by Shlomo Kalo
I scoured him with a quick look.
He chuckled a soft and pleasant chuckle:
"It wasn’t my intention to eliminate you with it… but offer it to you as a gift…with repeated urgings not to reject this gift, presented to you in good faith… as it’s clear to me that only a decent and upright man, of incomparable valor and consummate self-control, someone like you – is fit to hold it and keep its secret, without doing further damage to this distorted world of ours, that is heading towards disintegration. Even myself I don’t trust any more. After I fell into captivity and there was the cold threat to my life, innocent though I was – crazy ideas began to rise in my head, and ugly thoughts of revenge… I’m ashamed of them but all the same – I’m dangerous. With this whistle in my hand," he saw fit to explain, and added, "all I want to do now is apply the remedy in advance and remove the devilish temptation far from me. Take it, then, and make proper use of it! The mummy that I took it from wore it around her neck on a chain made from some special metal that does not rust and cannot be melted by any instrument. Only one familiar with the secret of the chain can, if he wishes to, remove it from his neck and use it… Here is the chain, and this is the secret of opening and closing it." He pointed to an almost imperceptible protrusion on one of the delicate links of that chain, which he brought out from the secret drawer, rubbed it three times, back and forth, and the chain opened. He threaded the whistle on it, came close and hung it around my neck, repeating the rubbing process.
"It’s yours!" he declared with some sorrow and yet also – with a sigh of relief – "And there’s no need to thank me for it, because I’m the one who’s grateful, for the double liberation – from captivity and from the whistle!" He pointed to the whistle hanging around my muscular neck like a tiny, harmless amulet.
Nevertheless, I saw fit to thank him with a few words. I was close to perplexity – something that had never happened to me before that day and that hour, and has not affected me since then and up until the present day.
The rest of the day we spent in erudite discussion of the sincere aspiration of the decent man – happiness in which there is no disappointment and which is not dependent on anything, and the fragility of all other happiness, and the tough education that war teaches to the man who refuses to learn in any other way.
In the late hours of the evening I parted from my host, and since then I haven’t seen him. A strange man. I wish the world were full of people like him.
THE GUN-BRAZIER
In the winter before the last winter of the war I was transferred from the central sector of the western front to its distant north-eastern extremity, located on an utterly smooth expanse of ice, a kind of sea of ice stretching from horizon to horizon and strewn with a mass of gigantic, silent boulders, whose blank expressions were sometimes lit by a malicious spark of schadenfreude at the expense of human beings.
A fast-flowing river, which at the end of autumn served us as a source of drinking water, also froze solid, its full length and breadth. Temperatures dropped rapidly: five degrees Celsius below zero, ten degrees Celsius below zero, twenty degrees…
Natural fuels for heating – i.e. trees or bushes, or something similar – were nowhere to be seen in that area. And since the coal from the depleted mines of my homeland had been supplied, most if not all of it, to staff headquarters located at a safe distance behind the lines, to the villas and palaces of the aristocracy and to foundries engaged in the smelting of artillery pieces and other weaponry – all that could be spared for us were a few meager logs, from trees felled in distant forests and loaded onto ancient trains, shaking convulsively on their rails like elderly sufferers from Parkinson’s.
At the sight of these decrepit trains, every heart was jolted by a pang of deep dread, along with the question which everyone tried to dispel from his consciousness and which everyone had no option but to ask – what will happen if one of the wagons overturns, or the locomotive catches fire, or the whole train expires on account of extreme old age?
And sure enough, this was exactly what happened and our worst fears were realized – twenty-seven degrees below zero and no fuel for heating, not even imaginary fuel. And no prospect of an improvement in the situation in the coming days, or in the foreseeable future.
The regimental doctor, the esteemed Doctor Weinschultz, an expert on tropical diseases, having spent fifteen years in India studying the venom of the local snakes and in particular the venom of the cobra, was sure he was going to freeze to death on that shoreless sea of ice and he drew up a detailed will, while he still had his faculties and his wits about him. His example was followed by a number of battle-hardened officers and various NCOs, heads of extended families. And sure enough, the exercise wasn’t wasted, since about half a dozen of them froze to death, while of the private soldiers, who had heard nothing of the drawing up of wills and the personal example set by the valiant Doctor Weinschultz – fifty-four died of the cold: thirty-seven of them married with children, eleven bachelors, some of them supporting elderly parents and some supported by them, five of them divorced without any obligations whatsoever, and one widower with a dependent mother-in-law.
Kitchens were not functioning since there was no fuel for the stoves or mobile ovens. Food was distributed frozen and helped to speed up the advance of hypothermia from within.
If it had been within their power, the unhappy soldiers on both sides of the line would have mutinied and abandoned their frozen positions, but the cold – so it seemed – sapped both their willpower and their instinct to survive. They became ever more indifferent to everything, their thoughts and senses dulled, frozen inside and out, waiting for their fate to be sealed – not hastening it but at the same time making no attempt to prevent it.
