“Sir.” The man hesitates again. “The advance divisions were forced to turn back. Von Rundstedt has been, well...replaced, sir. For health reasons is the word of the office.” At Revik’s harder look, the soldier’s face reddens. “...We are to be led by General von Reichenau in the next attempt. You are in charge of the Eleventh until von Reichenau can evaluate our status.”
Revik’s expression hardens more. Stomping snow off his boots, he turns, gazing out over the body-strewn field. The feeling in his eyes is gone by the time he completes the motion. He clasps black-gloved hands at his back.
“And my recommendation to Berlin?” he says. “We could be helping them in the West...”
“Denied, sir. Blauvelt felt—”
“Blauvelt?” Revik’s eyes turn to ash. “Is our Fuhrer no longer deciding strategy on the Eastern Front? It is fallen to his swine, instead?”
The other hesitates. Stepping closer, he lowers his voice.
“Sir...when I spoke to his man, he had news, sir...a message. He claimed to know you, and recommended me to assist him in this...” The man’s voice trails as Revik’s eyes narrow.
“Well?”
The man takes a breath. “It’s about your wife, sir...”
Revik’s face grows whiter than the snow flurrying around them in dry bursts. He is reading the man’s mind now, and no longer hears the words coming from his lips.
The world fades around the wind-chapped face of the unnamed soldier speaking to him earnestly. Details remain with me briefly, the smell of rotting corpses and unwashed clothes, burnt flesh imprinted permanently behind his eyes, knowing that friends and even relatives burned in those ovens, that the humans are no longer simply doing it to one another...
Then, all of it is gone.
...I blink, indoors, in a dated room that doesn’t feel dated here.
A mirror hangs over the fireplace. Fresh flowers bloom yellow blossoms over a flower-patterned vase with wing-like handles. I gaze into reflective glass, see a room washed in dusty pinks and rosewood trim. Lamplight warms a stained-glass shade from a table beside a standing wardrobe. A thin carpet of eggshell blue lays over the hardwood floor.
For a moment, the sounds of wet wood crackling distract me.
Then I hear breathing...the heavy, half-expressed breaths of a rhythm I recognize. I look at the bed. Tufts of gray hair stand unevenly across a man’s bare shoulders and in patches along the sides of his thick back. He lets out a low grunt.
The woman under him, I recognize. Her brunette hair lays in an artful fan on the bed, and she smiles at him. I feel a shiver of revulsion; it’s gone before I realize it’s not mine.#p#分页标题#e#
The woman is tired. I feel her unhappiness like a shroud...
The door slams open and I turn.
The sound is loud, but I can only watch, unsurprised to see him, although he looks different to me now, older than he’s ever looked to me, his eyes nearly black as he stands in shadow by the door. My gaze drifts to his white, long-fingered hands, and I see them clutching the wooden handle of an ax.
The woman has seen him too. Her voice is filled with terror, but not for herself. Her words come out in a near wail.
“Rolf! Rolf, no! Darling, no!”
He is walking to them in a straight line, his long legs moving with a quiet grace I recognize from a park on the other side of the world over seventy years in the future.
“Rolf! They know what you are!”
He doesn’t look at his wife, but at the stretch of skin and tufted hair.
He swings the ax before he has completed his last stride, embedding it between the man’s shoulder blades. It sinks down to the thickest part of the blade.
Revik slams the wooden stock forward, ripping it out with a thick, wet sound and Blauvelt screams and screams and screams...
Revik’s wife screams with him.
Unflinching, his face a mask of emptiness, Revik raises the blade and swings again...
...I am lost. I am lost.
A farmhouse lays buried in snow, two forms huddled in ratty blankets, a man and a woman. The woman is pregnant, at least seven months, and she is asleep, though the man is not.
Revik lays in the dark, watching the snow fall through the square window at one end of the hay loft, and his face looks almost dead to me now.
His eyes sharpen with a sudden flash of light, and he raises his head.
His skin is whiter, his weight less. His beard is shorter, and unevenly cut.
He is listening. There is a resignation in his eyes as he looks down at his wife. She has lost weight also, and her dark hair is matted with dirt, limp on the straw by her hollow cheeks and eyes bruised with fatigue. When the doors burst open below, he hesitates, then shakes her gently awake. Hearing the sounds in the barn, she stiffens, clasping his arm.