Work Text:
The Americans blew in on a wild and feverish wind that danced with cigarette smoke and muttered curses.
Now the wind does not blow, and everywhere is settled with this still pallid death and won’t come alive again. I know. I’ve seen so much death I feel as though I'll never set eyes on another living thing. It will haunt my vision; I will stay in this church until the day I die; I will stay with these soldiers lined in neat rows as though there are already in the morgue, until I am one of them too.
Death follows me like something tangible. It walks behind me, in my footsteps. Sometimes it works through my hands, and brings no aid to the wretched shells of men.
Sometimes, when I’m alone, I can feel a shadow of a caress on my neck, like stale air blown through cold lips long dead. I can feel it watching me, like this is all some game. It knows me. It waits and watches and follows. But most of all it plays, moving the pieces across the board in some pattern that spirals into a chaos that I am a part of, somehow.
Here before the altar, above the crypts, is the only place that does not smell like rotting wounds and cold coppery blood. Here the rusty scent of candle smoke and incense lingers like a ghost, old and impotent. It has never comforted me. It still does not, but anything is better than the air beyond those stairs that they struggle down with the wounded each day.
Each day. My God. Is there no end to the Americans? Surely soon they must all have passed through these doors and down these stairs and beneath my bloodied hands. Surely there cannot be more.
But there are. There are always more to die.
When the Americans came they scared me. I couldn’t understand their words through the harsh bravado in their voices. It didn’t last long though. A brave man bleeds just the same as a coward, and blood is all there is in the end: under your nails and in your hair and flecked across your face, the world narrowed to just that.
So they left in hushed, shambling groups, with rifles and each other’s arms for crutches and support. Their eyes told tales of things that could not be neatened and tidied and slipped into words.
But still, they sometimes try to tell me. Perhaps they feel the need to explain. Their mouths form the shape of words that do not exist. Primitive words, I think - a thousand different words for blood and death and the act of killing. They think that in these civilised days there is no use for this langauge, but there is. Man will always be Man, and time and history will chase its tail until the end.
But when the Americans walked out of town we believed they had left us for the Germans. No one thought any less of them for it. No one could if they looked out of their glassless windows at the vacant men who passed like shadows down the street. They had tried.
But more came, and this time the bravado was courage, and it sat quiet and solid behind their eyes. They had seen enough to know that bravery often withers and fades, when it is flaunted for all to see.
Now I think it does not matter. If they put a Nazi commander down on the table in front of me I doubt I’d notice. The brave bleed like cowards, and Nazis bleed the same as Americans. Thousands of men dead, blood on my hands, its taste in my mouth, the frozen ground too hard to dig graves. Blood is all there is, in the end.
That’s what I thought, anyway. But I’ve met someone, and in this dead place he echoes like a wrong note.
He told me his name, where he came from, asked about the aid station. He is a medic. I gave him supplies and he left. Nothing more. But when he moved past me he brushed against my side, and carried towards me in that still air was a whisper of voices singing, of hot rainy afternoons and rivulets of water gleaming from fat, glassy leaves. Of some other life entirely, where his hands and mine are clean of blood and other men’s pain. A world away from Bastogne.
This man, with his cold marble skin and his still, watching eyes, is the most alive thing I have ever known.
He tried to help me with a wounded soldier. He spat in gutteral french, his voice burnt around the edges with that awful knowledge: the wounded man’s blood covered him from fingertips to elbows, but there is nothing that can be done when you fight a battle such as this.
I begged him silently to let the man slip away, give his still unmoving form what dignity we can. So we stood watching each other across this death.
The stars on the ceiling were set in an unending, unreal blue, and I felt them wheel above us as though time and space were parting for this soul newly freed. But stars don’t look like that: stupid golden pointed shapes. Real stars are cold and distant and sharp, when we can see them at all beyond the sky that sags with snow above us.
Death was between us in that corpse, reaching out clawing hands for us. I could see it from the corner of my eye, but if I looked straight at it it was gone. It looked like tendrils of shadow that wanted to curl around me and take me with it.
This man and I are the same, but everytime I think of him I see him far away, with the void of death between us, and I don’t understand why.
We have found each other. We are the same. But there is something - a hint of something in the air - an echo of a memory or a word that I can’t hear. It is louder and more insistent than the whispers I hear in his gaze, of a life we might share. I tell myself I am imagining it, but I know it too well.
It is hard to ignore Death’s shadow when it walks so close to you.