| Suddenly
Yakób began
to sob; he threw himself down at the soldiers' feet and wept bitterly,
as though he would weep out his soul and the marrow of his bones.
They lifted
him up, almost
unconscious, and took him along the high road, under escort with fixed
bayonets. His tears fell fast upon the snow, and thus he came into his
own village, among his own people, pale
as a corpse,
with poison
in his heart.
He looked
dully at the blazing
wooden church-spire where it stood enveloped in flames as though
wrapped
in an inflated glittering cloak. Dully he let his eyes wander over the
hedges and fences; everything seemed unreal, as things seen across a
distant
wave or a downpour of rain, out of reach and strange.
He was
standing where the
field-path joined the high road. The soldiers sat down on a heap of
stones
and lighted their cigarettes.
Yakób,
trembling all
over, looked at his own black shadow; fugitives arrived from the
burning
village and swarmed past him; the rifle fire now sounded from the
direction
of the mountains.
Suddenly
Gregor's cottage
burst into flames. A blood-red glow inflated the clouds of smoke,
trembled
on the snow and ran over the pine-trees like gold.
Soldiers
were arriving from
that direction, streaming with blood, supported by their comrades.
Yakób
stood motionless,
looking at his shadow; fear was burning within him. He looked at the
sky
above the awful chaos on the earth, and became calmer. He tried to
remember
how it had all happened.
They had
come, had given
him food. His wife and children were probably safe in the manor-house.
Blinking his swollen eyelids, he tried to deceive himself, crouched
down
near the guard who was smoking, and asked him for fire. His fear
miraculously
disappeared.
He began to
talk rapidly
to the soldier: 'I was sitting...the wind was moaning...' he told him
circumstantially
how he was sitting, what he had been thinking, how the shots had struck
his cottage.
The soldier
put his rifle
between his knees, crossed his hands over his sleeves, spat out and
sighed.
'But you
have had underhand
dealings with the Russians.'
'No...no.'
'Tell that
to another.'
'I shall,'
replied Yakob
calmly.
'And who
showed them the
way?'
'Who?' said
Yakob.
'Who showed
them the way
over here? Or did they find it on the map?'
'Yes, on
the map,' assented
Yakob, as though he were quite convinced.
'Well, who
did?' said the
soldier, wagging his head.
'Who?'
repeated Yakob like
an echo.
'I suppose
it wasn't I?'
said the soldier.
'I?' asked
Yakob.
The other
three soldiers
approached inquisitively to where Yakob was crouching.
'A nice
mess you've made,'
one of them said, pointing to the wounded who were arriving across the
fields. 'Do you understand?'
Yakob fixed
his eyes on the
soldiers' boots, and would not look in that, direction. But he could
not
understand what it all meant...all this noise, and the firing that ran
from hill to hill.
'Nice mess
this you've made,
old man.'
'Yes.'
'You!'
Yakob
looked up at them,
and had the sensation of being deep down at the bottom of a well
instead
of crouching at their feet.
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