The Singing Forest

by Judith McCormack

  She is lying with her head on his chest, lingering in the torpor that suffuses her — both of them — afterwards. She is beginning to think of this act — the aching buildup of desire, the shuddering release — as a thing in itself, something apart from both of them, an entity of its own. Something that drugs them, leaving them in this languid haze.

  Being here now is soothing, a quiet hole in time where no one is recounting horrors, no one is frighteningly ill. Where the ground is not shifting, at least for the moment — something that seems rarer than before. She runs her hand over the hairs on Nate’s arm, the folds of the pale yellow sheet. Her wariness about this accidental — incidental — coupling is fading away. Sometimes she finds herself watching his hands, his torso for clues — attempting to make some sense of him from his body, to make sense of the two of them.

  At the moment she is listening to the lazy thump of his heart, wondering if she could record it somehow. Record it, and play it back to Gus, to his own defective muscle, to jerk it into awareness, to remind it how to go about its duties. Listen to this. Remember this? You can do it.

  The witness?

  I wasn’t thinking about him, she says sleepily. But I am now.

  When do I get my money?

  Is it really just the travel money? she had said to the investigator afterwards, looking at him hard.

  Of course, he says, astonished that anyone would suspect otherwise.

  First you were obsessed with finding enough evidence, says Nate, and now you’re questioning what you’ve found. Based on what?

  Nothing, really. That’s the problem.

  She is convinced now that Drozd was involved in torturing and executing prisoners, that he was involved in the executions in the forest. How much do the details matter then? Whether it was this prisoner or that one, whether it was this killing or that one, he was an accomplice to such ruthless brutality that these distinctions might be irrelevant. And he is only being deported, not imprisoned. Losing a life, but not his only life. A life he stole. A life that was denied to his victims.

  No, no, no. This is wrong, this is a kind of slippage. She can almost see legal tenets dissolving before her eyes. There must be specific facts, there must be evidence, even for the balance of probabilities, that untidy test. This is a case about wrongdoing, not a quality of character. He must be guilty of something precise, knowable — something he has done, not something he is, not some innate evil.

  Evil again. Its own foul and hideous bulk. Saint Augustine.

  Protean, ever-changing, stretching to encompass new horrors. But if there is anything that counts as evil, surely it must be torture and killing. What kind of person takes part in these things? A spontaneous human mutation, someone born without the ingredients of a conscience?

  Difficult to know, say the experts. A stunted amygdala, says one. An endocrine malfunction, says another. A damaged childhood, says a third.

  People have miserable upbringings without becoming torturers or murderers, says Nate.

  Brain chemistry. Faulty circuitry.

  More chillingly: an inherent human tendency, some of them say, liable to surface in anyone in the right circumstances.

  No, she thinks. Not anyone. And what about guilt? What about accountability? There must be a role for them somewhere in this poisonous combination of greed, callousness, self-interest.

  Your job is to deport him, says Nate, not to inspect his inner workings.

  Still. What happened to the normal human brakes on cruelty, the taboos against murder?

  Not such strong brakes, says her aunt. Not such hard taboos.

  True, he had been surrounded by other people involved in these things, people who initiated him into these obscenities. But there is no sign that he was a reluctant participant.

  All those officers — lulling themselves with drink, with self-justifying cant.

  What do you know about these things? says Drozd, furious.

  Not nearly enough, she thinks.

  ···

  The bypass surgery is in an hour, and he is awake.

  Here, says the nurse, propping him up, handing him a pill in a paper thimble, then a cup of water. A little something to keep you calm, to keep your heart rate down. They’ll give you the anaesthetic in the operating room.

  The pill makes him unusually talkative, almost chatty — so unlike Gus that it is almost unnerving.

  Hospitals. Hospitals, he says, nodding.

  You’ve been in a hospital, he says confidentially. Just a baby. They were over at the house. When your father was still around. She was coming down the stairs with you in her arms.

  He yawns.

  She tripped — a piece of the carpet. I was in the hall, I saw her. But she didn’t grab for the handrail, she kept her body curled around you like a snail. Like a snail. Down she went, banging, crashing, curled around you. She ended up with a concussion, bruises, a broken arm, but you — nothing, you were fine. She made them check you out at the hospital, they kept you overnight.

  His eyes are closed again.

  The next day she took a picture of you — that camera — a picture of you crawling up the stairs.

  He is quiet for a minute. Has he drifted off?

  And the other time, he says, suddenly stern.

  What other time?

  You with your broken leg after the accident. Just a little thing, you were, in that big bed.

  Time to go, says the orderly, expertly knocking out the brakes on the bed.

  And the fever, mumbles Gus. It wasn’t just your leg.

  Wait, she says to the orderly. The fever? she says to Gus.

  You don’t remember? That’s why you were in the car. She was up at someone’s cottage with you, and you spiked a fever, a high fever. She was taking you to the hospital when she had the accident. Don’t you remember?

  ···

  I have something for you, says her mother. She holds up a flat paper bag.

  What? What is it? says the little girl, hopping up and down.

  A colouring book.

