Grace

So here we are at war again and celebrating Passover. Suffering, slavery, redemption, and joy--all at once. And they're all in this story.

By Michael Oren

Why Jagger should have died, and Konig, Kaiser, and Schmidt—why Willy should have both his arms blown off and left to bleed out in the snow, and Vogt entirely beheaded—while I walked away scratchless, baffles me. At the time, though, I didn’t consider myself lucky. On the contrary, while my friends met more or less instant deaths and at least fell like men, I was left to freeze and starve, shiver and shit in the woods like a rat until the rats made meals of me. Still, the image of that fate did not prevent me from abandoning our overrun position and fleeing for the forest. The all-embracing, all-suffocating forest.

How could I, a city boy who’d never spent time in parks, much less the wilderness, survive? There was no shelter, no food I could identify, and, apart from the fading crump of shellfire, no sound. And yet into the darkness, into the silence and the cold, I ran.

And running, I tossed aside my gun and cartridge belt, even my helmet, only later to lament the varmints I could have hunted with them and stewed. My only thought was to shed any evidence of my soldiering—my epaulettes and insignia, too—and relieve myself of unnecessary burdens. Fortunately, I had the sense to keep my bayonet which weighed next to nothing but came in handy that night when I had to fix my first shelter.

It was a primitive affair, pathetic really, stitched together with branches and brambles that shredded more than shielded my face. Inside, smoked my last cigarette and lit a tiny stack of kindling, just enough to ward off frostbite without attracting the bands of partisans and highwaymen known to frequent the forest.

If might have slept for a few hours or perhaps passed out, either way, I awoke with a thundering headache and my greatcoat stiff with ice. Splinters of winter light pierced the treetops and lacerated my eyes. I had to keep moving, I knew, and not only to escape the war, but to where? Which direction?

My luck, just then a recollection from something some boozer once told me on a streetcorner came bubbling back to me. Moss, he mumbled while gazing at a streetlamp, grows mostly on the north side of trees. At the time, I thought it was only the rotgut talking, but now I believed there was providence in it. Many of the trunks were indeed mossy on one side and, on the other, smooth. With that as my compass, I told myself, eventually I’d reach the sun. There’d be fields and food and a bed with silken sheets. Somewhere, southward, there’d be peace.

Instead, there was desolation. No wildlife, not even birds, no trails or clearings or signs that human beings might have previously passed through. Knolls, ridges, hummocks hampered my path, thickets and briers blockaded it. And yet I pressed on. Sucking on snow for moisture, on pine needles to quell the hunger already gnawing at me. After two days and torturous nights, I don’t know what would have alerted a predator more—the racket I made hacking the brush with my bayonet or the smell my body exuded, more fetid than a corpse’s.

A week or more passed and already I was burrowing for grubs, ingesting acorns that tore through my stomach like shrapnel. My coat was mud-caked, and the uniform beneath it tattered. My once-sturdy boots were reduced to slippers. At some point, I became aware that I was talking to myself, singing tunes from my childhood, sometimes shouting. I railed at officers who were long since dead and assailed my mother for chasing my father away before I could even meet him. For working in factories and cleaning other people’s homes so that I rarely saw her except to receive scraps and thrashings for infractions I could never recall. Assailing her for the life, I was only too delighted to leave for the promised comforts of the military—the meals, the showers, the camaraderie. I cursed and mourned her, both.

I’m not sure when, exactly—when my third tooth fell out or when pus started seeping through my bootstraps—I realized I was dying. Not a discomfiting thought; on the contrary, it came as a relief, almost, salvation. My only regret was that it hadn’t come quicker as it had with Jagger and Schmidt and the others. Instead, I could watch as the frostbite crept black up my fingertips and ate away the tip of my nose. I would lose myself, piece by piece, and litter the forest floor.

And like a dying man’s, my mind flitted around my life. My childhood, shorn of pleasant memories, most of it spent in the street. The hardscrabble women who ushered me into manhood and the men who pummeled me into serving them as couriers or worse. And then the army, which turned out to be more of the same: dirt, beatings, hunger, and death. So much death, survival seemed an anomaly. And yet, while all my buddies were reduced to dog foot, I remained whole.

