He felt sure of himself, the unarmed man did, enormously sure of himself. He was the astutest man in the village; it was difficult to get the better of him. The others, the secretary and the schoolmistress, had not come back; he would come back. “I big Kamerad,” he would say to the German sergeant. “Partisan not kaput me. I kaput all partisans.” Perhaps the sergeant might laugh.
But the burned trees seemed interminable and ambiguous and his thoughts were surrounded by darkness and the unknown, like the bare spaces in the middle of these woods.
“I don’t know about the secretary and the others. I’m the courier.”
“They’ll know at headquarters, though?” insisted the unarmed man.
“Yes. Ask them at headquarters. They’ll know there.”
Dusk was falling. He had to walk carefully in the undergrowth, watching where his feet went in case they slipped on rocks hidden under the thick scrub, and watching where his thoughts went, too, as they followed each other in growing disquiet, in case they suddenly plunged headlong into panic.
Surely if they’d thought him a spy they would never have let him go through the woods like this, alone with this man who didn’t seem to be taking any notice of him at all; he could have escaped from him anytime he wanted. Suppose he tried to escape now—what would the other man do?
As he wound down among the trees the unarmed man began to draw a little way off, to bear left when the other bore right. But the armed man went on walking almost, it seemed, without taking any notice of him; down through the sparse woods they went, now some distance from each other. Sometimes they even lost sight of each other, hidden by trunks and shrubs; then suddenly the unarmed man would turn around and see the other above him.
If they let me free for a moment, this time they won’t get me again, the unarmed man had thought till then. But now he surprised himself thinking, If I manage to escape, then this time . . . And already in his mind he saw Germans, columns of Germans, Germans in trucks and armored cars, a sight that meant death for the others and safety for him, who was an astute man, a man no one could get the better of.
Now they were out of the glades and undergrowth and entering thick green woods, untouched by fire; the ground was covered with dry pine needles. The armed man had remained behind; perhaps he had taken another route. Then, very cautiously, his tongue between his teeth, the unarmed man hurried his pace, pushing deeper into the thick woods, flinging himself down slopes, among the pine trees. He was escaping, he suddenly realized. He had a moment of panic; but he realized also that he’d got too far away now and that the other must have noticed he was trying to escape and was sure to be following him. The only thing to do was go on running, for things might be ugly if he came within the other’s range again after trying to escape.
He turned at the sound of a footstep above him; a few yards away the armed man was coming toward him with his calm, indifferent pace. His gun was in his hand. He said, “There must be a shortcut this way,” and gestured the other to go ahead of him.
Everything then went back to the way it was before: an ambiguous world, where things might go completely wrong or completely right; the wood thickening instead of thinning out, this man who’d almost let him escape without a word.
He asked, “Does it go on forever, this wood?”
“Just around the hillside and there we are,” said the other. “Bear up, you’ll be home by tonight.”
“Are they sure to let me go, just like that? I mean, won’t they keep me there as a hostage, for instance?”
“We aren’t Germans; we don’t take hostages. At the most they might take your boots as hostages: we’re all nearly barefoot.”
The man began to grumble as if his boots were the one thing he was frightened of losing, but at heart he was pleased; every detail of his future, good or bad, helped to restore a slight feeling of confidence.
“Well,” said the armed man. “Since you hold by your boots so much, let’s do this: you put on mine until we get to headquarters, and since mine are all in pieces they won’t take them off you. I’ll put on yours, and when I come back with you I’ll hand them over again.”
Even a child would have realized this was just a trick. The armed man wanted his boots; all right, the unarmed man would give him whatever he wanted; he was a man who understood, and felt pleased at getting off so cheaply. “I great Kamerad,” he’d say to the German sergeant. “I give them boots and they let me go.” Perhaps the sergeant would let him have a pair of knee boots like the ones German soldiers wore.
“Then you don’t hold anyone hostage? Not even the secretary and the others?”
