The House of War and Witness

by Mike Carey

  The young man’s voice, never very loud, faltered into silence. The ghosts all around him murmured encouragement.

  ‘What happened then?’ Drozde asked him, speaking softly because he was so young and so beautiful and so pale. She was afraid a harsh word might break him.

  It’s hard for me to say. If I tell you everything directly – well, it makes the story meaningless. Or at least, makes it seem less than it was. And it was everything, to me. It was all I knew of life before I went to war. And when I went to war, I died.

  I think I’ll tell it as though it was someone else’s story – I’ll say ‘he’ and ‘she’ and ‘they’. ‘They did it.’ Not ‘I did it.’ And you’ll know, when I come to it, why I chose that way to tell it. Because this is a story about choices, and I’ll never know whether the choices that were made were right or wrong. Perhaps you can tell me that when you’ve listened. When you know all of it.

  There was a girl, and there were two boys. The girl was Ermel, Herdein Holz’s daughter. The Herdein whose father was from Shnir, and who was crippled in his left leg, and whose wife’s name was Müte.

  The boys were Kristof and Max. Each was a farmer’s son, and each reached his sixteenth year in the same month that Ermel did. Born in the same season, they were.

  And fast friends they were too, from that season onward. They grew up together; the three farms was nearest neighbours, and none of the three children was ever seen without the other two coming right after, the way you hear a goose honk and look up to see the whole skein quartering the sky.

  They played boisterous games. Stole apples from Alte Hankel’s orchard, chased the hens across the green and back again, and fished in streams that was rich men’s trout runs, that they would have been whipped if they’d been found there. The girl was no different from the boys in these adventures. They were just three friends that did everything alike.

  But you know that tale, I think, and the ending of it, which is always the same. They grew up. And though a little girl is allowed to be a boy sometimes, an older one must look how to be a woman. Ermel went to her mother one morning, bewildered and frightened, to show her a bloodstained nightshift. Forthwith she was taken away from her two best friends, and given skirts to wear instead of breeches. It wasn’t proper now for her to be with boys in the way a child might, or else she’d soon enough come by a child of her own. That was what her mother told her. As if those companions of so many years had overnight become enemies that might work her ruin.

  She grew up lovely, though. So lovely. Everyone said so. Everyone wanted her. She had blonde hair so fine her mother said you could put it on a spindle and spin it into gold. And her smile would charm a cat out of a tree, her father and uncles swore. They meant nothing by it, only to encourage her to smile again.

  This was in Prussia, as I told you. And in Prussia there is a thing called the cantonal Gesetz. A village, say, or a number of farms that lie together, is called a canton. And every canton has to supply a soldier for the army, whenever one is asked for. If that soldier dies, the army sends to ask for another, and so on. It means the strength of the army stays the same, even if the mother country is fighting lots of battles. New recruits are always there to draw on.

  Where the canton is a village, it usually goes well enough. There’s a public ballot, with everyone’s names on stones or papers put into a bucket. And everyone can inspect the names, to see they’re all there. And a child draws one out, or else a blindfolded man does, or one as can’t read even their own name, so it’s sure to be fair.

  But with farms, it’s different. Our canton was five smallholdings. Majki Zagroly, that was Ermel’s father’s. Soldany, that belonged to Max’s family, and Krusze Wielkie, that was Kristof’s. The other two, Kownatkie and Nawawies Wielka, was fallen in and no-one lived there now.

  So that was three families. And out of the three, only two boys of army age to be had. Max’s brother, Eberlin Slezak, had gone up last, so that should have meant that Kristof’s family, the Neissers, should send the next. But what were they to do? Both the households had ageing fathers, and both were relying on those rising sons to work the fields and tend the cows. Ermel’s father was a little younger, but his left leg was halt after a bad fall, as I think I already told you. It was all he could do to tend the holding he had and provide for his family. He had prayed so long for a son he’d worn his voice hoarse with praying, and only a daughter to show for it. A pretty daughter, but what’s that when the leaves fall?

  So the Neissers were beholden, but they didn’t want to admit it. And the Slezaks dug in their heels and said – what was true enough – they’d lost one son already. All amity between the families vanished like smoke up the chimney as they argued it bitterly back and forth, back and forth. And finally they determined that the recruiting officers must sit on it and give a judgment, because neither side would budge.

  Only the two boys kept up their friendship, like before, and took some refuge in each other’s company from the bitter tears and harsh voices that were given out in both their houses. And more than ever they missed Ermel, that had been their other self, their sister and more than sister when they were all three growing up.

  To be honest with you, they did more than miss her. They went to Majki Zagroly some nights when the moon was full and the sky clear, and threw stones at her window. And the three of them ran the woods again as they’d used to do when none of them had a thought of war or womanhood. They stayed together until cock-crow some nights, and crept exhausted home, each to his own back door, taking off their clothes only to put them on again and pretend to be just risen from sleep.

  And if you ask me whether either of the boys touched Ermel privily on those near-daylit nights, the way a man touches a woman, I say this. They were children, in their hearts at least. They had no more thought of coupling than they had of death.

