Winter's End Read online

  “Let’s get off the road,” Bart said. “I’m sick of the way they’re staring at us.”

  Late in the afternoon they caught up with a horse-drawn cart going up a stony path. A small, swarthy man was leading the horse by its halter. Milena, whose feet were beginning to feel sore in spite of her boots, put on her prettiest smile and asked, “Could you give us a lift?”

  The farmer stopped, grudgingly, and let them step in over the side rail.

  Inside the cart a woman of about sixty, wearing a coarse woolly cap on her head and a black apron, was sitting on a sack of potatoes. She greeted them with a smile, and then her small, deep blue eyes rested on Milena and stayed there, the intensity of her gaze at odds with the rest of her rather ordinary appearance.

  “Do you . . . do you know me, ma’am?” Milena asked uneasily.

  “Acourse I knows you,” the woman replied. Then, very quietly, she began to hum a tune with her mouth closed. Her voice was unsteady, and it was hard to follow the melody, but you could tell that as she sang, the woman was hearing another voice, a beautiful one, and was trying to imitate it.

  Milena got goosebumps. “That . . . that’s very pretty. Where did you hear that tune?”

  The woman ignored the question and went on humming dreamily. It was as if, looking at Milena, she were looking inside herself at the same time, seeing her own memories. She was concentrating on every note.

  “Who sang that song?” Milena persisted when she had finished.

  “Why, you!” the woman said. “We had your records at home, we did. A shame it were . . . Oh, it were a crying shame what happened.”

  The cart stopped just then. The farmer unhooked the chain keeping the tailgate in place and flung it abruptly back. “You two get out! We’re here!”

  “Wait a moment,” said Milena. “I just wanted to ask this lady —”

  “There ain’t nowt to ask!” said the farmer, pushing the woman toward the house. “I never should’ve took you two up. You clear out of here, quick!”

  They spent the next two nights in ruined houses. The walls protected them from the wind and the cold well enough to let them snatch a few hours’ sleep. As soon as they were up, they went on walking north. Hungry as they were, they tried to save their provisions as far as possible. They drank the icy water of mountain streams from their cupped hands.

  At midmorning on the third day, the mist suddenly lifted, and they were amazed to see the unreal beauty of the landscape surrounding them. Green moorland stretched out ahead, sprinkled with gray rocks and small, sparkling lakes. Far away the snowy peaks of the mountains rose to the sky. Sharp air filled their lungs.

  “Oh, my God!” exclaimed Milena. Words failed her and she couldn’t say any more.

  “This is freedom,” Bartolomeo breathed. “What do you think of it now?”

  “Oh — not bad!” she replied after a moment. “Let’s celebrate.”

  She went up to a rock and sat down on it. When he was about to sit beside her, she pushed him away. “No, go farther off. Like that, yes.”

  She straightened her back, put her hands on her knees, and took a deep breath.

  “A poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree;

  Sing willow, willow, willow!”

  From the moment when she sang the first notes, the air around her seemed to be transfigured. Her pure voice spun invisible threads between earth and sky.

  “With his hand in his bosom

  And his head upon his knee;

  O willow, willow, willow, willow!”

  Milena sang effortlessly, her eyebrows drawn slightly together, her eyes closed. She didn’t open them until the last vibration of the last note had died away.

  Bart, entranced, didn’t dare break the silence. His throat was tight with emotion.

  “Did you like it?” asked Milena.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I liked it a lot. And I liked the little lines it gives you between the top of your nose and your forehead.”

  “I know it does. They come as soon as I open my mouth to sing. I can’t seem to make them go away.”

  He came over to her again and sat down on the rock beside her. “Where did you learn that song?”

  “I feel as if I’ve always known it. I must have learned it when I was very small. From my mother, I suppose. I can understand that now. I know about twenty songs by heart, and I’ve always sung them to myself, first in the orphanage, then at the boarding school . . . always. I can sing them to myself in silence and hear them in my head. Sometimes I choose one and decide to sing it properly — I mean out loud.”

