Читать книгу War, So Much War - Mercè Rodoreda - Страница 12

III

IN THE WOODS

I LOST MY WAY AND DIDN’T KNOW WHICH DIRECTION TO TAKE, until a carriage road jumped out in front of me, so to speak, and I followed it. It was a fine day, a sunny day, an autumn day as I had never seen before in my short life. Sitting with my back against the trunk of a pine tree, I took several deep breaths. The ground was blanketed with pine needles but I couldn’t contemplate it calmly: The wound in my arm was tender and the bandage was stained with blood. At the entrance to the carriage road I found some rope, almost new and rather long. I’ll keep a piece. I cut it with the penknife my father had given me just before he saw the man walking into the train for the first time. The knife had many different tools: It was a knife, spoon, corkscrew, paper cutter, awl, scissors, and screwdriver. My mother scolded him: It’s dangerous, keep it till he’s older.

At my feet, a row of ants were dragging a beetle belly up; it was wiggling its feet, with nowhere to latch on to. A pinecone landed on my back. I looked up to see where it had fallen from. A flight of birds crossed the sky. The half-dead beetle that the ants were towing was large, black, shiny. Potbellied. I felt the urge to turn it over on its feet and scatter the ants. A cannon shot dispersed the flock of birds. The ants were still dragging the beetle. A second cannon shot went off farther afield, as if borne by the wind. I was standing, on the point of fleeing, when I spotted a boy behind some trees darting by as though possessed; he didn’t seem real. Holding his arm out in front of him, he pointed in the direction of the cannon shot. Before disappearing into the pine trees, he shouted: Go home! For a long, long time I stood there thinking about the boy and what he had said. But I was hungry and hunger distracted me. I crushed the pinecone with a stone; the pine nuts were puny and bitter. I could have eaten a horse. For hours upon hours nothing had entered my stomach except a few clusters of green grapes and water from the river down below. My shoulders hurt from unloading sacks of lentils and potatoes and swinging an axe to chop wood for the soldiers’ kitchen. My wound ached. Everything ached.

Rossend and his friends disappeared right away. Juli-Juli, the plumber who washed pots and plates with me in the kitchen, told me they had been taken away during the night to build trenches in some village. And he said to me: What are you doing here, so young? Beat it! If you can.

The entrance to the ant nest was blocked by the beetle’s carapace, its legs scarcely moving now, and the ants scurried about like mad trying to find a way to maneuver it inside. I tripped on another piece of rope. The first scrap I had cut was in my pocket. My sole possessions were my father’s knife and that bit of rope. A sloping path ran across the carriage way. Standing between the road and the path, I chose the latter because it was narrow, the weeds around it tall. One final cannon shot rang out, even farther away than the second one, and at that moment I heard a man’s voice giving orders: Jump, you fool! Jump!