“The secretary had three of our comrades taken; the brothers from the mill went on roundups with the militia; the schoolmistress went to bed with the men of the Tenth Flotilla.”
The unarmed man halted. He said, “You don’t by any chance think I’m a spy, too? You haven’t by any chance brought me here to kill me?” And he bared a few teeth as if in a smile.
“If we thought you a spy,” said the armed man, “I wouldn’t do this.” He snapped back the safety catch of the gun. “And this.” He put it to his shoulder and made a motion as if about to fire at him.
There, thought the spy. He’s not firing.
But the other never lowered his gun; he pressed the trigger instead.
In salvos, it fires in salvos, the spy just had time to think.
And when he felt the bullets hitting him like fiery fists that never stopped, the thought still crossed his mind, He thinks he’s killed me, but I’m alive.
He fell face downward, and the last shot caught him with a vision of stockinged feet and his boots being pulled off.
So he remained, a corpse in the depth of the woods, his mouth full of pine needles. Two hours later he was already black with ants.
Last Comes the Raven
The stream was a net of limpid, delicate ripples, with the water running through the mesh. From time to time, like a fluttering of silver wings, the dorsum of a trout flashed on the surface, the fish at once plunging zigzag down into the water.
“Full of trout,” one of the men said.
“If we toss a grenade in, they’ll all come floating to the top, bellies up,” said the other; he detached a grenade from his belt and started to unscrew the baseplate.
Then the boy, who had stood aside looking on, walked over, a mountain youth with an apple look to his face. “Let me have it,” he said, taking the rifle from one of the men. “What does he want to do?” the man said, intending to reclaim the rifle. But the boy was leveling it at the water, in search of a target, it seemed. If you shoot, you’ll only scare the fish away, the man started to say, but he did not have time. A trout had surfaced, flashing, and the boy had pumped a bullet into it as though having anticipated the fish’s exact point of appearance. Now, with its white underside exposed, the trout floated lifeless on the surface. “Cripes,” the men said. The boy reloaded the rifle and swung it around. The air was crisp and tensed: one could distinguish the pine needles on the opposite bank and the knitted texture of the stream. A ripple broke the surface: another trout. He fired: now it floated dead. The men glanced briefly at the fish, briefly at the boy. “He shoots well,” they said.
The boy swung the barrel again, into the air. It was curious, to think of it, that they were encompassed by air, actually cut off from other things by meters of air. But when the boy aimed the rifle, the air then became an invisible straight line stretching from the muzzle to the thing . . . to the hawk, for instance, floating above on wings that seemed scarcely to move. As he pressed the trigger, the air continued crystalline and clear as ever, but at the upper end of the line the kestrel folded its wings, then dropped like a stone. The open breech emitted a fine smell of powder.
He asked for more cartridges. The number of men watching had now swelled behind him on the bank of the stream. The cones at the top of the pine trees on the other bank—why were they visible and yet out of reach? Why that empty sp
an between him and them? Why were the cones, although a part of him, in the chamber of his eye—why were they there, so distant? And yet if he aimed the rifle that empty span was clearly a deception: he touched the trigger and at that instant a cone, severed at the stem, fell. The feeling was one of caressive emptiness: the emptiness of the rifle bore, which extended off into the air and was occupied by the shot, straight to the pinecone, the squirrel, the white stone, the flowering poppy. “He doesn’t miss a one,” the men said, and no one had the audacity to laugh.
“Come, come along with us,” the leader said. “You give me the rifle, then,” the boy returned.
“All right. Certainly.”
So he went.