  But their parents, by this time, had no thought of anything else. The Neissers and the Slezaks had talked and argued and planned and fretted themselves into a fine lather, and the fruit of their labours was alike on both sides: that if their bonny boy paid court to Ermel, and won her hand, then when the recruiting officers came they’d have an easy choice. No-one would take a young man whose banns had been read and throw him into a battle line when he should be in a different kind of skirmish altogether, under the blankets of a marriage bed.

  So Kunrat Neisser and Dietl Slezak took their sons aside and urged them on to plead suit to young Ermel. If they could lie with her and get her with child, they would do very well. But failing that, her bare word would be enough.

  Max and Kristof were dutiful boys, and did what was asked of them much more often than not. The thought of using Ermel in such a way didn’t sit well with them, but there were other thoughts that came into their heads too. To be with their friend forever, and live with her, and raise a family with her. That was on the one hand. And on the other, to run in a line of men against a line of other men, and be stopped with musket balls, and have death for a purgative.

  When next the boys met, they didn’t speak of what they’d been bid to do. It ran too deep for words. They talked of other things instead. Mostly, they talked about their friendship. They swore to be friends forever, as though swearing it would make it so. And then because they knew it wouldn’t they cried and fought and walked apart from each other, their hearts too full of that dreadful knowledge to hold anything else. They’d meant to call on Ermel, but they couldn’t do it. They couldn’t be all together as they used to be, when they had such thoughts bearing down on them.

  After that night, it seemed the old trinity they’d had – if it’s not sin to call it such – was broken. Some evenings, when the farm work was all done, Max would come to Majki Zagroly and offer to chop wood or cut shingles for Ermel’s father. Herdein Holz never spoke on these occasions, but only pointed to the woodshed or the barn or wherever it might be, and went back inside.

  And on other nights it would be Kristof who came. He was mor
e skilled with his hands, and had done some smithing with his uncle Janke, so he might fix a bent coulter on the plough or fashion a fine new handle for one of Dame Holz’s knives.

  The reward for these good deeds was to sit in the kitchen for a half-hour or so with the family. There would be desultory conversation about the weather or the harvest. Ermel would be present, but would not speak to the boy, whichever boy it was. That would have been considered forward. The kitchen was too hot, and in spite of its high ceiling not very large. Strings of onions, heads of cabbage and cured sausages hung from a rack at head height and rocked gently when anyone moved. The floor creaked. The air was heavy with steam from something seething on the stove. And Ermel and whichever boy it was sat and stole shy glances at each other and felt like two-thirds of something that might never be whole again.

  That was a bad season, for all of them. It was the end of summer, which in times gone they would have loved to walk in, but now if felt like dead winter and nothing to hope for. The boys were vying to see which of them would live. Even the winner would feel like he had lost.

  One night, instead of going to Ermel’s house, Max went to Krusze Wielkie instead. Kunrat Neisser opened the door to him and asked him what he wanted. Only to talk to Kristof, he said. To talk for a moment, and then he would go away.

  The old man wasn’t happy about it, but he went inside and soon Kristof came out. The two boys sat under a plane tree that grew at the edge of the furthest field in the Neisser holding, watching the old man sun bow his head to the earth.

  ‘I thought I might ask Ermel to be trothed to me,’ Max said. Kristof already knew this, of course. If Max had done as he was told, he would already have had that conversation. But something kept him from it.

  ‘It’s a good thought,’ Kristof muttered, staring at the ground. ‘I was turning it over in my own mind, somedeal, that I might put that question to her myself.’ And that was true too, yet here he was with the words still inside him.

  It seemed pointless, in the face of this, to say they’d always be friends. Two would stay, and one would go. Max knew from his brother’s example that the one who went wouldn’t be coming back. In asking for Ermel’s hand, he’d be asking her to throw the first handful of dirt onto Kristof’s coffin, though the wood for the coffin might not be cut or sanded yet, nor the flowers grown that would deck it.

  ‘I thought I might ask her tonight,’ he said, and waited.

  ‘Tonight is good,’ Kristof said. ‘It’s broad Sabbath already, and the recruiting officers coming o’Monday morning. A man shouldn’t linger too long.’

  A man! They were seventeen. What they knew of manhood was all hearsay and hopefulness.

  ‘Well then,’ said Max. ‘Come with me, and ask her too.’

  The two boys looked long at each other without saying anything more. It was surely the only fair way to do it. And yet, in being fair to each other, what would they do to Ermel? How would she live, knowing what she’d done? How would any of them live?

  ‘I’ll come,’ Kristof said. ‘But I may not speak. I’m not yet fully resolved.’

  ‘Well, no more amn’t I,’ Max said. ‘Not resolved, as such. But only thinking it.’

  They got up and walked together down the track that led to Majki Zagroly. The sun was lying on the ground now, and the light all around them was like fire coming out of the ground, almost. Red and gold and all good colours you could imagine.

  It was too late to pay a formal visit, but they both thought that was probably for the best. They threw stones onto the roof above Ermel’s window until she put her head out and saw them. Then they waited until she came down to them.

  It was only a half a moon, and the sky none too clear, but there was some light below the horizon yet – as though the ghost of the sun still shone after the sun had died. They walked down the path to the river, and they sat there listening to the voice of the water as the darkness grew upon them.