  She runs to get her box of coloured pencils. They sit down together on the old sofa and she opens the book.

  The pages inside are blank. She looks up at her mother, puzzled.

  Pick a colour, says her mother.

  Green.

  She shows her how to scrub it back and forth across the page.

  As the page fills in with colour, white lines begin to show up, and then begin joining together. Slowly an image of water reeds, a duck, a frog emerges.

  Where does the picture come from? she says, astonished, looking on the back of the page, underneath the book.

  Her mother smiles.

  ···

  The air wobbles again.

  The little girl lies there, stunned, bewildered. She can hear night sounds, the occasional rustle, a squeak, the snapping of bracken. Overhead in the trees, a nasal heent sounds twice. The ditch has a rich, sickly smell, the smell of vegetation in stagnant water.

  Her throat is dry, burning, she has been crying, calling out for hours, she is exhausted, thirsty. Her mother stubbornly refuses to wake up. The silence is heavy.

  With a shock, she realizes that a tall, bedraggled man is standing next to her, his face hidden, so close that one of his arms is almost touching her through the broken window. She freezes with fright. While she sits there stock-still, there is a rustle of wind. The man reaches over with a long arm, and brushes the window with a wet, prickly hand. Her heart bangs in her thin chest, then she sees it is a branch. She begins to wail again.

  Now the pain engulfs her again, billowing out the window, into the sky, expanding and shrinking with each breath.

  What do we have here? says a gruff, kind voice.

  A kid, says another.

  Heads bobbing up and down, hands around her, patti
ng, undoing the seat belt. Pulling, lifting gently.

  Another burst of pain, and then she is in the arms of a stranger.

  Twelve

  No form remains permanently in a substance; a constant change takes place, one form is taken off and another is put on.

  Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed

  The chauffeur is gone.

  This fact drops into the frozen morning, heavy as pig iron.

  An enemy of the people. A defeatist agitator.

  Who denounced him?

  The captain.

  A bad sign. The pit of his stomach is icy.

  He sees a cluster of three officers, talking in low voices. He skirts them, hoping to overhear something, but they break off when they see him, and he keeps walking.

  In the garage, the guard is rattled, even the dog seems tense, prowling around, sniffing at cracks in the wall. Standing on his hind legs, poking his nose at the windowsill, at the pane covered with whorls of frost.

  Nothing, says the guard, standing apart from the others. I’ve heard nothing.

  They look at each other, alarm underneath their sealed faces. The chauffeur’s running litany of complaints. Who would take them seriously? He was a moaner, a grumbler. But they listened, they were listeners, even if they were not grumblers themselves.

  And now they are both thinking the same thing:

  Did he name anyone?

  Too dangerous to ask.

  He watches the officers more closely, though, over the next few days — one man mouthing words, another glancing over a shoulder, a shrug. And he attempts to gauge their reactions to him to a millimetre. Are they looking away from him more quickly? Perhaps. Do they seem a degree cooler? Maybe. But if they are, it will pass, he thinks. Of course they are suspicious, jittery — this was how they were when Plisetsky disappeared as well. They all were.

  He had assumed that the men who were not officers — the local recruits — were too unimportant to be arrested. Now he realizes this very fact puts them at risk.

  But he is different, he is sure of this, confident that they need him. Look at all the ways they need him: standing in for the officers, enforcing long hours of stoiki, writing up confessions. Loading the vans, driving them to the forest. Shooting.

  They want everyone who knows about these things to have blood on their hands as well, says Sidorenko. A safety measure.

  Even this fact, he thinks, even this shows he is almost an officer. He is sure of it. So close, he can almost feel the serge of the uniform, the weight of the gun belt. Any day now. Not like the chauffeur. He was disposable, he was replaceable.

  And if the officers are warier, they are still more desperate to know things, every scrap of information he can glean. Another key to his safety. No, he will be fine. They need him.

  The only thing he regrets is that the traffic in the prisoners’ clothes and possessions — something that had started up again, very quietly — is abruptly halted once more. Occasionally he inherited items from this flow of goods — a torn greatcoat, an old pair of boots — and he also delivered some of the lots for the officers to resellers or buyers. Another valuable service he had provided. Not anymore, though.

  The chauffeur? Unfortunate. Yes, unfortunate. He will almost miss talking to him, almost miss his rants. But he is angry that the man has compromised him, and the fact is that he is no longer here, no longer useful. Although he wonders about his fate. Has he been shot? Sent to a labour camp? Asking about him would be too risky as well.

  Still, he is constantly watching, weighing. Calculating every sign, every hint. Is the captain looking at him oddly? Is the serzhant drawing away from him? He reads the directives, counts the prisoners, attempts to think of ways to feed the official maw.

  Snow has enfolded the city in a soft, cold grasp now, muffling the usual city noises. He comes to work in the dark, a sliver of red on the horizon. He goes home in the dark, the winter sun gone, the air so frozen his clothes are stiff with it. In the early gloom, the lights inside the office give it a hunched down look. And the officers are morose, petulant, snapping at him, at each other. Plisetsky was one thing, an isolated occurrence — the coat in the market, someone had to go. But if this is to become more common, then the map has changed, their own machinery looming over them balefully.

