Quartet for the End of Time (14 page)

I had been buried alive.

I
DO NOT KNOW
how long I lay there; how many days and nights, or if perhaps it was only a matter of mere minutes or hours. There was no measure of anything except my own bare life against that darkness. But at a certain, unmeasured point I became aware of footsteps overhead and was overtaken by a new sensation, which even now I find difficult to name. Perhaps it was hope—but if it was, it was a hope so pure, so unattached to anything that might have taken the shape of a real or imaginable thing in which to hope, that I could not identify it. And then so quickly did it dissolve itself to dread—when, in the next moment, a door above me was raised and a blinding light entered my grave—that it would have been hardly possible, with any assurance, to distinguish it from that subsequent emotion. In fact, the light with which I had been so unexpectedly assaulted was only the dim light of an underground cell, but its contact with the absolute darkness to which I had by then grown accustomed nearly blinded me—and, indeed, blinds me still. So that even now, as I speak to you, a dark shape hovers above you, where that same light once imprinted itself in the negative—in the precise shape of the hope, mixed irreconcilably with fear, that I felt as the door to my grave was lifted and the living world streamed, unexpectedly, in.

A
FTER THAT THERE WAS
a different sort of time. A time I could mark in the usual way, by the relation of light to object, object to light. I could measure it according to the regular intervals at which the door to my grave was opened—perhaps a space of six hours. Perhaps longer. But it doesn't matter. In any case, I began to be able to keep time, to think backward as well as forward again. To brace myself at the
sound of approaching footsteps, against the blaze that would soon rend the darkness, by shutting my eyes tightly against its incumbent glare. It was as though there was only one long moment that suspended itself between the all-consuming darkness and the all-consuming light. As though that silence, that blackness—which nothing, not even the functions of my own body (my heart, which continued, presumably, to beat, or my breath, which continued to traverse the distance between my lungs and my throat, or my kidneys and bowels, which continued to empty themselves, though there was increasingly less for them to expel) could interrupt—was the slow tick that preceded, however many hours later, the tock of the approaching footsteps and their accompanying blaze of light. At which point I would be hauled from my grave and strapped—my hands first, then my legs—to a straight-backed chair. The world would spin and then hover like a shadow above me. It never did take on any definitive shape, so that when I think back on that time now there is no image for me there to recall. And even the voices that echoed, that shouted at me in syllables I could not comprehend—even the pain with which my body greeted the lashes of the object with which I was beaten (making meaning, finally, of my throbbing head and limbs)—seems to fade into the indistinct shades of my memory, leaving only the faintest, lingering trail.

L
OOKING BACK, YES
— D
OUGLAS'S FATHER
continued—those days or weeks (I am not sure how much time went by like that) appear to me as though peering backwards down a dim corridor; not from the present into the past, but from the past forward. Because it is those days at the beginning—when the pain, and the glare of the light and the insensate syllables that rained down upon me, indistinguishable sometimes from the lashes of a whip or a chain—that remain most vividly in my memory. As the days progressed—as I myself edged slowly closer toward my eventual release—things become much more murky, more difficult to recall. So that it is at the murkiest and furthest possible reach down the dim corridor of my mind as I peer
ahead, into the future, that it happened I
was
released. This time onto quite a different sort of blankness.

I cannot therefore tell you exactly how it came to pass. That, as the door opened one day to the glare—which, as all things must, had receded over time to a shadow of its former brightness, against which I hardly squinted anymore—I reached up and felt my hand connect with a throat. That I felt my hand close on that throat. That I felt beneath my hand what for all I knew was my own flesh collapse under my own weight; felt its resistance give way beneath the pressure of that hand, while the hand itself, exhilarated by its own strength, held fast—until there was no resistance at all. It was not until then that I realized the hand was my own, and I lowered the dull weight of another man's body very slowly—almost with tenderness—so that at last it came to rest.