He left with a haversack filled with apples and two rounds of cheese. His village was a patch of slate, straw, and cattle muck in the valley bottom. And going away was wonderful, for at every turn there was something new to be seen: trees with cones, birds flitting among the branches, lichen-encrusted rocks, everything in the shaft of the false distances, of the distances occupied by gunshot that gulped up the air between. But he wasn’t to shoot, they told him; those were places to be passed in silence, and the cartridges were for fighting. But at a certain point a leveret, frightened by the footsteps, scampered across the trail, amid shouts and the bustle of the men. It was just about to vanish into the brake when the boy stopped it with a shot. “A good shot,” the leader himself conceded, “but this is not a pleasure hunt. You’re not to shoot again, even if you see a pheasant.”
But scarcely an hour had elapsed before there were more shots from the column.
“It’s the boy again!” the leader stormed, going forward to overtake him.
The boy grinned with his rosy and white apple face.
“Partridges,” he said, displaying them. They had burst up from a hedge.
“Partridges, crickets, or whatever else, I gave you fair warning. Now let me have the rifle. And if you make me lose my temper once more, back to the village you go.”
The boy sulked a little; it was no fun to be hiking without a rifle, but as long as he remained with them he might hope to have it again.
In the night they bedded down in the chalet of herdsmen. The boy awakened immediately the sky grew light, while the others still slept. He took their finest rifle and loaded his haversack with cartridges and went out. The air was timorous and crisp, as one may discover it in the early morning. Not far from the house stood a mulberry tree. It was the hour in which jays were arriving. There, he saw one! He fired, ran to pick it up, and stuffed it into his haversack. Without moving from where the jay had fallen, he looked about for another target. A dormouse! Startled by the first shot, it was scurrying toward safety in the crown of a chestnut tree. Dead, it was simply a large mouse with a gray tail that shed shocks of fur at touch. From beneath the chestnut tree he sighted, in a field off below him, a mushroom, red with white prickles and poisonous. He crumbled it with a shot, then went to see if really he had got it. What fun it was, going from one target to another like that: one might in time go all the way round the world! He spied a large snail on a rock; he sighted on its shell, and going over to it noticed nothing but the shattered rock and a spot of iridescent spittle. Thus did he wander from the chalet, down through unfamiliar fields.
From the stone he saw a lizard on a wall, from the wall a puddle and a frog, from the puddle a signboard on the zigzagging road, and beneath it: beneath it men in uniform advancing on him with arms at the ready. When the boy came forth with his rifle, smiling, his face rosy and white like an apple, they shouted, raising their guns. But the boy had already seen and fired at one of the gold buttons on the chest of one of them. He heard the man scream, and then bullets, in a hail and single shots, whistling over his head: he had already flattened to the ground behind a pile of rocks on the hem of the road, in a dead angle. The rock pile was long and he could move about, and he was able to peep out from unexpected points, see the flash of the soldiers’ musketry, the gray and gloss of their uniforms, and fire at a chevron, at an insignia. Then quickly scramble along the ground to fire from a new position.
Then he heard a burst of fire behind him, raking over his head into the ranks of the soldiers: his companions had appeared on the rescue with machine guns. “If the boy hadn’t awakened us with his firing . . .” they were saying.
Covered by his companions, the boy was better able to see. Suddenly a bullet grazed his cheek. He turned: a soldier had got to the road above him. He threw himself into the drainage ditch, gaining shelter again, at the same time firing; the bullet, though failing to hit the soldier, glanced off his riflestock. Now, from the sounds that he heard, he could tell that his adversary’s rifle had jammed; the soldier flung it to the ground. Then the boy rose up. The soldier had taken to his heels and the boy fired at him, popping an epaulette into the air.
The boy gave chase. The soldier dashed into the woods, at first vanishing but presently reappearing within range. The boy burned a crease in the dome of the soldier’s helmet, next shot off a belt loop. One after the other, they had meanwhile come into a dale, to which they were both of them strangers, and where the din of the battle was no longer heard. In time, the soldier found himself without any more trees before him, instead a glade overgrown with knotted thicket clumps. And the boy was himself about to come out of the woods.