  A week later. He is putting a memo on Sidorenko’s desk when the man grabs it out of his hand. Then he jerks his head — a tiny movement — towards the door. Now, he says silently, urgently, only his lips moving. Now.

  What? No, this cannot be right. He has misunderstood the man. Go? Run? The idea is laughable. But then what does he mean?

  He stands there stupidly.

  Sidorenko glances around. Get out of here, idiot, he mouths.

  That is what he means. How is it possible?

  Now.

  A shot of terror goes through him.

  Go slowly, he says to himself. Show nothing.

  He tries to walk casually over to the door, to breathe evenly — he makes a detour to collect a tea mug on a desk, to pick up a directive. In the hall, he stops for a second and exhales. Then he starts down the stairs, trying to make as little noise as possible.

  The street at last, and now he is running, dodging people, lampposts, carts. Everything he has built up so painstakingly, all his plans — so real, so lifelike, their outlines sharp and clear — gone in a moment, his prospects lying around him in pieces. Now he is running, running until his lungs are searing, until he is gasping for breath. Running until he is dizzy, nauseated, until his legs are aching. Fleeing from his own harsh death, panting closely behind him.

  ···

  A stark, desperate trek. On foot, clinging to the roofs of trains, the backs of trucks. Slipping across borders at night, under barbed wire, over fences, around guards. Through Warsaw, Budapest, Trieste, Auvergne, a continent holding its breath. He goes wherever a truck or train is going, heading west, stealing bread, wormy turnips along the way.

  Months later, Antwerp. The threat of invasion hangs over the city like mortar gas. A place of watchmakers, brewers, who refuse to believe it will happen, but think about it every hour, every day. Officially neutral, they say, over and over, as if this incantation alone will protect them. Politique d’indépendance, says the king. It will never happen, they insist in Flemish, as they lay in stores of flour, white sausage, batteries, anything they can get their hands on. Normally a placid, stout-hearted city, pleased with its own orderliness. The gabled houses, the cut-out facades, covered with snow. One eye open, one eye closed.

  And something else, a shipping port. A launching point, where he can leave this continent behind, this land strangled by its history. Where he can find a newer, looser country, a country that allows him to crawl through rules, slide around barriers. Where creating the elements of a life is not so viciously hard.

  No, says the immigration officer, looking out the window.

  No, says the visa agent, almost pushing him out the door.

  A Russian? says the customs liaison. Not a chance.

  No, says the ship’s cook on the Belgenland. No more men.

  No, says the first mate on the Zeeland. A full crew.

  He keeps talking, keeps looking, keeps trying until he is exhausted, until there is no one else to ask. Until one thing becomes plainly, grimly clear: he is not getting off this continent, not now at least, not from here.

  He turns around and falls backwards into the war.

  ···

  Rolling, twisting through a crevice in time, months and years spinning around him, fading into each other. A curve of beach in the dazzling sun where birds pick at a corpse, the tide nagging at it. An old woman hunched on a stool in the street, gnawing at a piece of meat. A jeep of chattering soldiers hitting a land mine, the jeep leaping into the air and falling on its side, men spilling out, their tongues stilled. Ragged
children sitting in a half-circle in a bombed-out building, one with a bandage around his head, swaying as an older girl leads them in a song, her hands moving as if she was conducting a choir — sur le pont d’Avignon, l’on y danse, l’on y danse. An airplane suddenly sprouting flames, brilliant against the night sky, twisting downward in a long, slow arc. A man lying on a frozen street, one leg torn off, the cobblestones beneath him dark with blood. A can of milk, a can of pears he finds in the rubble, greedily licking the metal, the pear taste blooming on his starved tongue. A dead woman in a raincoat over her lingerie, her body in a grotesque position, her face still wearing a puzzled look. Bombs released from the belly of a German Dornier, black wasps dropping towards the ground. An old man emerging from the damp morning fog, walking slowly, steadily with a bed on his back, the bedclothes tied neatly around the frame. The wind blowing a parachute in a field, dragging a body, the pearly silk inflating and then collapsing, over and over. Immense clouds of smoke billowing out over a strafed factory, grey, white, silver, welling out of each other, graceful citadels of ash and air. The smell of rotting apples, sewage, gunpowder, burnt flesh. A waltz of chaos and destruction that went on and on and on, past reason, past bearing, past belief.

  But then it was over.

  ···

  The office is cluttered with papers, spilling out of wire baskets, piled on the radiator. Files are stacked on a credenza, alphabet letters taped above each stack. On the wall, a portrait of a borrowed king in epaulettes and medals — a man with a narrow, refined face. On another wall, a calendar, the picture of mountain crags brushed with snow; in a corner, a globe covered with small-print countries.

  A glassblower? says the immigration official again, a man in his thirties, a thin white scar along the bottom of his jaw. He has been asking questions from a dog-eared sheet for twenty minutes, back and forth over the same ground, as if the answers might be different from moment to moment. Or to catch him out in a lie. He is brisk, dodging from one area to another.

  Yes.

  And you worked in a small factory?