The cold was so intense that even vaporized breath did not rise from the bluing lips of one of the fighters, who made an effort and tried to remind his comrade that man is an articulate creature, the crown of creation, master of the world and its fullness.
The situation was approaching the kind of disaster that transcends narrow national partitions, since on both sides of the front line the cold was the same cold, and those freezing to death were the same people, with family obligations or without, and most of them having left no wills behind them. Few shots were heard. Frozen fingers could barely squeeze the blazing metal of the trigger, and the would-be shooter, on withdrawing his hand, was likely to find his firing finger missing, hanging uselessly, stuck fast to the trigger which had not been pressed hard enough to fire a shot.
As the crisis reached a climax, a day of truce was declared by the two opposing staffs. No official announcement was needed, since one way or the other, all military activity had ceased of its own accord, in direct defiance of the wishes of the managers of the war in their stately homes, a good few kilometers from the frozen front.
I invited my senior officers to the improvised regimental headquarters – dismal concrete blockhouses which had long since lost doors and dividing partitions, being made of rotten wood. The wretched blockhouses themselves were covered with thick layers of ice, layer upon layer and looked twisted and unstable, as if seen through distorting lenses. The roof was a piece of tarpaulin, old but intact. Icicles hung from its four corners, like the festive decorations of a Russian shawl or an original Spanish scarf.
The officers, with their frozen limbs, were not so much obeying my orders as coming here with the aim of trying to derive some warming benefit from the crowding together, somehow drawing heat from the bodies of friends, whose mechanisms for thermal storage might be more sophisticated than their own. Naturally their hopes were disappointed. And it was only natural that all looks, more dulled or less dulled, half frozen or three quarters frozen, or those in which the process of freezing was nearing completion – should be turned towards me, the youngest among them as well as the holder of the highest rank.
I forgot to mention that following certain exploits on the battlefield I was promoted to the rank of colonel a
nd awarded all the medals and marks of distinction, including mentions in dispatches, which existed in those days in my homeland, for heroism and valor, for resourcefulness on the battlefield, for imagination and for commitment to the objective and for flawless performance of an impossible mission and for loyal service to mankind for the sake of mankind (to the best of my knowledge, this last medal is no longer considered valid).
Anyway, the officers, veteran officers of two infantry divisions and one artillery division, stood to attention, erect and packed tightly together in the narrow space of the command hut, the concrete block covered in ice, and waited.
It was obvious to me the time had come to act with energy and urgency, to get out of this frozen state and do it at once and demonstrate, at any price, resourcefulness and innate vision.
I took a deep breath of the frozen air, warmed slightly as it was by the faint hope arising in the hearts of all present, and gave an unequivocal command – that the guns were to be arranged symmetrically over the entire surface area of the camp, such that at each residential site there would be a pair of guns, standing muzzle to muzzle, barrels angled appropriately.
The officers were surprised, but much vaunted military discipline still held sway, and without a word said, after salutes and desultory clicking of heels, they went out to perform their duty.
About half an hour later the frozen plain, with its low and faraway iron horizon, was strewn with pairs of guns – each gun angled to kiss the aperture of the barrel of its counterpart, the whole resembling, in fact, one long tube with both ends sealed.
I ordered the loading of the left-hand gun with a live shell, and the firing of the shell into the muzzle of the gun paired with it.
It may be that on hearing my order, for the first moment at least, they thought me mad, but this made no impression on me at all, especially as this was not a new experience for me. And here I had a reliable ally in my senior military rank, which tipped the scales – and the shot was fired.
The echo of the shot was barely heard – with the swallowing of the sound-waves on the inside, and the frozen air outside.
The shell thus fired, struck the base of the barrel of the right hand gun, and driven by the explosive charge in its head which was instantly activated, was hurled back with great force into the gun which had fired it. This prodigious force, as I had calculated it from the start and worked it out to the last detail, propelled it back into the fired-on gun and from there – back into the firing gun, a reflex process lasting for precisely three hours, fifty-one minutes and seven seconds, an exact chronology which I had assessed on the basis of pure mathematics – and then a second shell was fired.
The result was that the gun-barrels blazed like the furnaces in which they were themselves forged, and emitted awesome heat, the heat of hell-fire no less, into the surrounding area, the near and the not so near. Within moments everything was thawing – the river, the ground, the air, the hearts of the soldiers, their brains and faces, which began to smile, the radiant smile of childhood. Of course, anyone who had lost fingers or part of his brain could not put them back again, but there was consolation in what was left. Frozen lungs came to life, breathed like bellows in the hands of a young smith in the prime of his strength; most important of all – the nimble cooks mounted their mobile ovens on the glowing metal and set to work at once, perfuming the air that shimmered in unceasing waves of heat with the succulent aromas of potato soup, lentils, kidney beans flavored with strong garlic, bread baked from frozen and smeared with plum jam…
Tremendous was the outpouring of joy, and anyone who was not a part of it has never known true joy in his life. The enthusiastic soldiers came close to anointing me king, according to an old and forgotten custom, described in detail in the holy scriptures, but they changed their minds, and this was just as well; after all, there was no olive-oil available there, and no other oil is effective in the conferring of true kingship.
