Although he was much less broad than the other man, he was almost as tall, and his voice echoed forcefully. “Don’t do it!” he went on, turning back to the horse-men as they prepared to charge. “Don’t cross the bridge! They’ll shoot you down one by one! They’re just waiting to pick you off!”
Anyone else in Bart’s place would have been swept aside by the furious giants, but his name was Casal — and they listened to him.
“They killed Faber!” cried a high voice.
“And they’ll kill you too if you charge them,” replied Bart. “ You’re not cattle going to the slaughter!”
“I don’t care if they kill me!” said the last speaker, a boy of hardly sixteen.
“I forbid you to go any farther!” thundered Bartolomeo. His black eyes were darting flames as he raised his fist in front of the lad’s face.
“If your father was here —” someone else began.
“My father would tell you exactly the same!” Bartolomeo cut him short. “I speak as he would!”
As the fighting horse-men saw his determination, doubt crept into their ranks.
“I know you’re brave. I know you are ready to die,” Bart went on. “But what’s the use of that, just to give them the satisfaction of killing you? What’s the use of it? I ask you.”
“So what do we do, then?” asked one of the men. “We’re not retreating!”
“And we’re not leaving our comrades dead on the bridge!” added another.
They had a good point. Looking beyond their furious faces, Bartolomeo saw the vast crowd waiting farther off, unaware of the drama being played out here on the bridge. The light of dawn, low in the sky, now showed massed throngs all the way to the hills on the horizon. And he looked at the other side of the river. Behind the lines of gray-green trucks where the enemy was concealed, implacable and silent, the city seemed to be holding its breath. He had to admit that he had been wrong, just as Jahn, Lando, Faber, and all the others had been wrong: the soldiers had indeed opened fire. They had obeyed orders, ruthlessly shooting down those poor souls armed only with clubs.
What could he say now to men who had just seen a friend, a father, a brother fall dead before their eyes? And Faber, their much-loved leader! Bart had succeeded in keeping them from rushing to their doom for the moment, and he had managed to save the lives of a few of them, but he wouldn’t be able to contain their despair and fury much longer.
“Come on!” shouted the young man who was so keen to lead an attack. “Let’s charge them!”
“No one move!” shouted Bart. “I order you not to move! Leave this to me!”
And without knowing just what he hoped for, he started over the bridge himself, walking straight down the middle of it. He moved a dozen paces.
“What are you doing, Bart?” someone called behind him. “Come back!”
He recognized Jahn’s voice but did not turn.
There was no sign of life on the other side of the river. They’d wait until he was halfway over the bridge before they fired. He’d be a better target there, closer, easily visible. He went another few feet. What did he want to do? He didn’t know.
Then he remembered what Jahn had said about his father, and the words began dancing around in his head: “I often wonder if he wasn’t actually looking for a chance to die in his prime. . . . There was a great melancholy in him. . . . I don’t know where it came from. . . .”
He shuddered, afraid of detecting the same sinister temptation in himself. Did he, Bartolomeo, have the same melancholy in his heart? The same profound sadness, so that putting an end to his life was almost a seductive idea? He went on walking straight ahead, stumbled on a uneven paving stone, walked around the distorted body of the young horse-man who had thrown himself into the attack beside his friend, and went another five yards. His black scarf was streaming out in the cold morning wind. From where he was now, he could no longer hear the cries of the horse-men or the sound of the great crowd behind them. All that came to his ears was the peaceful murmuring of the river. I’ll walk to the end of it, he told himself. There’s nothing else I can do. I’ll walk it to the end.
And suddenly Milena was by his side.
“Milena!” he exclaimed, stupefied, seizing her by the shoulders. “Get away from here!”
She shook her bare head. Her short blond hair stood out like a halo around it.
“No, I won’t! We’ll cross the bridge together. Come on.”
She took his arm and led him slowly on, looking serene, her back very straight.
“They’ll fire on us, Milena. You know they will.”
“On you perhaps, but not on me.”
“They’re capable of it! Look, they fired on boys of thirteen! We’re walking over their bodies.”
“They won’t fire on me, Bart. They won’t fire on Milena Bach. I’m not hiding anymore. Let them see who I am! Let them take a good look!”
For a moment Bartolomeo wondered whether she had gone out of her mind. He stopped her by force. “Milena, listen to me! What are you hoping for? Do you want to be a martyr? Martyrs don’t sing, you know.”
He stroked her cheek. It was soft and icy.
“No one will dare order them to fire on me, Bart. No one!”
“Milena, they set the dog-men on your mother fifteen years ago! Have you forgotten that?”
She gazed deep into his eyes, her own blue and burning. “They did it because they were up in the mountains with no one to see! My mother died all alone in the darkness of night, understand? She can’t even have seen the teeth that tore her to pieces. We’re in broad daylight here, Bart. Look around you! See all these thousands of people! They’re watching. Their eyes will protect us!”
