Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest

6

It all began many years before the children of the village were born, in the days when even their parents were still only children: suddenly, one wet and stormy winter night, all the animals vanished from the village — livestock, birds, fish, insects, and reptiles — and the next morning, only the villagers and their children were left. Emanuella, who was nine years old at the time, missed her tortoiseshell cat Tima so much that she cried for weeks. Tima had given birth to three kittens, two tortoiseshells like her and one playful marmalade kitten who loved to pretend he was a rolled-up sock and hide in a boot. That terrible night, the cat and her kittens disappeared, leaving behind an empty, lined shoe drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe. The next morning, all Emanuella found in that drawer was a small ball of cat hair, two whiskers, and the sweet-sour smell of warm kittens, licky tongues, and milk.

There are a few old people in the village ready to swear that on that night, through cracks in the shutters, they saw the shadow of Nehi the Demon passing through the village in the dark at the head of a long, long procession of shadows. The procession was joined by all the animals from every yard, every chicken coop and pen and paddock and stable and doghouse and dovecote and cow barn, a host of silhouettes large and small, and the forest swallowed them all up. By morning, the entire village had emptied of animal life and only the villagers were left.

For many days afterward, people were careful not to look each other in the eye. Out of suspicion. Or shock. Or shame. From that day to this, most of them have tended not to talk about all of that. Not a word, good or bad. Sometimes they even forget why. In fact, they prefer to forget. And yet they all remember quite well, silently, that they're better off not remembering. And there's a need to deny everything, to deny even the silence itself, and to ridicule those who nonetheless remember: They should keep quiet. They should not speak.

That night, Solina the Seamstress, who had once tended goats and raised chickens, lost her flock, her chicken coop, and her ducks. And at dawn, her small cage of songbirds was left empty. Her husband, Ginome the Blacksmith, disappeared the next day and wasn't found until a week later, shaking and frozen with cold among the trees of the forest, perhaps because he had gathered the courage to go out and look for his herd of goats and the vanished farmyard birds. When his wife, Solina, and all the village elders asked him what he had seen, all they could get out of him were wails and sobs. That's when Ginome began to lose his memory. After that, his body began to shrink and shrivel and collapse into itself until it could fit into an old pram and he himself turned into a sort of lamb. Or kid.

Years ago, Almon the old fisherman set down a detailed description in his notebook of what happened that night. He wrote that on that last evening, right before darkness fell, when he went down to the river and took his fishing net out of the water, he found nine live fish in it. He decided to leave those fish in a tub filled with water near his front door till he took them out to sell in the morning. When he woke up the next morning, there was the tub, still filled with water but empty of fish.

And the same night, Zito, Almon's faithful dog, vanished forever too. Zito was a very feeling dog, but as logical as a clock, a quiet dog with one brown and white ear and one completely brown ear. When he was trying very hard to concentrate and understand what was happening in front of his nose, he used to cock his ears forward so they were almost touching. When he cocked his ears this way, that dog looked serious and hugely intelligent and thoughtful, for a moment like a dedicated scientist concentrating as hard as he can, nearly, so nearly about to unlock one of science's secrets.

And sometimes Zito, Almon the Fisherman's dog, could read his master's mind. That dog could guess what his master's thoughts were even before he began thinking them: He would suddenly get up from where he was lying in front of the stove, cross the room, and stand resolutely at the door less than half a minute before Almon looked at the clock and decided it was time to go out to the riverbank. Or that dog would lick Almon's cheek with his warm tongue, lick it with love and compassion to comfort him when a sad thought was just about to settle in his brain.

Despite all the years that had passed since that night, the old fisherman had not been able to reconcile himself to the dog's disappearance: after all, they'd been connected to each other by a love filled with tenderness and care and trust. Was it possible that the dog had suddenly forgotten his master? Or perhaps something terrible had happened to him? For if Zito were alive, he would surely have escaped from whoever had kidnapped him and made his way home. Sometimes Almon thought that he could hear the muted echo of a thin howl calling to him from very far away, from the heart of the thick forest: Come, come to me, don't be afraid.

It was not only Zito who disappeared that night, but also a pair of small finches that used to sing to Almon the Fisherman from their nest of twigs on a branch that gently grazed his window whenever the wind blew. And the woodworms that used to fill Almon's sleep at night with the sound of their quiet gnawing as they ceaselessly dug their tunnels through his old furniture. Even those woodworms had been silenced forever since that night.

For many years, the fisherman had been used to falling asleep every night to the gnawing sounds those woodworms made as they munched away at the innards of his furniture in the dark. That's why, since that terrible night, he hasn't been able to fall asleep: as if the depth of the silence is mocking him from the darkness. And so, night after night, Almon the Fisherman sits at his kitchen table till midnight, remembering how once, at that hour, the forlorn cry of foxes used to filter in through the closed shutters and the yard dogs would answer the forest foxes with angry barks that would end in a howl. At those times, his beloved dog used to come and rest his warm head on Almon's lap, look up at him with an expression of deep understanding, an expression that radiated a silent glow of compassion, love, and sadness. Until Almon would say, Thank you, Zito. Enough. I'm almost over it now.

So Almon would sit, thinking alone in the night silence, missing his dog, missing the finches and fish and even the woodworms, and write and rub out words in his notebook, sometimes hearing from a distance the thin voice of Little Nimi as he ran alone from yard to yard in the dark, making whooping noises that sounded from afar like sobs. At those moments, Almon the Fisherman would begin to berate his pencil, argue loudly with the stove, or riffle the pages of his notebook to try to block out the clamor of the night and the roar of the river.

Almon wrote in his notebook that without any living creatures, even the clearest summer nights sometimes seemed overlaid with a murky fog, a fog that descended on everything and almost buried the village, the heart, and the forest under it. Summer-night-haze, Almon the Fisherman wrote in his notebook, not spongy and soft like winter-frost-vapor, but dusty, dirty, and depressing.

Since that night when Nehi the Demon took away all the creatures, pulling them along behind him to a hiding place on the mountain, the villagers lived and cultivated their orchards in silence and fear. Without a single pet, without a single farm animal. Alone. Only the river still passed through the village, rolling pebbles, broken branches, clumps of mud, in the foam of its flow. Day and night, winter and summer, that river never rested.