The Sojourn

The Northwestern Carpathians, in which I was raised, were a hard place, as unforgiving as the people who lived there, but the Alpine landscape into which Zlee and I were sent that early winter seemed a glimpse of what the surface of the earth looked and felt and acted like when there were no maps or borders, no rifles or artillery, no men or wars to claim possession of land, and snow and rock alone parried in a match of millennial slowness so that time meant nothing, and death meant nothing, for what life there was gave in to the forces of nature surrounding and accepted its fate to play what role was handed down in the sidereal march of seasons capable of crushing in an instant what armies might--millennia later--be foolish enough to assemble on it heights. And yet there we were, ordered to march ourselves, for God, not nature, was with us now, and God would deliver us, in this world and next, when the time came for that.

Like a couple that communicates by intention nearly as much as by word, so in tune are they to each other and their surroundings.

What is left to be afraid of?' And he said, 'The possibility that a life itself may prove to be the most worthy struggle.

I prayed for death so as not to live in madness.

The ship slipped her lines and a tug nudged her into mid-river, where she stalled briefly, waiting to see that everything that lay before her on the course below was clear. Then Hamburg, and Europe, and all her empires, all I had ever known--the only ground that up until then had fed me, the only well from which I had drunk--receded in slow swaths of wash and sky as we surrendered to the outgoing tide on the Elbe.

The only difference between life here and on the battlefield was there we believed that the outcome of the war would be different, and so fought to that end. Here we were reminded of our defeat, for although they died among comrades, death came quietly to those who couldn't hold out any longer, and into that silence, too, went all hope that we might have fought for some purpose.

Banquo asked me how it felt to be alive when I saw so many of my comrades dead or dying, and I said that I had ceased to think of life or death because it seemed that I was destined to serve out the sentence of one for having delivered so well of the other, and that I saw the dead every night before I went to sleep as though they were still alive and standing before me.

Like the body, courage, too, is a thing weakened, especially when we are young and invincible. We can't give one the rest it needs and expect the other to protect us. Don't anger Nature with talk of wishing she had chosen differently. See to your own nature.

I longed only to turn back and climb and begin life all over again in a place where I might find the peace I'd once known in mountains of another time and another place, and I wondered-if I could slip out of camp unobserved-whether I just might be able to stay hidden and uncaptured until this war came to an end.

I had never seen anyone fight and I had never been taught to defend myself. But I knew hurt and never wondered that day what it was I had to do if I didn't want to be hurt again.