It was not until that moment—coming alive beneath the body of a man I had killed—that I began to reason with a certain faculty of mind that I had for some time forgotten. In short, I became human again. I began to think, to dream. I noticed things. I noticed that the light, for example, was dimmer than it had been at other times. That no one stirred. That, though it was surely strange, no one hauled the body from my own, in order to expose me—his murderer—below. No, it was only my own breath that stirred. Everything else was plunged into the darkness and stillness of death.

Slowly, then, I began to ease myself from beneath the body of the dead man. We moved together, a sad, slow sort of dance—in which, neither being able nor fully willing yet to disrupt the connection between us, I slowly shifted my weight and at long last succeeded not in separating myself finally, but at least in switching positions. So that now— except for my broken leg, which was still partially pinned beneath the dead man (though I would not realize it until later)—I lay on top of him, rather than he on top of me.

Now my heart—and the blood in my brain—was beating quicker and then again quicker, and the quicker it beat, the more I desired for it to continue beating. In a sudden burst, I managed to extract my leg from
beneath the weight of the dead man and in the same moment realized it had been pinned. Only then—having severed that last bond between us—did I manage to raise myself from my shallow grave and make for the open door. Though it seems to me now that that first moment—that first free moment above the earth—lasted an age, I believe that I moved, in fact, quite quickly, despite my broken limb. That I surveyed the cell and, finding it bare and the door ajar, a key dangling in its hold, made my way toward it without hesitation. That indeed I paused only once to reach—for some reason—for the key in the door, and that having torn it from its hold I plunged with it into a night that was itself plunged, nearly, into the same breathless stillness as the grave I had so recently left behind.

D
RAGGING MY USELESS LEG,
I headed in a singular direction—so singular, in a landscape replete with possibilities of directions I might equally have tried, that it was, on the contrary, no direction at all. I didn't pause—to survey the land, to test the wind, to reason with whatever faculties I had begun to regain—I only plunged ahead, with a great shuddering panic of joy in my heart, which beat now only with the joy of its own beating, and with each beat there stirred again in me the impossible human faith with which all human hearts beat: that it would continue to beat. And it was by that faith, which had nothing to do with gods, or even with men, that I managed to make my way from the small camp, barely glancing back as I went.

Almost at once I became aware of time in quite a different way than I had from within the cell. Of the way that it existed, deeply, within the earth—distinct and yet inseparable from the predictable comings and goings of the sun. It was according to these comings and goings (in order, that is, to survive first the brutality of the heat in midafternoon, then the crippling cold with which the landscape was seized by darkness) that I relearned time. That I regained, that is, or more particularly, a sense of
continuum
—of the manner in which time was not constituted merely by the tick, tock of two moments as they swung, alternately, back and forth, but proceeded according to a more encom-passing
rhythm of which that alternation was only the most minute part. Without this sense—just as without water or food—I would surely have perished. But water and food were, of course, necessary, too, and both of which I was lucky enough to stumble upon on the third day of my travels when I came upon a recently abandoned village—torn through (I could not tell) days, maybe even hours before, and perhaps by Semenoff himself.

The sight of that village as I approached it was to me like the sight of the kingdom of heaven—if, that is, there were such a kingdom, and I a man of faith. Being a man, instead, of an empty stomach, parched throat, and broken bones, it was equal or better to me than any glimpse of paradise. There was still water in the flasks that hung on the scorched and crumbling walls of the houses I entered—and I drank. There was flour and even a little dried meat to be found inside a leaning cupboard, whose door, fused shut by fire, I managed to pry open with the end of a spoon. I then mixed the flour with the water from a flask into a paste and placed it on my tongue. It is impossible to describe the sensation that spread through me in that moment. It was as if every cell of my body unfurled at once. I did not move for half a minute or more, or even swallow, but only sat and felt within me the thrill of contact between the food and my tongue. I felt it rush right out to the ends of my fingers—felt it reach every last follicle of hair on my body. Only then did I swallow.