But why? Not by virtue of my deeds in life, a reward for acts of kindness. Not in thanks for the horrors I’d watched and done nothing, nor certainly for those I’d committed myself. All the torments inflicted on me now, some of my last coherent thoughts concluded, were more than well-deserved.

So, prepared, I finally stopped plodding. I dropped first to my knees and then to my chest, adopting the position I wanted my skeleton to retain. Beside me, I laid my bayonet—a souvenir, perhaps, for some carefree future wanderer. Then, with my chin pinioned in the snow, I raised my eyes to their final vision. Of trees and icicles, outcroppings, and stumps. And a shadowy figure gliding toward me, hooded and shawled, and making not the slightest sound. “Take me,”

I sighed with the last of my breath. Take me, I thought, and instantly ceased to think.

I did not awaken but rose through successive stages of slumber. A sleep in which my eyes were open and taking stock of the environs. A shaft of dirty light angling down from an unseen source, an unvarnished wooden floor. A brace of shelves lined with earthenware jars, some of them web-encrusted. A chamber pot, a broom, a cross. The squat iron stove containing the only sign of life: a fire.

I raised my hands only to discover that both were tightly bound with rags. Parts of my face were bandaged as well, as were my feet, most likely, beneath the horsehair blanket. My body was a repository of pain. The only comfort came from the sense that my torment would soon be over. Captured and kept alive solely to squeeze out intelligence, I would quickly prove of no use whatsoever to the enemy and receive a blessed bullet in the head.

So, I lay there for what must have been hours, perhaps even a day or more. Briefly visiting consciousness before retreating into dreams in which my mother scolded me for pilfering food and then helped herself to all I’d stolen. The father I’d never met appeared as well, but only as the staff sergeant who made me stand in the rain with my gun over my head and shouting over and over again: “I will not fart during inspection!”

A door somewhere opened. Rusty hinges dueted with the wind. And footsteps, too soft, too tentative, for boots. I looked up and saw a familiar figure, the same one I last saw in the woods, and thought, since when does death come twice? It hovered over me for several moments, silent and unstirring, until at last, with the subtle shift of head, a face emerged into the light.

An apple-shaped face framed in a kerchief knotted beneath her chin. High of cheekbones and thin of lips, with pox-dented cheeks and eyebrows that had never known tweezers. The eyes, though, were luminous—brighter, certainly, than anything in the room or even, probably, the winter sky outside, radiant with kindness. She smiled and showed me a remnant of teeth.

She lifted a bowl to my mouth—some kind of gruel—and a wooden spoon. My first instinct was to shoo her away, not because I wasn’t ravished, but because I, in my mind a soldier still, couldn’t bear the thought of being fed. And who knew what side this creature was on and whether the porridge wasn’t poisoned?

I tried to take the spoon from her hand only to realize that mine was completely swathed. So, growling, I let her coddle me, gingerly scooping out the entire bowl, all the while smiling that compassionate smile and pouring her eyes into mine.

“Thank you,” I muttered in my native language, and she whispered something in hers. I was about to ask for another serving when suddenly the room began to swim. Her face became a shell-cratered battlefield and her eyes twin bursts of phosphorous. She murdered me after all, I barely managed to think. The bitch.

When I awoke, this time almost refreshed, I noticed that the bandages on my hands had been changed and the ones on my face removed entirely. My nose was one hard scab. All that was curious enough until I realized that, astonishingly, I was no longer wearing my uniform. Instead, there were a peasant’s clothes—homespun breeches and a cheap linen shirt. Lifting up the blanket, I saw that my feet were in place, sockless, their frostbitten toes slathered in what looked like lard. On the floor, nestled in the straw that had leaked from my mattress, was a bedpan.

