by Frank Huyler
Rai shook his head and lit another cigarette and took a deep drag and said something about women. I didn’t respond, and we sat there in silence for a while. I thought about going after her for a moment because I knew I was in part to blame, but she’d stung me with her remark, and so instead I reached for Rai’s packet of cigarettes. He tossed me his lighter, and we both smoked and didn’t speak. The rumble continued in the distance. I thought about those men, high on the dark ridges, crouching beneath that sound, and I could not imagine them clearly. It was a new world for me, and I had nothing to draw on, no memories of my own. It was all thirdhand, it was all Gettysburg and the Somme and Tobruk for me, all names and abstractions. Nonetheless the roar continued, like trains in the distance, and it was real, and it felt like history.
“What is it like up there?” I asked, breaking the silence.
He took in his breath, sharply, and shook his head.
“It is very bad for them,” he said. “They cannot hear one another. They cannot speak on the radios for too long. They cannot light fires or turn on any lights. They are pinned down in the snow. There are avalanches, also.”
He took another drag, then continued.
“This is indirect fire,” he said. “The batteries are many kilometers behind. The gunners cannot see the target.”
“What is the target then? And who is aiming the guns?”
“There are forward observers on the ridges. They are calling in the fire. Probably they are shelling the ridgelines. But it is difficult to be accurate in these conditions and especially at night. So most of the fire is ineffective. The shells are bursting in the snow and on the rock. But you must keep your head down, you cannot cook, you are getting cold and you are getting thirsty soon because all the water freezes. You cannot fly in provisions, you must hope it stops.”
“So what do you do?”
“The enemy batteries are dug in well. In this terrain they are very hard to find and destroy, and they are firing from behind their own lines. So you try to find their forward observers. With night vision and infrared and telescopes. If they are exposed, sometimes you can see them. And then you call counter battery fire on their position. Or you use rifles if they are close enough. And if you cannot see them you guess where they might be and hope you are lucky. It is a game of cat and mouse.”
“And they’re doing the same.”
“Yes, of course. They are trying to see who is looking for them also.”
As he spoke, it struck me that what sounded like the work of thousands was really just a few men, perched high on mountainsides with all those stars in the dark, aiming volcanoes at one another. For an instant I did nearly picture them, in their dirty white suits, huddled among the sun-warmed rocks, moving with reptilian slowness lest they be seen, offering rare terse sentences into their radios. And the barrage itself—from a distance it was very likely to be beautiful, with all the hundreds of bright points opening and closing like a veil on the ridges, and snow falling in great cascades down the flanks into the echoing valleys below.
“Dangerous work,” I said, and he nodded, slow-lidded and calm.
I was not calm. On the contrary, the sound was deeply unsettling, like the swell of a ship beneath us, or the moment before rain begins to fall. On and on it went, sometimes with a short lull, before starting up again. The radio hissed with static, and only rarely did scraps of voices come through, excited and high-pitched and quick.
“Are we in any danger?” I asked, later.
“No,” he said. “We are many kilometers out of range.”
“Maybe so,” I persisted. “But there are dozens of army tents out there. It looks like a base, doesn’t it?”
He thought about this for a while.
“An air strike, perhaps,” he said, finally. “But that is a big change. That is a big escalation. From artillery we are safe.”
I thought about it also. I was not afraid; instead, I was excited. It made me feel reckless, and it made me feel alive.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Later that night, when there was nothing else to do but try and sleep, I heard footsteps approaching my tent. I’d been dozing, I think, and woke with a start at the sound of boots on gravel, and the glow of a flashlight through the nylon wall. I shook my head to clear it, and then there was a scratch on my door.
I unzipped the tent, and looked out, and it was Elise, looking very young with her headlamp and her rolled-up sleeping bag in her arms.
“I am sorry,” she said, simply. “I do not like this noise.”
“Is Homa awake?” I asked, for some reason.
She shook her head.
“Homa is sleeping. She doesn’t know what is happening.”
I paused for a moment, looking at her, and then I opened the flap wide and she crawled in beside me.
I made room for her, suddenly aware of my unwashed body in the close confines of the tent. For a moment I thought she would undress, but she only wriggled out of her jacket and nylon pants, revealing yellow long underwear, and had soon zipped herself into her sleeping bag beside me. She shivered a bit in the cold, and only her face and a few wisps of hair emerged from the mouth of the bag, and then she reached up and switched off the headlamp.
“I’m sorry,” she said again after a few moments. “I could not sleep.”
“What should we do?” she asked, after a while. “Should we stay here? I do not like this. I think maybe we should go down.”
“I don’t know,” I said truthfully, after a while. “I’m not sure what we should do. If we left it would all be for nothing.”
“This will delay them more,” she said. “If they ever were going to come. And I’m thinking about what you said about the supplies.”
“You mean that there’s not enough?”
“Yes. Not enough. And the general coming. And now this.”
She shook her head in the dark.
“It is always men who do this,” she said. “Always.”
“We’ll ask Rai in the morning,” I said.
