Kurt moved on his belly beneath the briars that formed a rudimentary roof for the hollowed out basin of earth the two men had called home for two nights now, slithering over the lip of the hollow and following the pull of gravity through the dark to where he knew Leo would be. The movement was that of a snake’s, but Kurt knew that he could not be a snake because a snake would have been long gone by now. He thought about what other animals he could be; a loyal mastiff at best, a fuck-witted donkey at worst.
Down in the hollow – sensing that he had reached the point where the space widened out into a concavity like the bottom of a kettle, the master bedroom of their little hiding place – he lurched his legs around in front of him and sat upright, whispering; “Leo, Leo.”
“I don’t know why you’re whispering,” the strong voice came back from somewhere nearby. “There’s no one here. There’s never anyone here.”
Kurt thought about that for a moment. He listened for the low rustle from deeper in the forest, and for the breath of the breeze skirting the frozen crust of the snow beyond its perimeter, but soon he found even that had gone. He strained his ears into the silence, feeling suddenly panicked, as if the whole thing were a sleight of hand trick pulled by some conjurer, and that when the shroud was removed they would be robbed and naked, stripped of everything that had carried them this far from where they should be, and of the forlorn hope that it could carry them on to safety.
Leo heard the fidgeting as Kurt moved across the cracked, waterless surface beneath the briars. He called out “what the fuck are you doing now?” and Kurt was suitably shamed. He arrested his panic, came to terms in that moment with the perfect blackness that had been pulled across their vision and with the night that seemed somehow more soundless, more bereft of life and mercy, than any that had preceded it.
“Nothing,” Kurt whispered, “just thinking, that’s all.”
Leo sighed.
“You might as well share it.”
“How long have we known Gabriel? Four months or so?”
“It’s not so much how long, it’s what has happened. That’s what makes up the time.”
If what Leo said was true, than all of time could be compressed into those four months since Gabriel had appeared in the regiment, transferred in as part of a raft of reinforcements ready for another push eastwards. He’d stood silently in line on the parade ground, looking as benign and placid as the angel that bore his name, but from deep beneath all that, from some piece of ephemera swaddled in the hastily-stitched brown uniform and buckled tight in leather, was something that told the others he had seen action.
What action he had seen, he never spoke about. In those early weeks, he barely spoke at all, responding to orders handed to him down the chain of command in a voice a little softer than those that barked complicitly back at the drill sergeants from his left and right. It was a rare voice, quiet and fragile but still retaining some hidden depth in its timbre that neither Kurt nor Leo could fathom. At first Kurt thought that only he had been unsettled, had had emotions shaken within him that he long presumed deadened by the monotonous terror that reigned all around them, and so he kept his thoughts to himself until, reclining at ease on the firing step of the main trench one evening, Leo made his feelings known.
“Something not right about Gabriel, something I don’t like.”
Kurt acted as if he thought nothing of it, nonchalantly drawing information from his comrade, refusing to let anything slip until he knew more about what his friend was thinking.
“Just a feeling, puts me on edge.”
From then on it was as if Gabriel knew. He opened up after that, as if moving into the next phase of some mystical game, the rules of which only he was privy to, moving chess pieces into advance positions and releasing only the information he knew to be necessary. Leo and Kurt learned about Gabriel’s life before the war, his work as a farmhand on a patch of land near Ingolstadt, in a place so obscure and inconsequential that it bore no name on any map, and was referred to locally only by its position behind the village of Kaifeck.
“Imagine living in a nowhere place, just the backend of some other place,” he told them one night, gazing into the fire which licked over the last shards of dry wood salvaged from the back of the storage bunker, “what’s a place without a name?”
They learned too about the family that occupied the land; the old woman and her son, her son’s wife and her granddaughters, his long and painful courtship of one such granddaughter – she the latest in a long line of Bavarian land owners, disgraced and ejected from the feudal chain some four generations before her own birth, but still possessed of the pretensions of grandeur and aristocracy; he the son of no-one, a vagrant, heir only to the stack of cowshit he was granted for fuel each winter and the pittance he drew for each month of labour – and their eventual marriage in the old Lutheran chapel at Kaifeck. In between these tales, Gabriel spoke of the way the sun shone low between two ancient oaks on April mornings, the way the crisp light shattered infinitely in the meadow, each drop of dew on each blade of glass its own jewel in the crown of the dawn, and of the way the mare lay sleepily in the hay after she’d foaled, and the way the newborn had taken its first ginger steps into the world.