  “What makes you decide to do that?”

  “I don’t really know. The right moment. The right person.”

  “I see — and was this time the right moment or the right person?”

  “Take a guess!”

  She took his hand as they started walking again. It was that evening that they decided not to go any farther.

  The mountain refuge hut, in the shelter of a group of trees, stood just on the line reached by the first snows. The door was unlocked. The single room had a bunk bed pushed against the back wall, a huge fireplace, a table, two benches and a cupboard cobbled together out of rickety planks. They lit a fire and ate some of their provisions. Then they talked all night. They talked feverishly until they felt exhausted, and by the small hours of the morning, they had come to their decision.

  Bart found a pair of rusty scissors in a drawer and sharpened them at length on a hard stone. Milena sat astride a wicker chair in front of the fire with her head facing the back of it and bent her neck, “Go on.”

  Hesitantly, Bartolomeo slipped a heavy handful of blond hair between his fingers. “Are you sure? You won’t hold it against me later?”

  “Look, I’m the one asking you to do it. We know we must go down again, and I don’t fancy having three-quarters of the population take me for a ghost. Go on, Bart.”

  The first snip of the scissors gave them both a pang. After that Bart set to work as well as he could, sending locks of blond hair flying around them. Soon the feet of the chair were surrounded by a silky, golden carpet. When Milena had nothing left on her head but a short, untidy boyish haircut, he put the scissors down.

  “All right?” he asked, going around to kneel down in front of her.

  Milena’s face was covered with tears. “It’s hard,” she said sadly. “I’ve had long hair since I was four. About the age when I learned the songs. It’s as if you’d cut my arms off.”

  “But your hair will grow again. Don’t cry.”

  “What do I look like?”

  “I don’t know . . . well, like Helen Dormann, maybe.”

  She found the strength to laugh. Seeing her like that, her face tear-stained, her eyes reddened and her hair shorn, Bartolomeo Casal thought he had never seen such a beautiful woman in his life. A woman, he told himself, not a girl.

  They took off their school coats, threw them on the fire, and watched them burn until there was nothing left but the charred buttons. Then they went out to the little lake nearby. It was perfectly circular, reflecting the deep green of the spruce trees surrounding it. The silence and calm were absolute.

  “First to say ‘This is the first morning in the world’ has lost!” said Milena, laughing.

  “This is the first morning in the world!” shouted Bart, and he raced for the bank. Stripping off his clothes quickly, he plunged into the icy water. He swam fast, churning up the water with his arms and legs.

  “Come on! Come on in!” he called when he had reached the middle of the lake.

  She hesitated, and then undressed too and went to the edge.

  “Come on in!” called Bart again.

  She couldn’t help it: she shouted out loud and flung herself into the water. It felt like having a thousand red-hot needles pierce her body. They met in the middle of the lake, choking, shaking with laughter, unable to utter a word.

  When they were back on the bank again, the air seemed bitter cold.
They ran to the refuge and piled the fire high with dry branches, all the logs that were left, and their own clothes, which they had carried back under their arms. The wood crackled, sending up sparks, and then the flames rose high. They pulled a mattress in front of the fireplace and slipped under the covers. Their skin, warm from the fire, was still cold in patches from the icy lake. Some drops of water were still running down Milena’s white back. They held each other close, kissed and embraced, amazed to find themselves here naked, body against body for the first time, without any fears at all.

  Much later, when they woke up, the sun was high in the sky. They considered the clothes that Martha had packed in the bag for them. Bart’s pants were four inches too short, and they had to let the hems down to lengthen the legs. Milena was decked out in a dress that could have belonged to her grandmother and a black coat with a fur collar.

  “Just look at me!” She laughed, pointing to her hair, which resembled a recently harvested wheatfield. But Bartolomeo’s eyes said, You could wear anything at all; nothing would make you ugly.

  “Anyway,” he said out loud, “if any dog-men get up here, they’ll find themselves faced with quite a problem. Our trail ends in this mountain refuge. Sorry, gentlemen, but we’re on our way back down.”