Instead of this all the soldiers gathered around the guns as they went on firing, danced and sang improvised songs in the style of the wandering troubadours of ancient times, praising with every form of praise known to man the incomparable genius of their commander, commander of commanders for all times and places, the valiant symbol of valor and humble symbol of humility for all peoples and nations, Baron Leutenlieb of the House of Munchausen, in a word – myself.
And so that joy would be complete, and our enemy-neighbors on the other side of the frozen front line would have a decent chance of sharing in it, I sent them detailed particulars of the process via the medium of a carrier-pigeon, originally intended for purposes of espionage. And much to the credit of our neighbor-enemies, they received the message, understood the scientific principles behind it and at once set about implementing the invention, activating their own long-barreled guns. And it was not long before from their camp too improvised songs arose, in the style of the wandering troubadours of ancient times, since their people like ours was blessed with many talented individuals, no less inspired than those on our side, and all of the songs recounted the wondrous exploits, and extolled the genius, the modesty, the noble mien and the incomparable and unequalled generosity of spirit – of the one and only Baron, none other than Leutenlieb of the House of Munchausen. The melody, admittedly, differed slightly from our melody – softer and more poetic, although on the other hand, their words sounded less clear than ours.
Incidentally, one of my junior officers, a promising mathematician named Zalman Gottlieb, calculated with impeccable thoroughness the quantity of energy released by the exchange of gunfire, as a method of diffusing heat over a given radius, using an innovative heating mechanism which he called the "gun-brazier", and he constructed a sophisticated mathematical formula, the Leutenlieb formula as developed by Zalman Gottlieb, which immediately after the war was introduced into the curriculum of all progressive schools, and it was this which enabled Einstein to grasp the end of the thread of his celebrated Theory of Relativity, and ultimately ushered in the age of computers, to the benefit or detriment of the world.
A few weeks later in that very same place my destiny led me into two interesting encounters which deserve a few lines of description.
The eighteen year old Lieutenant Fritz von Fingerkopf, my aide-de-camp at that time, presented himself before me in a highly excited and flustered state, saluted smartly, clicked heels and reported that in Infantry Company 773 of the Eighth Brigade, a man had been trussed up, put into a sack and was being beaten, without respite, and it could be the man was no longer alive, and time was running out and action was required immediately if not sooner… Von Fingerkopf expressed all this with confused and halting tongue – with no discernible difference from his normal mode of speech.
I ran to the staff headquarters of that company, meeting on the way the platoon commander, Captain Millerknecht, in whose squad the violent assault was taking place according to Lieutenant Fingerkopf, and who was expecting me. He saluted correctly and then, running alongside me he made the comment that from a certain point of view this soldier deserved a good thrashing, because he had adopted, or perhaps had been born with, a most obnoxious habit – biting his comrades whenever they annoyed him, which happened three times per day on average. These were deep and painful bites, quite extraordinary, and the company medical orderly could find no remedy for them; even the doctor had been stunned by the sight, and was unable to cope with the damage. And he was sure – Captain Millerknecht went on to say, the effort of running making his breathing a little heavy but not impairing in any way the clarity of his words – his boys had no intention of killing the man, but were exacting revenge on behalf of all those who had been bitten up until now.
And so it was that instead of going to the company headquarters we made our way to the place where the soldiers’ justice was being administered, a small compound beside a conglomeration of scouts’ tents. On seeing us, Captain Millerknecht’s soldiers dispersed in all directions, like the experienced veterans they were,
leaving behind them the sack with the unseen victim confined in it.
I hurriedly released him.
The assaulted man, his sleek dark hair disheveled in a manner clearly not to his liking – sporting a kind of half-moustache in the snot-channel under his nose – leapt from the sack and his very first action was to attack me and bite my left arm, a bite I shall never forget. His teeth easily pierced the sleeve of the coarse uniform, fastened on the flesh, or more precisely – were jammed in there like sharp and crude nails and nearly penetrated to the bone…
And before I had time to recover from the unpleasant surprise and grab hold of the deranged soldier – he slipped away and disappeared into the mist descending on the camp at that time.
I approached the regimental doctor. He examined the wound thoroughly, nodded his massive, graying head, injected copious amounts of some brown liquid into me, took a drop of blood for analysis under the mobile microscope and finally declared in incontrovertible style:
"This is a bite characteristic of the cobra, and in your blood there is venom identical to the venom of the cobra. The liquid that I’ve injected into you is a serum that will neutralize that venom. You’re lucky that I was assigned to this unit, because as you know – I’m an authority on the snakes of India in general, and on the cobra and the harm it can do, in particular. No other doctor would have any idea of what’s going on here… true, it’s a tiny amount, but enough to cause degeneration of the muscle and perhaps even lead to amputation of the limb affected!"
Of no avail were my clear and succinct declarations, that I had been bitten by a madman and not by a venomous snake, and it was hardly likely that on the western front, in cold such as this, a tropical snake, and a cobra to boot, would be wandering around at leisure, biting whatever took its fancy.