These were idyllic words, words full of the colour and vigour of life in the countryside, but they were delivered in such a way that they were stained. They became heavy and sombre, drifting out of Gabriel and settling somewhere in the dark beneath the three as sparks from the fire rose above and disappeared in the black. The unsettling nature of this delivery, the icy shiver with which each word was imbued, disturbed Kurt and Leo, but it also compelled them, and both men found themselves drawn closer and closer to the strange fellow with the shock of blonde hair and with the eyes that spoke more than could ever be said.
Like glowing metal in a foundry, like the residues of dead wood petrified deep in the heat and pressure of the ground, the connections they formed were subjected to such unnatural conditions as to galvanise them, reinforcing and strengthening them in the midst of unmitigated destruction. Patrol after patrol chipped away at the men in the platoon, the body of which was whittled sharp and keen by sniper bullets, ambushes and friendly fire which picked off the unwary and the foolhardy and the tired, until what remained was bonded stronger than ever, shining hot and bright and compacted by forces stronger than love and brotherhood, forces which were unspeakably primal.
And so during the fall back from that patrol, the patrol which exacted such a heavy cost that each had subsequently sought to erase it from the narratives of their existences, the remnants of the platoon – four, five, six of them, it didn’t seem to matter – breathed and moved as one as they fell pell-mell across the Ukrainian soil. Leo was just ahead, the grey fabric of his great coat becoming one with the vertebrae beneath his starved flesh, one with the clods of dirt that clung to his boots as they pounded the earth, one with Kurt himself, and one with the heavy breathing of Gabriel just behind; a whistling, seething train of any number of men, all still – seemingly – residing on the correct side of the black curtain that had been drawn across the platoon, trapping so many of their comrades irrevocably beyond it.
Kurt had never thought it would be like this. The chaos he’d expected – hoped for, even – never came. The abandonment of everything in favour of a frantic lurch in the direction of survival; that would have been easier to deal with. Then he would have been free and unencumbered, having transcended all bounds of responsibility or concern. Instead, as the platoon collapsed even further in upon itself and the rattle of gunfire and the hot teeth of shellburst laid itself upon the nucleus of men that remained, everything had suddenly drawn much closer, not falling away at all but binding itself inextricably to them, closer than the fibres of the clothes that clung to their limbs. And this was why such things as numbers didn’t matter now. There were no names in that fall back – no division where one human ended and another began – just the mad scramble of a unified body of men, each now carrying the entirety of their history – all they had ever owned, felt, or experienced – in a neat, communal bundle. And it was then that they become truly aware of one another, each sharing an equal portion of the load, each borne by the same frenzy of panic, each blessed with clarity and level-headedness in this community of escape, each component of the train sensing that they were henceforth bonded until the end, however soon or late that end might come.
Finally, appearing from out of the darkness, the rotted planks of the gangway that led down into the maw of the bunker, and the two banks of earth that rose on both side to provide cover to those entering and exiting. Between these two banks of earth that reached up to embrace the returning soldiers Kurt had felt the breathing behind him recede and disappear into the blackness. Or perhaps the breathing that receded was his own? Perhaps the curtain had been drawn around him, right there in the mouth of the bunker, and he had never even noticed?
Kurt had turned then and seen Gabriel, alone now, caught and momentarily blackened in the yellow of the shellburst, appearing nailed fast like Christ to the bedlam of colour that lay beyond his shoulders, then cut loose once again like a spent marionette, bones strewn loosely across the rotted wood of the gangplanks. Then arms clasped around Kurt’s shoulders and he became a part of that community once more, assimilating into the organism as he travelled backward through the aperture and the steel shutters swung closed with a yawning, aching sound. Breathing in the darkness, listening to the bolts screaming in their rivet-holes as the shutters absorbed the worst of the worst of what the Tsar’s guns could throw at them – blasts that would have ended each and every one of them, broken up that little parliament of souls for once and for all – Kurt had suddenly thought of Gabriel, thought of that silhouette tacked up to a wall of horror, arms spread wide ready to embrace whatever it was coming his way, and he spoke his name in a whisper.
“Gabriel, he got it.”
Then, between the breathing, a low voice;
“Got what? I’m here.”
Gabriel.
And so the six or seven or eight men stood in silent contemplation as shells reached down to shake the artificial hill of steel and concrete they had wrapped themselves beneath. Trickles of dust fell onto helmets after every roar from beyond the shutters, and each man worked noiselessly backwards through the recording of what they had just witnessed, like marauders occupying a trench, stalking resistance and quickly, brutally, nullifying it, erasing it from the tablet of existence like they had trained themselves to do.
But not everything can be erased. Putrid memories leave their residue, residue that has the habit of bleeding back through the walls of our consciousness from time to time. And so, slowly, it bled into the thoughts of each of the men, colouring each utterance until every word spoken became as dark and heavy as the words which had emanated from Gabriel on those nights around the campfire.