F
OR FOUR DAYS
I lived in that village alone, except for the rats and the unburied corpses of the dead—before I realized I was
not
alone. On the fifth day, toward evening, as I prepared my usual meal—stirring into my ration of flour six drops of the precious water from the flask (it gave me, I remember, such pleasure to count them, and even greater pleasure, after I had counted out six precisely, to allow one more—a mistake, a single, unaccounted-for drop, a pure gift!)—I caught sight out of the corner of my eye of an odd shape, darting quickly between the burned-out beams, fallen crossways, along the path. I turned and squinted into the oncoming darkness. At first I thought my eyes had simply tricked
me. Perhaps it had been only a mirage I had seen—resulting from hunger, or the shifting light. Or perhaps, and just as likely, it was a passing ghost, finally rising from one of the bodies I had not had the strength to bury—whose stench and shame I lived among, as if it were my own. I was not then, as I am not now, unsusceptible to the idea that spirits linger sometimes, semi-embodied on the earth, and that it is even possible on occasion to encounter them. Whether in real and physical form, I don't know, but at least, certainly, in the dream images—which do not ever just come from nowhere—of the mind. But at the same time as I accepted this possibility (as well as the inarguable fact that I was very hungry and very tired, and that my eyes were apt to make mistakes in the descending darkness), I did not believe that either explanation was true. I believed very strongly, and I could not be swayed from this belief, that I had indeed seen—moving between the beams that had been strung across the path—the shape of a man. I left my spoon and the flour and the water I had yet to allow myself the pleasure of releasing, drop by drop, from the flask, and made my way to the adjacent house. My leg had healed slightly, though it was stiff still, as if frozen beneath the knee, so I could not move quickly. Still, I moved quickly enough to catch a second glimpse of the moving figure as it disappeared behind a fallen tree. It was no wonder I had managed to track him—I saw now that he was a very old man, that he moved half doubled over, painstakingly slow. My impression that he had been a ghost had no doubt been influenced by the fact that he was dressed entirely in white.

It is difficult for me now to say with what sort of caution I myself moved then, in the direction of the fallen tree behind which the old man had disappeared. What was I afraid of? What was left for me to lose in that ruined village over which, until just moments before, I had thought I'd had sole dominion? In truth, I had not thought past the last flask of water the already nearly empty cupboard contained. I had not thought past the immediate salvation that had presented itself to me in the form of a ruined village; of white flour, a severely limited supply of water, and a side of dried meat, which I had not yet had the stomach to touch. What would I do when the water was gone? When I had stirred the last of it—
forgoing the final surplus drop—and there was nothing at all? Over what would I maintain dominion then except precisely that nothing? What, therefore, could I claim dominion over now? And thus with what caution did I move, except with the caution of a doomed man toward his own death—finally away from dominion over anything at all?

But when I reached the collapsed tree—fallen crossways over the charred entryway to the adjacent house—and peered beyond it, it was not death that I saw, but only an old man. Bent nearly double—perched on a fallen beam just beyond the barrier the fallen tree imposed. He did not see me at first, but instead stared straight ahead—toward what, I didn't know. Nor, indeed, given the blankness of his gaze, if he saw anything at all. I waited for a moment, my ears perked like a dog's, listening for any indication that I was in the company of any more strangers whose presence I had just as equally failed to anticipate. But no, there was just the familiar sound of the empty air through the broken limbs of the tree and collapsed beams of the houses—which, exposed at various angles to the approaching wind, created a series of obstacles it overcame in a single breath. After some time passed like this, and I was certain the man was indeed alone and indeed a man, I approached, extending my open hand in an expression of—I knew not what. But then, as I continued my approach, as I continued to extend my empty hand at that particular angle toward the old man, suddenly—I knew.
Peace
, said my hand—and I knew in that moment, for the first time, the true meaning of that word, and also why it proves so difficult to say among living men. I had, and expected, nothing. And immediately as the old man turned, sensing my approach, he knew and accepted that. We were two men, with nothing to give, and nothing that could be taken away, and so we sat down next to one another, side by side, and were at peace.