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Nikolai went back to Fox, fondled his cheek and told himself the two of them had both been more frightened by the leaping of the little dark carnivore gnawing at the corpses than by the heads sticking out of the earth. As he was remounting he heard the filly groaning softly. He recalled that Fox had jostled her when he backed off and might have pulled the knot in the halter too tight. He dismounted again, slackened the rope, ruffled the young animal's mane. Suddenly the groan was repeated, but it came from the glade.
"Whatever happens, he'll die," thought Nikolai, placing his foot on the stirrup. It was no longer a groan but a long sigh of pain hissing in the darkness. Nikolai hesitated. He pictured the glade at night, the buried man seeing the wolves approaching or feeling the teeth of a rodent. He seized his rifle and walked toward the dead.
Among the wounded men who had to be finished off in wartime he knew two types: the first knew their wound was fatal and thanked their executioner with their eyes, the second, much more numerous, clung to the half day of suffering that was left to them to live. He strode across the glade that was still once more. Some of the heads were bowed toward the earth, others, rigid, seemed as if they had fallen silent at his approach. One of them was gri
He found him at some distance from the others. A very young soldier whose shaven head rose up from a dark mound. Nikolai leaned over, touched the buried man's neck, found no wound on it. The soldier opened his eyes and groaned at length with a rhythmical sound, as if to prove that he was indeed a human being. Nikolai walked toward Fox ("I'm leaving now! Let them all go to hell!" a voice whispered inside him), hesitated, took out a flask, went back toward the head. The soldier drank, choked, his cough sounded almost alive. Nikolai began to dig, first with his hands to free the neck, then, when he reached the shoulders, with an ax blade. He liberated the back and, as he had expected, found the arms forced behind him and bound together with wire. Going down deeper, he noted with satisfaction that the soldier had not been buried standing up, but kneeling, to save time, no doubt.
Now he must lift him out. Nikolai placed himself behind the still-inert body, found a good purchase for his feet, took hold of the soldier under his arms. And at once let him go. In gripping the buried person, his fingers had just pressed against a woman's breasts.
He took hold of one of the freed hands, turned it toward the moon to examine it. The hand was frozen, bruised, black with earth. But it was a woman's hand all right, he could not be mistaken.
With a man everything would have been easier. He would have tipped him onto his back and then heaved him out of his hole. But with her… Muttering oaths that he was not even aware of, Nikolai dug at the front of the body. His fingers touched the remnants of a coarse wool garment and bare skin came through where it was torn. Further down the earth was warm, heated by the living energy spreading outward before being extinguished.
The woman said nothing, her half-closed eyes did not seem to see the man digging her out. Lying in front of her, Nikolai thrust aside the earth in broad armfuls, like a swimmer. It was when he arrived at the middle of the body and disengaged her belly that, all of a sudden, he raised himself up on his knees and shook his head, as if to rid himself of a mirage. Then he leaned forward and, already with a grown man's authority, felt the torso stained with earth, the round belly, heavy with a life.
She remained motionless, crouching close to the great fire he had lit in a recess in the steep riverbank. Two buckets filled with water were heating, suspended above the flames. Nikolai worked as he would have done in building a house or at a blacksmith's forge. Precise, confident actions. The thoughts colliding with one another in his head had no co
Feeling his way, he gathered up dead branches, then turned to see the fire. Sometimes a scarlet flash glittered in the darkness. It was Fox lifting his head and seeking him with his eye by the light of the flames. The silence was such that Nikolai could hear the horse's breathing from a long way off, little sighs, now sharp, now reassured. And when he came back toward the fire he had the strange feeling that he was returning home.
In the morning they crossed the place where the rutted road was piled high with bundles of brushwood, advanced up a valley still white with mist, and finally found the meeting of the ways he had vainly sought the previous evening. Several times Nikolai tried to talk to the young woman, whom he had mounted on Fox's back, deciding to go on foot himself. She did not reply, sometimes smiling, but her smile resembled the tensing of a face on the brink of tears. Finally, toward noon, when they needed to make a halt to eat something, he lost his temper somewhat, irritated by her refusal to speak, "Listen, what's the matter with you? Why don't you say anything? It's finished. We're far away. They won't harm you any more. At least tell me your name."
The young woman's face twisted into a grimace, she tilted her head back slightly and forced open her lips. Between her teeth, in the place of a tongue, Nikolai saw a broad, oblique gash.
When he had recovered his wits, he realized that she had been mutilated so that she could no longer tell what she had seen. But tell it to whom? Everyone saw the same thing during these years of war. Moreover, how could one describe those heads in the clearing, those eyes being extinguished one by one? While the birds built their nests on the branches above them.