Except, it seemed, for Gabriel himself.
While the remnants of the platoon sank into the new life that the fallback from the patrol had prepared for them, Gabriel seemed suddenly unfettered by whatever it had been that had dogged him before. He was untroubled; fresh and clean and new. He never spoke about the patrol – just as none of them did – but it was evident that those moments that stretched out like hours and that frantic singular movement back to the bunker in which each man had seen more than could possibly be processed in a lifetime, did not weigh upon him as it did the others. They would see him crouched by a frozen boot print, admiring the fractals that spread across the virgin ice in the dawn, or simply smiling despite himself at his sentry post, watching the crows arc among the handful of shattered, leafless trees in no-man’s land or wheel above the Russian line. But it was the levity in his voice which disgusted the others the most, and quickly Gabriel became ostracised from the platoon as the men exercised the only power that remained. They couldn’t hurt him physically, they couldn’t rob him, or chisel away at the kernel of hope each had long since dispensed with, so they took away the only thing that kept them all alive; human contact.
All turned their backs apart from Kurt and Leo. To them, the lightness with which Gabriel spoke was a relief rather than an affront, a respite from the unremitting darkness that lay around them. His words were messianic, leading them onwards towards a shared destiny, and they craved his company, listening to him talk about nothing as they watched the embers of a fire burn away and savouring every morsel from his angel’s lips.
It was out of these meetings – in which Gabriel would hold court, his face losing all trace of humanity as the light and shadow of the fire played across it – that the plan was born. From then on, the die was cast, the wheels set in motion for the beginnings of an existence beyond this one, at some indeterminate point in the future that neither Kurt nor Leo had even dared to imagine for many years now. When the Russians came – and all agreed it was a ‘when’ rather than an ‘if’ – and when this fire-forged composite of men was scattered across the hills to the west, they would move from the midst of chaos and begin their long trek back to Bavaria, to Ingolstadt, and then to Kaifeck, and, finally, to the no-name place that lay beyond it.
It was here, in the place without a name of its own, that the plan would be enacted. Now the magic of Gabriel’s words wove itself profoundly around the two listeners, as the strange blue eyes flickered and the tongue spoke of wealth, of robbery, of making a clean break. “They may have been spat from the feudal chain, but they’re not hard up,” he said as Kurt and Leo watched, rapt by Gabriel’s oration. “They don’t want for anything. Why should we?”
Then there was revision, a dark undercurrent snaking its way into the idyllic narrative they’d both heard over and over again, a river of darkness and deceit that stretched all the way from the bloody soil of Eastern Ukraine and plunged deep into the heart of their bucolic Fatherland.
The stories they’d consumed seemed to play out in reverse, no longer cleansed and pure but now putrefied like the residual memories of the fallback from ambush and of the brutality of that shroud that snatched so many of their brothers away. It will come, he told them, riches, comfort and a new life, all they need do was wait. And so they did.
Down there in the pitch dark of the hollow kettle-bottom, Kurt couldn’t help but think about the momentary disconnect that occurred between the two banks of earth that rose up like arms in the darkness, as what felt like all the guns in Russia spat their fire on top of them. He’d seen it, clear as day; Gabriel, nailed to his invisible cross like a martyr, arms splayed, rifle loosed from open hands and tumbling away from a body torn from behind by shrapnel and fire and death.
He’d seen it, there was no question; the shroud pulled quickly and tightly around Gabriel, drawing its fabric over him and spiriting the breath from his frame. And he’d heard the voice and he’d recognised it, they all had, just as they’d all seen Gabriel in the hours that followed, each man wrapped in his own cocoon of forgetting apart from the strange figure with the shock of blonde hair who nonchalantly smoked a cigarette and then slept like a baby. But what had happened between those moments? What had happened to facilitate such a profound change? What Gabriel had lost, the others had gained.
How could he articulate this to Leo? Leo, who lay on his back beneath the briars and looked up into nothing with open eyes.
“We’ve come this far, Kurt,” Leo said, “it’s a funny time to lose faith now. What do you suggest…”
But Leo’s voice fell silent as both men heard it: the whip crack of footfalls puncturing the snow that covered the meadow, each louder than the one preceding it as the figure moved towards them across the space.
John Burns is a writer and teacher originally from Nottingham in the UK. As a child, he fostered a love of reading, writing and language, something which led him to a career in journalism and subsequently teaching English literature. He is the author of Homesong, a self-published novel, and has had short fiction published by Ink, Sweat & Tears and Jungleland amongst others.
