The Fox Was Ever the Hunter

The lost shovel

The left knee lifts, the right knee falls. The grass is trampled, the ground is soft. The muck skids off underfoot, the clunky boots chafe against the ankles. The laces are made of mud, twice torn and twice knotted between morning and noon. The socks are wet. The grime on the hands dries in the wind. The cap has fallen into the dirt.

The cigarette gets grimier from hand to hand, the smoking is interrupted by orders — one cigarette lit four times and put out three times between morning and noon while thin flights of smoke pass from mouth to mouth. The last man flings away the butt, still glowing.

At neck height the trench is deep enough. The light over the grass is as low as the tank in the forest, as the forehead over the eyes. And the day gets pulled into the ground somewhere between the forest and the hill.

It’s evening, the soldiers watch from the corners of their eyes, the officer with the gold tooth gives an order and steps out to piss, he walks past the tank and then into the wood, three trees deep. The soldiers stop digging, they listen in silence for the officer’s stream to hit the ground. But the branches crack, and the crows squawk as they fly to their roosts. The crows feel the fog slowly draping the trees. Maybe they sense the snow up in the flat ridge, the snow of the days ahead. Snow that is coarse and dry and stays put. Snow so white that their black beaks are always open and freezing because they can’t find anything to eat except frozen corn.

The men don’t hear the officer’s stream hitting the ground.

The officer buttons his pants, pulls his cap down lower on his head, his scarf tighter around his neck. He picks up a withered branch and scrapes the dirt off his boots.

* * *

Fall in, count off, every voice is tired in its own way, every breath from every mouth is its own steamy animal. Two ranks, the tall and the short.

Right shoulder, shovels, shouts the officer. He inspects the ranks. DOLGA where is your shovel. Ilie raises his hand to his cap, clicks one shoe against the other, Comrade Officer Sir, my shovel has disappeared. The officer raises his forefinger, his gold tooth is brighter than his face, find it, he says, or you’re not coming back to the unit. Right face, march, left right. The soldiers march up the hill alongside the tracks left by the tank. The hilltop swallows them from below, the sky from above.

* * *

Ilie no longer hears their lockstep, he searches the trench as they march alongside, the trench is darker than the ground. His hands ache from the shovel because it’s no longer pressing against them, because they are no longer digging, because his calluses are softening into skin and they burn. His shoes find nothing but grass and dirt, his eyes nothing but the hill. The hill has moved into the night, and the forest is a dark corner without trees.

Behind that hill, thinks Ilie, is the flat plain. Perhaps at night it’s made of water, of smooth, level water, so that he might make his escape. He would be black like the riverbank and the place where he jumped wouldn’t see him and the water would carry him away. If I swim for a long time, he thinks, my eyes will get used to the night, they can lead me across many things, and once I have crossed everything there is to cross my hands will touch a different riverbank, a different country. But first I’ll have to take off these clunky boots, he thinks, before I get to the top of the hill. I’ll have to get rid of them before I jump, I can’t lose time untying laces on the riverbank. And when tomorrow comes, just as early and just as dreary as today did, to the sound of a command and a gold tooth that’s been awake for hours, tomorrow when the column follows the tank tracks up the hill, the boots will be there, and the trees will once again be in the forest and so will the crows.

Meanwhile in a mailbox far away is a letter for Adina. Inside the letter is a picture of him, with a weak smile and no grass straw in his mouth.

* * *

By the time the column reaches the hilltop Ilie is afraid of stepping out of his own soles. The plain is black, but the ground isn’t made of water. He trudges alongside the tank ruts and is afraid of turning around to face himself. The trench has witnessed everything, and tomorrow the officer with the gold tooth will know, and that is treason. The officer’s mouth will scream, his tooth will glow. And the hilltop will stand there mute and no longer remember that it spent the night inside Ilie’s forehead, and that it was responsible for driving his see-through skull to thoughts of escape, all out of fear.

* * *

Now every step bores a hole in the stomach, every breath sticks a stone in the throat. Broken corn leaves scratch behind the knees, the grass comes up to the naked buttocks. Ilie has to take a shit. He raises his head and pushes. He tears a leaf off the stalk, a narrow, long corn leaf. The corn leaf breaks, his fingers stink. The cornfield stinks, and so does the forest. And the night and the moon that isn’t there stink as well.

Ilie sobs and curses, mother of all soldiers and officers and tanks and trenches. And he curses, invoking the gods and everything the world has ever borne.

His curses are cold. They are not for eating and not for sleeping. Only for blundering about and freezing, they climb up between the cornstalks and choke on themselves. They are for churning up and laying down flat, an instant of rage and a long time keeping still.

Once a curse is lifted, it never existed.