Bartolomeo turned and saw the troop of horse-men starting over the bridge after them. But their anger had died down, for now at least, and they were advancing slowly and in silence, shoulder to shoulder. Their grave faces and the dark folds of their clothing made them look like stone statues with life breathed into them, marching on like an invincible army. Bart raised the palm of his right hand to them, and they stopped. Their obedience to him expressed a greater and more formidable force than the disorderly attacks just now. Beyond their figures, armed with pikes and clubs, Bart looked at the countless crowd coming down from the hills: men, women, children. Far in the distance you could imagine yet more of them, like tiny mites floating in the air.
On the other side of the bridge, the guns were silent. Milena is right, he thought. If they fire on us at this moment, they’ll set off such fury that it will carry them away, they’ll be lost forever, and they know it.
In spite of this conviction, he still knew he was playing a deadly game. A single bullet would be enough. And another for Milena . . . Yet he felt no fear, only an awareness that he was living through the crucial moments of his life and that he was at peace with himself.
He held Milena’s hand, and they took several more steps together. In the middle of the bridge, they stopped and saw that twenty yards behind them the horse-men had stopped too. They glanced at the dark waters of the great river flowing below. It had brought them here at the beginning of winter. Why would it let them down now? The wind had dropped. The whole world seemed to be waiting.
“We mustn’t stop,” said Milena. “Come on.”
They walked on as if suspended in midair, avoiding the broken bodies still lying where they had fallen. Among them they recognized Faber’s. He was facedown, and his immense arms, open like spread wings, seemed to be trying to seize and lift the entire bridge. A red trickle of blood ran from his head, making its way into the cracks between the gray paving stones.
The trucks on the opposite bank still didn’t move. It was disturbing. They took twenty more paces, still at the same speed. Milena’s hand in Bart’s was soft and sure. He turned his head to look at his companion. Everything about her was youthful and luminous. No, he told himself again, they can’t fire at her without condemning themselves.
And suddenly he kn
ew they had arrived at the precise point where they would not be allowed to go any farther. Something had to happen now. He felt Milena’s hand trembling in his. Had the same idea come to her too? They did not stop. Every step farther they took represented a victory, yet every step going was a terrible threat.
It was then that they heard the engine of the first truck on the bank starting. It maneuvered out of its parking slot and drove slowly away down the avenue. A second followed it, then another, and yet another. Soon the entire convoy was on its way south toward the army barracks. At first there was an incredulous silence. Then shouting broke out among the horse-men.
“They’re leaving! They’re clearing off!”
It was the signal for a great roar of voices that rose to the hills and echoed back from them. Bart and Milena, feeling they were waking from a dream, realized that they had crossed the entire bridge. The last trucks, the ones barring the exit from it, were starting up in their turn and driving away. They saw the frightened faces of the truck drivers quite close. Some of them couldn’t be much older than themselves. They hardly had time to step aside: a human wave was already sweeping toward them, and nothing could contain it. A similar torrent of men and women shouting for joy poured over the two neighboring bridges. The city lay ahead.
In a few minutes, the banks had been invaded, and the great peaceful army led by the horse-men flowed into the icy avenues of the capital. Windows were opened as they passed; people shouted acclamations. Shouts of hatred for the Phalange could be heard too, as if no one had ever wanted anything but to see it fall. Then the liberated citizens came out into the road to join the crowd, and the immense procession made for Phalange headquarters in the New Town.
“The arena!” cried Bart. “We must go to the arena!”
“Yes,” Milena agreed. Gerlinda, in tears, had miraculously found her again in the excited crowd.
There were no trams running, and no cars on the streets. The three of them raced down small side roads, Bartolomeo in the lead, the two young women following him. Making their way through the Old Town, they reached the square outside the arena fifteen minutes later, out of breath. To their surprise, there was turmoil there already. The crowd was a mixture of a number of horse-men, people from the city, and gladiators looking as if they had come from another age, bare to the waist or in their shirtsleeves despite the bitter cold. The two halves of the great gate were closed, but a dozen horse-men were advancing on it in single file, an enormous beam found on a nearby building site under their arms.
“Out of the way!” they shouted. “We’re going to break the gate down!”
A space opened out ahead of them, and they charged the gate at a run. It was made of solid oak and groaned at the impact. They moved thirty feet back and ran at it again.
“They’ll never do it,” said Bart.
A gladiator with a stolid face, head shaved, was standing close to him. He was still holding his sword and looking around him, dazed, as if unable to understand where he was.
“Has there already been fighting in there?” Bart asked him.
“Yeah.”
“A boy called Milos — did you see him?”
“Dunno.”
“How did you get out here?”
“Small gate around the back. Don’t have any tobacco, do you?”
“N-no,” stammered Bart, taken aback by this unexpected question, and then he set off to go around the building, with Milena and Gerlinda behind him.
There was indeed an exit at the back, a narrow gate already under the control of a group of horse-men and insurgents holding weapons. They were letting out the gladiators and ordinary spectators but seizing any members of the Phalange who tried to escape by mingling with the crowd.
As she reached the place, Milena was not expecting another experience as strange as the one she had just shared with Bart on the Royal Bridge. Yet an extraordinary thing happened: a powerful man with a red beard, wearing a heavy overcoat, came up to the gate, his head lowered, in the vain hope of passing unrecognized. Fingers pointed his way at once.