I winced at the indignity of it, but then remembered how she’d spoon-fed, nursed, and sponged me, and no doubt saw me naked. Not that there was much to see, my body still wracked and withered. Still, I felt strong enough to sit up and sling myself between my elbows. Yet no sooner had I risen when the woman again appeared, this time approaching swiftly and upbraiding me with nods—No No No. She planted her fingertips squarely on my chest—the nails, I noticed, were notched—and gently pushed me backward.

No No No, she once more instructed me, wordlessly.

I couldn’t resist, even if I’d had the energy, and resigned myself to rest. To watching her as she emptied the bedpan and swept the straw from the floor. Watched and tried to guess her age, which was not more than mine, and nationality. The rags on my hand had clearly been torn from her dress, which billowed below layers of shabby shawls and above the work boots that disappeared far up its hem. She’d seen my body, but I could not even imagine hers, as formless as a rabbit’s foot.

Days passed, days in which she’d disappear for many hours only to return, wipe the mud from her boots at the doorstep, and proceed to clean the room, tend to me, add wood to the fire, and then depart with nothing more than that beneficent smile. The light in her eyes seemed to linger.

Slowly, agonizingly, I rose from the bed and stood on what felt like clumps to hobble toward the stove and warm my hands through the bandages. Finding me like this, I suspected the woman would be shocked, maybe even threatened, and cast me back into the forest. I’d still be too feeble to resist.

Yet, instead, after scrapping her boots and encountering me, a man a half-torso taller and, however denuded, nearly double her width, a former soldier in what was likely a hostile army, the woman merely smiled again and gestured to me to follow. After a second or two of hesitation, I did, limping out into a spanking winter morning with snow on the fields and on the roof of a modest farmhouse. My own abode, which I now saw was an unused sty, was also drift-bound.

On feet that felt shod in concrete, I trailed after her. She didn’t look back but merely went straight to the farmhouse door, entered, and left it ajar for me. Inside, the room was far less dingy than the sty, less sparsely furnished, and in place of the stove was a blazing chimney. There was also a hardwood table and a single wicker chair. She motioned for me to sit.

Strangely, I could hardly remember the last time I actually sat in any chair, certainly not one intended for a normal person about to eat a normal meal. And the meal she served me was normal, indeed, scrumptiously so. Potatoes, turnips, even some kind of meat. I kept on expecting a varmint’s eyeball to come floating up, but there were only shriveled peas. I ate, I scooped and slurped, but the woman didn’t seem to mind. Rather, she appeared to be enjoying the sight of me engorging myself like a pig. I scraped the bottom of one bowl and then, without me asking, watching as she again ladled it full.

I spent the rest of that day with my chair positioned as near as bearable to the stove while the woman exited and reentered the house, busy with daily tasks yet silent. Only in the later afternoon, with the sun already drooping toward the windowsill, did she again indicate to me to rise and follow her outside, traipsing through the snow, and back to my old bed. The prospect depressed me. While no mansion by any means—no electric lights, phone, or even an indoor privy—the farmhouse seemed sumptuous next to the stye. Yet, once inside, I saw that she had thoroughly aired out the place, replenished the straw in my mattress, and rummaged up a chair of my own. A table, too. I could live here, I thought. Yet life both before and during the army had taught me to trust no one, neither my mother nor my sergeants. More likely I’ll die here, I anticipated, and soon.

For some weeks, the routine continued. Mornings, she’d come to retrieve me, ensconce me in her house, feed, and warm me, and leave me to my thoughts until twilight and the time to retire to the stye. There, I’d lie in darkness, tossing on that lumpy mattress and listening to the nearing thuds of war. I waited for the creak of her boots, the heave of her breath, and swish of her blade as it drew fatally across my throat.

But there came no war nor hiss of steel, only the pitter-patter of melting icicles and the purr of the season’s first rain. By this time, my hands and feet had completely healed, and while the tip of my nose remained numb, no part of it had fallen off. I’d gained weight as well. All that porridge and no exercise and soon the peasant’s clothes she’d dress me in began to shrink. I was about to embark on a walk around the farm, wading through the mud, when the woman preempted me. She opened the door and gently waved me out into the crisp spring morning. She smiled her smile which was less angelic, suddenly, and if I weren’t mistaken, mischievous. Then, without a sound, not even in her own lingo, she handed me a hoe.