  The idea of escaping by crossing the mountains had soon seemed to them unbearable. Their own parents had fled in the past, but at least they had fought before they ran away. They had defied the Phalange. And some people were surely still ready to do the same. Like the woman in the horse-drawn cart who had said it was a shame. They had decided last night they had to find those people and join them. Brute force was obviously on the barbarians’ side, but how could they not believe that the precious memory of life before the Phalange didn’t still live on, lying low in people’s hearts? There must be embers that could be rekindled before darkness covered the world entirely. In their excited conversation at the refuge, Bart and Milena had worked out that there must be a link between the rekindling of that fire and Eva-Maria Bach’s voice. The barbarians had silenced it, and Bart knew how, but it now vibrated on in Milena’s throat. Perhaps anything was still possible.

  And Milena, who had only just found her mother’s trail, couldn’t resign herself to giving up so quickly. Every step she took northward was a denial of her heart, a denial of her wish to know more about the woman who had been so like her.

  What was more, they had said to each other, how could they leave Catharina Pancek and Basil behind them, imprisoned in detention cells? Their sacrifices called for something better than just hiding.

  Bart couldn’t get the secrets revealed by Basil out of his mind. After all, the terrifying Van Vlyck was only a man, and an order from him would surely be enough to open the doors of all the boarding schools. They had to find the man and make him give that order. How? They had no idea, but at least they would have tried. They’d have fought back.

  It was with this crazy hope that they had made up their minds: they would stop trying to escape and go to the capital city in the south of the country. Neither Bartolomeo nor Milena had ever been there.

  They walked for a long way, came to the river, stole a small boat tied up to a dock, and let themselves be carried downstream, stopping only to sleep and stretch their legs. The great river seemed ready to protect them, offering them its soft murmuring and its slow waters. It cradled them.

  “Sing,” Bartolomeo sometimes said, and Milena let the lines appear on the little patch of skin between her nose and her forehead for him.

  In the middle of the third night, they passed under a bridge. The clear sky was sprinkled with stars. Bart recognized the four stone horsemen.

  “Wake up, Milena! It’s our little town. Look, there’s your school!”

  Milena, sleeping under a blanket at the bottom of the boat, put her chin above it and sat up to see better. “You’re right. It feels funny going under the bridge, when I’ve walked over it so often. Look, there are people crossing it now! They look like students from the schools with those coats. What on earth are they doing here at this time of night?”

  Sure enough, two figures were hurrying toward the hill. The first seemed to be carrying something heavy on his back, perhaps a sack. The second, who was a little smaller, no doubt a girl, was following close behind. But as the current swept the boat on, they were unable to see any more.

  Pastor got out of the bus in a very bad temper. Three of his five dogs had been vomiting for half the journey, and they’d had to drive with the windows open to let in some fresh air. The other passengers, already terrified by the presence of their strange traveling companions, had been freezing cold all night, and couldn’t sleep. The horrible, sour stench made them gag. The other two dog-men, Cheops and Teti, weren’t much better than their comrades. Green in the face, they had been belching disgustingly the whole time, not even bothering to wipe away the saliva slobbering down their chops. Only Ramses had behaved decently. He was sitting beside Mills, and they had both managed to sleep, heads close together like a pair of lovers.

  “Told you so,” muttered Pastor, kicking the wheel of the bus. “These creatures don’t travel well. Amenophis threw up all over my jacket. I’ll be stinking right through the hunt.”

  “No worse than usual, I can assure you,” said Mills dryly.

  When Pastor asked the bus driver why he hadn’t reported the two fugitives last week, he said one of the consolers had told him to “leave them alone,” and he for one didn’t go asking for trouble. The big dog-handler, who had a bump on his head to remind him of an unpleasant experience, had no difficulty in understanding the man’s meaning. They went into the café, where the manager greeted them with a sleepy “Morning.” He confirmed that yes, he had certainly seen the young couple. They’d been sitting at that table by the window over there. Where had they gone after that? No idea. Pastor ordered a large basin of coffee for “his dogs.”