“Van Vlyck! That’s Van Vlyck!”
Two horse-men seized him firmly, and a third handcuffed him. He seemed to be demoralized and put up no resistance. As they were about to lead him off, a woman’s voice rose in the crowd.
“Wait!”
Milena stood before him. They did not say a word, but simply stood there face-to-face.
Van Vlyck, mouth open, wild-eyed, stared at the girl, and one could guess that for him time had been wiped out. He saw before his eyes the one person he had ever loved, the woman for whom he had unhesitatingly sacrificed all that was best in his life, and whom in the end he had delivered up to the murderous Devils. She stood there younger and fairer than ever, fascinating, immortal. In this girl’s blue eyes he saw his devastated past and his dark future.
And Milena found that she could not hate him. In his eyes, as if in a magic mirror, she saw the image of her living mother. I’m looking at the man who killed her, she told herself, but the words did not get through to her mind. I’m looking at the man who . . . who loved her, she thought instead, the man who wept one evening fifteen years ago when he heard her singing in a little church in this city and who never got over it. I’m looking at a man who loved her to distraction, who looked at her as he’s looking at me now. . . .
And when Van Vlyck moved away, led off without ceremony by his horse-men guards and taking no notice of what was happening, it was as if he took away a living memory of the dead woman, a memory in the flesh that no photograph or recording could ever equal.
Milena felt shattered. It took her some time to return to reality, but a tremendous crash accompanied by shouts of triumph brought her out of her daze. Bartolomeo took her arm.
“The bar across the main gate has just given way, Milena — we can get in through it now!”
They ran back, still followed by the faithful and dogged Gerlinda. The battering ram had indeed broken the gate down, but those wanting to go in clashed with those in a hurry to get out, either gladiators or spectators who were ashamed of being there, and there was turmoil. The three young people managed to get through the crowd by dint of sheer determination. Bart shouted more than twenty times, “A boy of seventeen named Milos! Anyone seen him?”
No one replied. Milena even asked a gladiator with a face horribly mutilated by scars, standing proud as if a wild beast had once mauled him.
“Milos Ferenzy! A gladiator, seventeen years old! Was he in your camp? Do you know him?”
The man shook his head, looking dazed, and went on his way. Soon they gave up asking and climbed to the top of the tiers of seats, shouting as loud as they could, “Milos! Milos!”
Gradually, as the arena emptied, they came to the conclusion that their friend wasn’t there.
“He could be somewhere else in the building,” Milena suggested.
But it seemed unlikely. Why would he have hidden? He must have left, and they had missed seeing him; their paths had crossed.
They went along corridors at random, opening the doors of deserted cells to left and right. In the end they had gone all around the building and were back where they had started.
“Milos!” called Bart one last time.
His voice echoed under the vaulted ceiling and died away, leaving the place in total silence. As they were about to leave, Gerlinda pointed to the far end of a corridor.
“There’s stairs over there.”
They made for the staircase. Two worm-eaten steps were missing. Bart went up carefully in case any more collapsed under his weight. Halfway up, he stopped.
“Have you seen something?” asked Milena.
The young man disappeared from view without replying. She waited a few seconds and then, hearing nothing, asked again, “Bart, have you seen something?”
There was still no answer. Fear was churning inside her. She went up in her own turn. A faint light came through a small opening in the mud-brick wall. Bart was kneeling b
eside a body curled up in a perfect curve like a sleeping cat. She made her way over on all fours and leaned against her lover’s shoulder.
Milos was wearing a dirty white shirt, its front soaked with blood. One of his feet, black with dirt, had been bleeding too. Unable to say a word, they looked at his tranquil face. It was like the face of a child of twelve.
“Milos . . .” murmured Bartolomeo.
“Oh, Helen!” cried Milena.
And with their heads close together, they mingled their silent tears.
Gerlinda’s frightened voice came up to them from below. She had stayed behind alone in the dark corridor. “Is there anything up there? Hey! Is there anything there?”
It seemed as if winter would never end that year. In the middle of March there were a few faintly springlike days, but then the cold returned. Deep snow fell again, as if Nature couldn’t shake off her covering of ice and frost. She might stretch and shift, but she always fell back under it, exhausted, frozen, defeated.
Helen spent a long time shut in her little room at Jahn’s Restaurant, coming out only for her shifts, doing her work like a robot. Milena and Dora, the only people she would see, did all they could to make her eat a little, forced her to talk, to wash and brush her hair. Twice they managed to take her for a walk beside the river.
At last, one afternoon, she said she wanted to go with Bartolomeo to see Basil in the hospital. The young horse-man’s wound had turned out to be much worse than it seemed at first, and he had a perforated stomach, which caused him great pain. The hospital was on the hills, in a park planted with larch trees. Basil, looking sad and thin, was lying in a white room that didn’t seem the place for him at all. On this first visit Helen just listened to the two young men talking.
“Do you need anything?” Bart asked.
“Yes,” said Basil, fretfully. “I’d like to be able to eat real food — by mouth.”
As they left, Helen hugged him and told him she’d be back. She was good to her word and visited every day, first with Bartolomeo and then alone until Basil was discharged.
Winter's End Page 29