  It seemed like a spell was on them. A word would be enough to break it, so they were careful not to speak. Or only with their eyes, anyway – such talk as you can have that way. And round and round it went. Ermel looking at Kristof, and Kristof at Max, and Max at Ermel.

  I know, their eyes said. And I know that too. And what’s to be done about it?

  Ermel kissed Max on the mouth. She kissed him long and deep, holding him to her as though he was her lover and her everything.

  She did the same to Kristof.

  Then she took off her clothes and walked into the water. She swam out into the centre of the river, where she turned onto her back so she could watch the stars through the gaps in the scudding clouds. She only had to kick her legs a little to hold her place against the gentle current.

  She knew what must be, but she could not choose for them. She could not even tell them what she knew, beyond what those kisses must surely have told them. For the rest, they must make their own choice.

  When she had given them what she thought was long enough, and then a little longer, she swam back to shore. She found them where she had left them in the nest the river grasses made, their limbs entangled, their beautiful bodies shiny with the sweat of love.

  She thought for a moment of leaving them there together. But then Kristof opened one eye and beckoned to her, so she elbowed and fussed and slipped herself in between them, and they folded themselves around her. That was how they spent the night, all three of them wrapped together in a knot of friendship like the knots they put on brooches.

  The next morning, the recruiting officers, which in truth was only a sergeant and a drummer boy, were met on the road by a handsome young man who saluted them as smartly as if he was already in uniform.

  ‘I thought there was some dispute to settle,’ the sergeant grunted.

  ‘It was settled,’ the young man said. ‘I’m for you.’

  And he was sworn in there and then, at the turning of the road, with the drummer boy standing witness and nobody but birds to cheer him.

  He met his regiment the next day. It was encouraging, at least, to find he was not the youngest. He trained for three months with sword and musket, and he was so quick on his feet they put him in the Schuetzen, the light infantry. It was some while, though, before he had to fight. In the first year after he enlisted, Prussia prosecuted no wars. It declared itself ready to fight against Sweden once, but Sweden declined the honour. Apart from that, all was peace and amity.

  The boy could not write, and so he sent no letters home. When he came up for leave, he spent it in Berlin. But he thought often of the friends he’d left behind, and wondered if they were happy. He hoped they were. He had done all he could to make it so.

  Then the new king came, with warlike thoughts and talk of honour. Prussia would be one, he said, and Prussia would take all her old strength on herself. So that meant joining the divided territories of the motherland, and it meant taking back Silesia, which was Prussia’s by a very old treaty. Everyone thought that the unification would come first, but it was Silesia where we were sent.

  The young man was a skirmisher in the first battle, here where your river runs, and he fought well. Again and again he fought, through the winter and into the spring. He was at Mollwitz, where three thousand of the enemy died for three hundred of ours; he marched on into Bohemia, and saw host after host break before Prussia’s will. He was there when they agreed the ceasefire that nobody, not even he, thought would hold. And then he came back here to Pokoj when the weather turned, to wait out the winter.

  And here died, not from the fighting but from the frost and from a desperate flux that wrung his guts out for eleven days, until he finally succumbed to it.

  I did ever hate the winter.

  The soldier took off his cap and smoothed down his blond hair. Though a little wild and unkempt, it was – Drozde saw – very fine. Perhaps not fine enough to spin into gold, but she could see why a mother would say that. And yes, the smile was charming enough. Drozde wondered, now, how she could ever have thought
the soldier a man. But then Ermel jammed the cap back down over her ears, and squared her jaw, and was a man again.

  ‘I gave them two years,’ she said. ‘What was I to do? They had only just found each other, and it would have broken my heart to sunder them. Perhaps they ran away together. Or perhaps the recruiters came again, two summers later, like reaper men out of season, and took one of my lovely boys with them to war and woe.

  ‘It is not my story – not that part of it – but I know which ending I prefer.’

  There was a murmur of sympathy among the other ghosts as Ermel finished speaking.

  ‘Thank you for your story,’ Drozde said to her, and the others flowed around the soldier, offering their thanks with sorrowful faces, for the tale had been a sad one. Magda reached up to stroke the woman’s hair, and Ermel knelt down and removed her cap again so that the child could reach it. The sight of the two of them, Magda’s face rapturous even though her hand went through Ermel’s head as often as it made contact, touched Drozde in a way that surprised her.

  But something about Ermel’s story had made her uneasy.

  ‘You said you were from Prussia,’ she asked the young soldier, ‘and that you fought in this place and triumphed. How can that be? The soldiers here are forever boasting that Silesia will never fall into Prussian hands. Your conquest must have been a long time ago if no one now remembers it.’

  The young woman hesitated. She seemed suddenly constrained – wary even – and Drozde knew that she had come up again against that invisible barrier, the unspoken promise which bound the ghosts to silence. Ermel spread out her hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  ‘I’m sorry, Drozde. That’s one of the things we’re not supposed to talk about. But you know, even if I was allowed to tell it I couldn’t, not really. It’s hard to even think about time very much once you’re here.’