“I am sure Sanjit does not know,” she said. “I am sure they have told him nothing.”
I didn’t reply, and a few moments later she spoke again.
“How did your wife die?” she asked.
“She had a vague pain in her abdomen for more than a year. I thought she was imagining things. But she wasn’t.”
“Are you blaming yourself for this?”
“Of course,” I said. “If she’d gone in earlier maybe she would have had a chance.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. There was a long pause. “I am sure it was not your fault.”
“Not completely. But I was always working. Both of us were lonely after our son left home. In some ways we led separate lives at the end.”
“What did she do?”
“She was a portrait painter,” I said. “Bank presidents. Lawyers when they retired. That kind of thing.”
I thought of them, also—the deans and partners who wanted to leave a bit of themselves behind on the paneling, and were willing to pay for it. Still lifes as well—pears and apples and china. Watercolors of Eric as a child. The fields behind our house. The paintings were good, even excellent. But they were no more than that, and hanging on the wall of even a modest museum, as a few of them did, they hardly attracted a second glance. For her, in some ways, that was the most bitter truth of all.
“Were you ever happy together?” Elise asked, and again she caught me off guard. I paused for a while before answering.
“Yes,” I said, finally. “More in the early days, before we realized how ordinary our lives would turn out to be. But we didn’t appreciate what we had. Both of us made that mistake.”
“She was unhappy with you?”
“Not exactly unhappy. But she was never completely content. Neither of us was. We didn’t discuss things like that. We were like a lot of couples in that way. We tried to make the best of it.”
And it was true. Many times I’d seen her looking
out across the cornfields from the back porch, her thoughts so clear to me; bittersweet, taking her comforts where she could. They were not all that she hoped, I knew, but I’d like to think that it was tolerable enough for her, and if I had my failings and my distances, so, too, did she, and we had many moments of togetherness nonetheless, at times in spite of ourselves, as people always do.
One night, not so long ago, when I was well into my fifties, they had called me in from home. Usually the residents did not require my presence until morning, but the ICUs were full, and the ambulances kept coming, and they could not keep up, and they needed my help. I was just sitting down to dinner when the phone rang. Rachel gave me a long stony look, as she had so many times before, then stood and cleared my plate.
It turned out to be one of the longest nights of my career. The first patient I saw was an old woman whose heart kept stopping. Refractory ventricular tachycardia, the sawtooth pattern on the screen, and her eyes would roll up in her head, the alarms would shriek, and we’d shock her, and she’d wake up again. Between shocks and the wisps of smoke, she asked us questions—Where am I? What happened?—until finally the electricity did nothing, and I could hear the sound of her ribs popping, one after the other, at the chest compressions. I watched, knowing it was no use, and after a few minutes I told them to stop and tell the family.
Then, without pause, it was on to the others. I’d been up since early that morning, and I was no longer young, and much later that night, as I stumbled through the ICU under the fluorescent lights, I couldn’t ever remember being more exhausted. I had to force myself on, drinking cup after cup of coffee, and the EKGs before me, whose patterns had always been clear, seemed like a hundred black lines of calligraphy flowing from one patient to the next.
It was raining when I finally came home the next morning—a driving, cold rain, with low overhanging clouds. I nodded off in my car, then jerked awake and rolled the windows down. The air and rain poured in, staining the leather seats, fogging my glasses, and I could barely make out the road before me.
Our garage was separate from the main house. I was too tired to run across the lawn. Instead I walked, with my head down, soaked through and shivering.
Rachel was in the kitchen listening to the radio, and didn’t hear me as I opened the front door. I left a trail of drops all the way down the hardwood floor of the hall. The lights were on, and the kitchen was warm.
I knew how sick she was of my absences, and that she was lonely, that she missed her son in college, that the town was small, and the commissions few, that somehow she was fifty years old and the art show she’d given a few months before at a local gallery had been attended mostly by acquaintances and friends, or students from her classes, that only a handful of the cheaper works had sold, and the others remained stacked in her studio along with the rest of her hopes—I knew all of that, and so I expected her to greet me with the familiar echo of those things, and I expected to reply in kind—helplessly, with weariness, as if to say, I don’t know what else to do, and these are the choices we both have made.
But she didn’t greet me like that. Instead, she sighed, and came forward, and put her arms around me, and pulled me close, and I was reminded of the early days again, when her face had lit up as I stood exhausted in the doorway of our apartment in Chicago, home for the morning, together for a few minutes before she went to work.
“You look awful,” she said, as I put my head down on her shoulder. “You look a hundred years old.”
She stepped back, and took a dish towel off the counter, and began to dry my hair.
Elise turned on her headlamp.
“Do you mind if I write in my journal?” she said. “I can’t sleep.”
“I don’t mind.”
I closed my eyes. I heard her fiddling with her bag, the rustle of pages, and then a ticking sound, like sleet against a window. I snuck a glance at her: it was a ballpoint pen, and she was writing intently in her small bound book, a faint frown on her face, in profile, the pages lit up by her headlamp.