In the middle of the clearing stood a large rock. The soldier barely made it, jumping behind and doubling up with his head between his knees. There, for the time being, he felt, he was out of danger; he had some grenades with him, and the boy would have to maintain a respectful distance; he could do no more than keep him pinned down with his rifle, ensuring that he did not escape. Certainly, had it been possible for him simply to dive into the thickets, he would be safe, able then to slide down the heavily bearded slope. But there was that open tract to cross. How long would the boy wait? And would he continue to keep his rifle trained on him? The soldier decided to try an experiment: he put his helmet on his bayonet and stuck it out from behind the rock. There was a shot and the helmet, pierced through, bowled along the ground.
The soldier kept his wits; doubtless aiming at the rock and the area around it was quite easy, but the soldier would not get hit if he was nimble enough. Just then a bird raced overhead, a hoopoe perhaps. One shot and it fell. The soldier wiped sweat from around his neck. Another bird, a missel thrush, went over: it fell, too. The soldier swallowed. This was very likely a flyway, for other birds continued to go over, all of them different, and as the boy fired, they fell. A thought came to the soldier: If he’s watching birds, then he can’t be watching me. Just as he fires I’ll jump for the bushes. But it might be well to test his plan first. He picked up his helmet and placed it back on the tip of his bayonet. Two birds flew over this time: snipes. Waiting, the soldier regretted wasting so fine an occasion on the test. The boy fired at one of the snipes; the soldier raised his helmet. A second shot rang out and he saw the helmet leap into the air. The soldier’s mouth tasted of lead; he had no sooner noticed this than the second bird fell. He must not lose his head: behind the rock with his grenades, he was safe. And why, then, even though hidden, couldn’t he try to get the boy with a grenade? He lay on his back and, taking care not to be seen, stretched back his arm, primed his strength, and pitched the grenade. A good throw; it would go some distance; but describing only half of a parabola, still in midair, it was exploded by a rifle blast. The soldier flattened himself against the ground to escape the shrapnel.
When next the soldier raised himself, the raven had come.
He saw, circling lazily above him, a bird, a raven perhaps. The boy would certainly shoot it down. But no shot followed. Was the raven perhaps too high? And yet he had brought down higher and swifter birds than that. Finally he fired: now it would drop. No. Unperturbed, it continued to soar in the sky, slowly, round and round. A pinecone toppled from a nearby tree. Had he taken to shooting at pinecones? One by one, as he hit them, the cones fell, striking w
ith a dry crunch. At each report the soldier glanced up at the raven: was it falling? Not yet. Lower and lower, the black bird continued to circle overhead. Could it be, really, that the boy didn’t see it? Or perhaps the raven didn’t exist at all, was only a hallucination. But perhaps—perhaps a man near death sees all the birds fly over . . . and when he sees the raven it means that the hour has come. In any case, he must tell the boy, who went on shooting at mere pinecones.
The soldier rose to his feet and pointed up at the black bird.
“There’s the raven!” he shouted in his own language. The bullet struck him through the heart of the spread eagle embroidered on his jacket.
The raven came down slowly, wheeling.
One of the Three Is Still Alive
Three naked men were sitting on a stone. All the men of the village were standing around them and facing a bearded old man.
“. . . and they were the highest flames I’ve ever seen in the mountains,” the old man with the beard was saying. “And I said to myself, How can a village burn so high? And the smell of smoke was unbearable and I said to myself, How can smoke from our village stink like that?”
The tallest of the three naked men, who was hugging his shoulders because there was a slight wind, gave the oldest a dig in the ribs to get him to explain; he still wanted to understand, and the other was the only one who knew a little of the language. But the oldest of the three did not raise his head from between his hands, and now and again a quiver passed along the vertebrae on his bent back. The fat man was no longer to be counted on; the womanish fat on his body was trembling all over, his eyes were like windowpanes streaked by rain.
“And then they told me that the flames burning our houses came from our own grain, and the stink was from our sons being burned alive; Tancin’s son, Gé’s son, the son of the customs guard . . .”
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