Читать книгу The Wooden King - Thomas Maxwell McConnell - Страница 17

The frame of her bed creaked and her feet brushed the two steps across the rug and cold air swept his arm as the covers lifted and his mattress gave in to a warmth returning. Her touch drifted, raised his shirt, glided over his naked chest. Breath at his neck, humid, stale. Beyond the black curtain a tram down on the avenue clanged up the morning through the cold dawn. Her fingers traced the hair of his belly, glanced, glanced and stayed, the cup of her fingers. “It’s time.” A whisper dry as dust in the dark. “The right time.” Deeply he breathed, the weight of her head on his shoulder, her sigh at his neck. Her hair grazed his cheek and the warmth of the cup drew away. She rolled onto her back.

“Why don’t you ever want me anymore?”

“I do. But I must use the toilet.”

“No. You don’t want me.”

He kissed where he thought the cheek might be and kissed a tear.

“Alena.”

“I don’t know what you want but it isn’t me.”

“I’m doing all I can.”

“Don’t blame it on the war again.”

He was taking breath to speak when she said, “I know. It’s time for you to take Aleks to school,” and tore the covers open to the cold.

In Wilson Wood they talked of Trn’s boyhood in the country, of walks he’d taken, wheat to his shoulder and lowing cow heads over the fences with their wet tongues and furry chins and once in winter a man with reins skiing behind a black horse in a pasture of snow. Gypsy wagons on lost roads bending through the forest and trampers on holiday dressed as cowboys and Indians because of books by a man named Karl May. Hitler had read Karl May but Trn didn’t add this. Before them like crystalline gossamer in the morning sun a great web loomed and they waited silently for its maker to appear till the air erupted among the trees. Nations of birds struggled from their branches and cried to escape but before they could take flight another report disturbed every leaf. Trn reached for Aleks already reaching for him and huddled the boy behind a pine, bark bristling at his shoulder, Aleks panting under his chin, resin and spring’s sweet decay and a burn that scorched the sunbeams slanting through the wood where smoke coiled the trees.

A fourth or fifth shot cracked before they heard the voices, the laughing. Aleks whispered, “Is it cowboys?”

“Hurra!”

“Feuerfrei!” one of them cried and shouldered his rifle and fired and the bark of the pine next to them splintered into yellow meat. Another clapped the rifleman on the back, “Nein, nein, nein,” and chuckled and shouldered his own weapon.

Trn waved out one arm. They were only twenty paces away now. “Bitte, bitte, meine Herren. Wir sind zwei Zivilisten.”

They all had their tunic collars undone in the heat, cloth caps folded in their belts, sweat standing their hair. Six, seven, laughing. A day in the wood, away from the sentry box or the drillplatz. They came forward in their tall boots as Aleks left the tree and one of them made much of him, ruffled his hair, brushed some straw from his shoulder.

“Ach, mein Bruder,” he said, smiling as he looked at Trn. “Ich habe einen Bruder, der sechs Jahre alt ist.”

He held Aleks’s chin, asked how old he was and Aleks looked at Trn. Trn said the boy was six now and the soldier roughed Aleks’s hair again. With a rifle butt one of them shattered the spider’s web and had to pick the filaments from the stock while the others laughed. The one with the younger brother apologized when Trn explained that families often walked the valley floor, picnicked here. They slung their rifles and went the way they’d come, began to sing.

“Dear Fatherland, put your mind at rest.”

“Are you all right?”

“Did you see their guns?”

“I did.”

“Firm stands and true the watch, the watch on the Rhine.”

“He let me touch it.”

“I know.”

“It felt hot. The metal felt hot when I put my finger on it.”

“I’m sure it did.” Trn pulled crumbs of bark from the boy’s dark hair, gave him a good brushing down to his brown knees. “You look almost like you did when we set out. Almost presentable.”

He brought him near inside one arm before standing.

“What a story I have for Grandfather and Mother now,” his eyes agleam, his cheeks glowing. Miroslav asked what sort of rifle was it and said perhaps it came from the gun works across the city and was forged by Czech hands and how even in wartime irony took no holiday and Alena said they were both fools ever to go into the woods anyway and could not go again.