She worked away, diligently, in a tiny, paper-saving hand. She wrote in German, and though I glanced over from time to time, and could see the sentences clearly enough, I understood nothing, not even a single word. I nearly asked her. But she was serious; I could see it in her face. I wondered who she was writing her story for, or whether she even thought of that at all.
As I listened to the pen, I realized that it was an important thing for her. I suspect it was not so much the act itself. I think for her it was more the formal collection of experience, and the dream of understanding it. I’m not sure how I knew this. Perhaps it was her discipline; she continued, without pause, for a long time. I wondered how honest she was being, and what she was saying. I wondered what she’d written about me, because surely I must appear there from time to time. Finally, she closed the book. Then, to my surprise, she leaned over, and kissed me tenderly on the cheek. Before I could respond she switched off the light, plunging the tent into darkness.
“I am sorry,” she said, her voice catching, and after a moment, in the dark, I realized she was crying. But she composed herself quickly, and after a few more minutes she fell asleep, leaving me alone with my thoughts again.
I was so acutely and tenderly aware of her; the way she shifted, her breath, the smell of shampoo that came to me, her patch of warmth against the side of my sleeping bag. It felt strangely familiar, and I realized it was Eric, my son, as a very young child, that I was thinking of. Rachel and I had taken turns putting him to bed. He would shift and murmur beside me for a while—it was before he could speak—and then it would fall over him, his body would relax, his breathing would slow, and I would watch him sleep for a while before easing myself out of the room. It was the same feeling of tenderness, of intimacy and poignancy, and as I lay there beside her it came back to me. I could still feel him as the smallest of children beside me.
The sound grew when the wind blew toward us, and faded when it blew away. At times it was just at the threshold of hearing, and at other times as fully present as the river below us, the sounds merging together—the river and the falling shells—all night. As I lay there half asleep, I felt as if the sound was being poured into my unconscious mind. It reminded me somehow of the northern lights, which I’d seen decades ago, on a solitary camping trip, high on the Michigan lakes.
At first, it had simply been an odd glow on the horizon. It might have been mistaken for a distant city. But there was no city, just open water, and the vast sheets of forest stretching into Canada. The conditions, I learned later, must have been perfect—the right time of year, and clear weather, and sun flares trembling the ionosphere. I was lucky to have seen it, in such profusion—a true display of the aurora, and how it changed, as the hours passed, from a pale glow to a blue, swirling mass, like a deep and fragile creature in the sea. I watched it for hours, sitting beside my small fire. It was the kind of thing one expected to hum, but instead it was accompanied by a delicate and profound silence. It had no distance; it was both very near and very far away. The next night it was gone, and though I saw hints of it several times later in my life, once with Eric in nearly the same place, never again did it reveal itself to me so fully, and with such abandon.
In its own way, the sound of the barrage was as mysterious and as beautiful as the lights in the northern sky had been all those years ago. I knew it was a human thing, of course, that up close it was merely brutality and savagery, but from a distance it sounded like the work of God. In a sense I suppose it was.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The next morning it was gone, but in the afternoon it returned, in fits and starts, and by evening it filled the air around us again. When I finally went to bed, I lay awake for a long time, waiting for her footsteps outside the tent. But she didn’t come. No doubt she considered it. But something prevented her, and after a while, as the sleepless hours passed, I suspected it was pride.
I think that place, so unlike anywhere else
I had ever been, so full of depths and absences and altitude—I think it was most true to itself at night. That is when the barrage was at its strongest, when it had the greatest reach, where it could carry me back into the past, and ahead into the future, with equal urgency. It showed me who I was most clearly, as if I had been deposited without context; and it made my mind tumble and spin, as if on a frictionless surface.
And as I listened, that second night, the ruined villages kept coming back to me. I imagined the dead, half frozen and rotting in the ground—so many thousands, stopped cold in a minute at four in the morning, the snow and stones on the mountainsides descending like surf, the earth a rippling sea.
The barrage, of course, was from a different instrument entirely. Yet lying there, it was hard not to think of it as a small dark cousin, an echo of a drum, another kind of phantom limb.
The following morning, in the cold clear air, there was only silence as I walked to breakfast, and a wisp of vapor from the cook tent, where Ali and his nephew were at work on our breakfast. My boots were loud on the gravel.
Something caught my eye just then. A flash, high on the ridge, on the far side of the river. I paused for a moment, looking up, but I could see nothing. I thought little of it, and continued, and just as I turned to enter the dining tent I saw it again. I felt a little prickle then, along the back of my neck, but I resisted the impulse to turn around and study the ridge—instead, I simply stepped into the tent, where Rai had already assumed his customary position at the table and Elise, who had arrived before me, stood rubbing her hands by the kerosene heater.
Rai looked up.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Do you have your binoculars here?” I asked him.
“Of course,” he said. “Why?”
“I think I saw something on the ridge,” I said. “A reflection. I’m not sure.”
He came instantly to attention.