That day we dug for potatoes. Or, rather, I dug, and she collected, dragging a burgeoning sack as we progressed. The work, no challenge for me in my civilian days, was backbreaking. I had to keep stopping to catch my breath and massage the stitch in my neck. Yet she did not egg me on, didn’t rush me or express the least disappointment in my frailty. She only sang, over and over, a song that had no discernible melody or even lyrics, only sounds. Guttural, visceral, hypnotic. Like the dirge of some dying animal, or a bird in search of a mate.

More days passed. The weather warmer, the potatoes fewer, while my muscles grew accustomed to the work. Steadily, we shed layers. The overcoats and shawls, the gloves from my hands and the kerchief from her head, and for the first time I truly saw her. A woman, certainly, though not the type I knew in the city, subsisting on cigarettes and beer, not meatless but full with yoke-like shoulders and haunches that billowed her skirt. Her breasts, while not big, looked healthy, her forearms, when bared, were stout. Her cropped-short hair was the color of last year’s fields. I saw her, and the two of us worked up a sweat.

I was not surprised when it happened, nor was I relieved. There was, rather, this inevitability about it, like the disappearance of the frost or the sprouting of lilies. Like a lonely death in battle. The evening she led me not to the stye but back to the farmhouse. Her smile neither benign nor impish now, her eyes feverishly aglow.

Once inside, she undressed me. Hardly new to nakedness before women—since boyhood, I’d had my share—yet suddenly I felt embarrassed. It wasn’t only the still-ravaged state of my skin, the off-color tattoos, or the smell of musty potatoes. Instead, I experienced the vulnerability I knew often as a child and which I’d labored to suppress, especially in wartime. On the edge of her bed, I sat helpless, stripped not only of helmet and gun but of the flimsiest rag to shield me. From a basin heated on the stove, she sponged me, eased me backward, and released the cord on her skirt.

There were no surprises in her body. A roughhewn body made for farmwork and the requisite pleasuring of peasants, coarse where expected, leathern and chapped. But the overall sensation was one of softness. I felt enveloped and safe. She kissed with lips that were fibrous yet wet, serrated fingernails furrowed my chest. Her eyes, lustrous in the dark, remained open.

Moving into the farmhouse, sharing her bed, went a long way to dispelling my suspicion that she was fattening and softening me in order to sell me for the highest price. No novice with sex but utterly new to love, I was no expert, yet she seemed to genuinely care for me. Sometimes, desperately.

Dawns, we rose, drank tea and ate the bread and bacon she managed to trade for the potatoes, and returned at once to the fields. We worked side-by-side with scarcely a sound, much less a word, in perfect tandem. Throughout the day, though, and more incessantly toward nightfall, the beat of artillery and rattle of machine guns approached. It was only a matter of time, I knew, before the war finally reached us. But in what form? Which army? And still, I wondered: would she, for an attractive sum, exchange me?

I didn’t have long to wonder. One midday, late autumn, a gaggle of soldiers staggered out onto the field. I call them soldiers now, but I would hardly have recognized them as such, so sodden and threadbare were their uniforms, so emaciated their forms. Twenty paces away, I could smell them. Only their guns and helmets gave them away. Unlike me, they hadn’t discarded them in the forest.

Spying them, I hoped that they’d pass us by without incident. They could easily have shot us both and ransacked the farmhouse for food. There was a time, earlier in the war, when either side would’ve routinely done that. But they were too weak for rampaging, it seemed. They barely glanced at us as they trudged, their eyes fixed on some no longer attainable home. Still, I thought, the woman should not draw attention to herself, should keep her head down and work. But when I looked up from my digging, she was gone.

Minutes stretched as the soldiers dragged themselves on and may have ignored me entirely if not for her. She reappeared, suddenly, and hurried toward them. Idiot, I berated myself, she’s going to turn me in after all. A deserter, even at this stage in the war, was worth betraying.

