his glance resting on her, Ilona started up and came nearer, bright and cheerful, asking:

  “Are you better? You do feel easier, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I am quite all right,” said Apostol in a whisper.

  The childish, dreamy joy in her eyes drove away the thoughts that tortured his sick brain. It seemed to him that there was a new witchery in that strange voice of hers, as if something, faith or passion, had changed it since yesterday and made it deeper and mellower. Seeing her standing there, confused by his luminous gaze, her face shining with pleasure, Bologa felt a warm thrill in his heart and wanted to encourage her to speak.

  And Ilona, as if she had guessed his longing, began to talk quickly, breaking off occasionally in the middle of a word, apprehensively, as if she feared some unknown danger. She told him that the doctor had wanted to have him moved to the hospital but that she had opposed it, for he would surely be better looked after here, where he was the only one, than at the hospital, where there were so many. She had sworn she wouldn’t leave his bedside, and, in fact, she hadn’t budged. She hadn’t any too much to do in the house, for her father didn’t make her work hard. Her father was awfully kind, though he liked to make out he was severe with her. But she did not mind about his severity, for she knew how to behave and take care of herself.

  “I saw you were ill as soon as you set foot in the enclosure the day before yesterday, and I told the orderly to look out. But now that you are in my care you don’t need the help of the orderly any more. He is a good fellow, there’s no doubt about that, and he is attached to his master, but men are no good with sick people, no matter how hard they try. From to-day onwards you’ve got to understand that I am master and that you must obey me absolutely until I tell you that you are well again, otherwise …”

  Here she broke off abruptly, took up a medicine bottle and a teaspoon, came up close to his bed and said:

  “Now you’ve got to take this; it’s quite sweet, I’ve tasted it.”

  “Leave that, Ilona. Go on talking!” begged Apostol.

  The girl’s face turned as red as the geranium in the window, and for a moment she hesitat
ed. But then almost immediately she repeated, with sweet severity:

  “If you don’t take your medicine you may as well know that I’ll never tell you another thing, so there!”

  Bologa closed his eyes a minute as if he would lock up her sweetness in his soul. Ilona filled the teaspoon and held it to his mouth. Her fingers trembled slightly, and Apostol put his hand on hers. The girl’s cheeks crimsoned again, and to hide her emotion she said:

  “My goodness, how hot your hand is!”

  Apostol tasted nothing. He again closed his eyelids, filled with a happiness in which all his thoughts were drowned. He heard Ilona put down the bottle, wipe the spoon, walk about on tiptoe, and finally sit down on her chair at the foot of the bed. He felt her caressing gaze on his cheeks, his forehead, his lips. He did not dare to move for fear of scattering this joy that was in his heart.

  From then onwards Apostol lost count of the time. Doctor Meyer came twice a day, always told him there was nothing wrong with him, but that he was to stay in bed until he’d bring him a miraculous medicine which would immediately cure him. Then one morning the doctor arrived in high spirits and called out from the threshold:

  “Come on, out of bed! I think after to-morrow I’ll bring you what I promised. But until then, mind you, you are not to leave this room! Not even to go across the passage into the office—not leave the room at all. You understand? Have patience! You’ve waited ten days, so you can wait another two. And because then, you know, you whispered some nonsense, let me tell you now, my young friend, that life is never a burden, but that death is the greatest burden of all. There! Remember what a morose and embittered doctor has told you. In point of fact, the most wretched life is of greater value than the most heroic death.”

  On the third day, at midday, an unusual hour for him to come, Doctor Meyer arrived, triumphantly waving a sheet of paper in his hand.

  “Look at the little miracle, my friend!” he said, with an exuberance so little in keeping with his nature that it seemed forced. “A month’s sick-leave! Do you think it was easy to get? I assure you it wasn’t! But I wouldn’t stop trying until His Excellency had to capitulate. At last here it is! I think there is a train which leaves here at four; which means there’s plenty of time for you to pack and clear out! What! You are not even glad? That’s military gratitude! Here am I, a grumpy fellow, rejoicing and he puts on airs! Bravo! Oh, by the way, don’t forget that when you get home you’ll have to feed up and rest with a vengeance! Now hurry so as not to miss that train!”