  “Your dogs?” asked the surprised manager. “Dogs taken to drinking coffee these days, have they?”

  “Mine have, yes,” said Pastor, jerking his head in the direction of the stooping figures visible beyond the curtain over the glazed door.

  “Oh, I . . . yes, I see,” stammered the café manager, and he went off with his fat face shaking.

  Less than ten minutes later, the two men and their pack were off along the mountain road. Mykerinos had sniffed Milena’s scarf together with Chephren and Ramses, and he led the others with his nose raised to the wind. Mills had given the other three dogs — Cheops, Amenophis, and Teti — Bartolomeo’s boot to smell again, and they too immediately set off.

  “Good,” said the police chief. “They went along the road on foot. We can take shortcuts and save time.”

  Although the two young people had a head start, he didn’t doubt for a moment that he would catch up with them before they were over the mountains. He had seen the same thing happen more than ten times before: fugitives lost their way, suffered injuries, gave way to exhaustion. Sooner or later they were always tracked down, and then . . . well, official instructions might be to bring them back alive, but Mills had never been able to resist the dubious pleasure of taking a different line. He and Pastor had known each other so long that they didn’t need to discuss it when the time came. Mills would merely nod, and the big dog-handler understood and whispered a single word into the ear of one of his beasts. A word of just two syllables, very simple, but pitiless and deadly: “Attack!” The sight of the kill disgusted Pastor, and he put his jacket over his head rather than watch. When it was all over, he called his dogs to heel and congratulated them. By then he couldn’t even recognize the bodies. Mills, on the other hand, made himself watch to the very end, with his stomach heaving but his eyes wide open. All he had to say in the report was that the fugitives had been armed, their behavior had been threatening, and the police party had been forced to defend themselves.

  They started along the uphill path on their right. After a hundred yards, Pastor was sweating profusely
. “Bombardone,” he muttered, “I’m telling you, just so’s you know, this is my very last hunt. You’ll never get me going up this damn mountain with you again.”

  “You’ve said that before, and you were always right there with us next time. You love the hunt — admit it!”

  “I hate it. Anyway, I’m retiring in six months’ time. You know I am. My wife and I are off to live in the south. You know what kind of pet we’ll keep then?”

  “No.”

  “A cat! A nice, big, neutered kitty-cat who’ll sit on my knee and purr. Ha, ha, ha!”

  Three hundred yards lower down the mountain, Helen and Milos heard Pastor’s laughter ringing through the air, echoing back from the rocks. They stopped.

  “If he laughs like that often enough, we’re in no danger of losing them!” said Helen.

  It had been a hard night for them both. They had taken Emily’s advice to leave their school coats at her house and caught the same bus that Bart and Milena had taken a week before. They sat at the back to attract as little notice as possible. But there had been a terrifying moment as they left: a massively built man had stationed himself in the middle of the road to stop the driver, who opened the bus door. The huge man had gotten in, followed by the alarming pack of dog-men.

  “Don’t be afraid, ladies and gentlemen,” Mills had boomed at the frightened passengers. “They won’t hurt you.”

  “That’s right, don’t worry,” Pastor had added. “They obey my slightest word. In theory.”

  And he had made his dog-men sit in the empty seats.

  Two of them, addressed as Cheops and Teti by their master, sat down just in front of Helen and Milos. From behind they were an intriguing sight, with flat skulls that seemed to have no room in them for any brain.

  Then the unhappy animals’ ordeal began. The stink of their vomit, the constant stops, and the icy air coming in through the windows had made the journey seem endless, but Milos had a chance to notice something that he thought could come in very useful later. Apart from the dog-man sleeping against Mills’s shoulder, the others seemed to obey only one man: their master, the handler whom Mills called Pastor. The police chief had been obliged to use him as a go-between several times when he wanted the pack to do something: tell them this, make them do that, and so on.