My breath abated as I watched the transfer of something—bread and bacon, an entire week’s worth—but transferred not to her hands but theirs. The men gnawed, animal-like, they stuffed themselves, and in the end, thanked her effusively. They thanked me as well, waving with the last of their strength. I waved back at them with my very best simpleton’s grin.

She had passed another test, I felt, and proven her dedication. Yet a part of me remained unpersuaded. The part of me that knew that the real trial would soon follow. Like a madman, the war was rapping at our door. The floorboards shook with it, as did our bed. True, she hadn’t given me up to my former comrades, had fed them with our precious rations. But how would she act when the other side appeared—her side, perhaps? Between her lover and her countrymen, who would she choose?

It didn’t take long, exactly two days. Two nights in which she lavished intense affection on me, not mere carnality but a passion bordering on mania. “Drogi, drogi,” she kept purring, one of the few words I ever heard her mutter, moaning. I admit being moved by it, matching her caress for caress. Yet suspicion once again benumbed me, as the inevitable moment neared.

It came, though not in the form I anticipated. Not a troop of soldiers or even a squad, but a single officer. Not bedraggled or even sullied, in a firm-fitting uniform that had never seen a day of battle, gold-buttoned with a burnished shoulder strap descending to a holster from which he drew a pistol. He pointed it at me as I hoed, and I tried my best to keep my eyes on the ground, struggled to keep my knees from trembling.

He shouted at me, again and again, some of the words familiar to me from dying or surrendering enemies, in either case, soon to be dead. And now I would be, too. With that same simpleton’s look, I gaped at him, hoping he’d mistake me for a mute. But there he was, jamming his revolver into my chest, his handsome face—chiseled features, metallic eyes—pressed into mine. With what I assumed was my last thought, I again upbraided myself. She was the one who alerted him, who sold me for a few kopeks or whatever her pitiful coin. Fool, I rued, for not running as soon as I was able, escaping that perfidious woman just as I had the war, resisting her lure.

I tried to straighten myself—enough of play-acting—to accept my death like the soldier I once was. Standing at attention, the hoe in a perfect present-arms, I forced my eyes open and to glare defiantly into his as they narrowed into gun-slits and then suddenly bulged open. His mouth slung wide but not a single word emerged, only a sound like a pebble dropped in a well.

The officer stumbled backward. His legs buckled and the pistol dropped from his grip. Half-turning, I saw behind him the woman with an expression I’d never seen before—enraged, mindless—and her smile turned to viscous. Embers were set in her eyes. They continued seething as the gurgling officer completed his turn. As he showed me, planted midway between his shoulder blades, the handle of my old bayonet.

The war ended. I knew it from the birdsong no longer interrupted by bomb-thumps, and by the refugees streaming in both directions across our field. In and out of the forest. The woman would offer to feed them what we could, regardless of their destination. A simple woman, perhaps, lustful, possessive, violent when she had to be, commandeering, gruff, but instinctively, unerringly, good.

Of course, it crossed my mind to follow the displaced, join one of those gaggles limping toward home. Cry, she might, and try to stop me, I could leave whenever I wanted to, that day or the next. The entire world was open.

But what home would I return to? The street, the whores, the gangs? What family? And what would the world have to offer that I hadn’t found here? Back there, where I came from, there were more wars, more death, but here there was comfort. Here there was compassion, security, and peace.

And who was I to question? Who was I, who had seen and done such terrible things, to appeal a not-guilty verdict? A life sentence to love. Though never a God-fearing man or deserving of the merest forgiveness, I somehow felt redeemed. Undeservedly, no doubt, and inexplicably, saved.

And all with a woman with whom I’ve never exchanged a word. From whom I’ve never received anything but a smile and a glow and a daily dose of grace. Some names I will always remember—Jagger, Konig, Kaiser, Schmidt—but hers I’ve not need to learn. She just was, is, and for me always will be, divine.