he kept under the floorboards his cabin. “Just in case,” he said and clamped his hand over my mouth. I could feel his callous palm against my lips, smell the pipe tobacco and old-fashioned soap on his fingers: “Keep our secret"—and I had. What a marvel . . . the massive pull of the continuity of civilized life.
The trail dipped lower into the dangerous valley; instinctively, I softened my footfall. All the native creatures of my brain (hopes, dreams, worries, expectations) crouched like hunted animals at the edge of a clearing. We marched in silence, listened.
Autumn came: the ground turned soft and gold in the sunlight; the trees were beautifully black and skeletal in the cold rain. Around a damp, smoky campfire, we helped each other to picture life in the city. Soldiers longed for holiday cake, for the spectacle of Independence Day, now, by our reckoning, under way. They made lewd wagers about the quality and quantity of young women still at large in the city.
But the longer I spent in the Enemy's Territory, the more I preferred to be alone, to sit quietly among the trees, awed by the beauty of the copper-black twigs against the powder-blue sky. At first, I attacked these unacceptable feelings with logic: the Enemy was trying to get a foothold in my thoughts. I reminded myself daily how much I detested his filthy customs, his sneaky nature, his simple-minded, worshipful attitude toward the trees, toward the animals of the world, an attitude that grants the unthinking routines of beasts something of a human characteristic. I reminded myself that the Enemy would love nothing more than to kick in the door of my family's house and murder us one by one, to shove aside our butchered bodies and take down the dinner plates, throw the cutlery into a heap on the table, raid our cupboards, tell his blood-weaned sons a long black lie about how my land and my city and my house had come to be theirs, the house they had stolen, the house in which they were now taking their ease and telling their tall tales, until the true story of my life was replaced by the Enemy's. My wife, our son, our life, our joys and sorrows . . . all of it forgotten, forever.
I hated the violence an enemy necessitated in my heart, when I felt that we were a people devoted to other people, to family life. When I opened my pack, I sometimes feared I would find my wife's head, sawed crudely from her body by the Enemy and snuck into my possession, as a way of destroying my mind. Or I feared I would stumble upon the body of my son, impaled on a broken branch along the ridge, or that I would wake to find that all of my fellow soldiers had been quietly knifed in their sleep.
I had always been able to summon scenes of incredible brutality effortlessly, and though I attributed these scenes to the Enemy, it struck me now that these scenes were entirely mine. In my daydreams, the Enemy thirsted for my blood, sacrificed his brothers, his sisters, his own children, in gruesome and ruthless military tactics—the unbelievable bloodlust of an enemy I had never seen. And an unseen enemy the mind must construct entirely from itself, from the raw material of its own desires and fantasies. I frightened myself.
Winter came. The earth was a white and flawless sheet: the muddy, rutted ground we had patrolled and patrolled suddenly pure, as if never trod upon. It was beautiful. I wandered into the immediate woods to be alone. I propped my rifle in the snow and sat upon an ice-cold rock to rest. The woods were still, bright, and silent—my mind wandered; like a man suddenly unchained from the wall of a prison yard, my mind set out full of life and hope in the direction of its own concerns. I sighed heavily in the winter air, watched the mist of my breath travel. Bright red berries thrived on the black limbs of the snow-capped trees. I tilted my head back to take in the startling heights of the evergreens.
Then I heard the devastating crunch of one of my fellow soldiers
The trail dipped lower into the dangerous valley; instinctively, I softened my footfall. All the native creatures of my brain (hopes, dreams, worries, expectations) crouched like hunted animals at the edge of a clearing. We marched in silence, listened.
Autumn came: the ground turned soft and gold in the sunlight; the trees were beautifully black and skeletal in the cold rain. Around a damp, smoky campfire, we helped each other to picture life in the city. Soldiers longed for holiday cake, for the spectacle of Independence Day, now, by our reckoning, under way. They made lewd wagers about the quality and quantity of young women still at large in the city.
But the longer I spent in the Enemy's Territory, the more I preferred to be alone, to sit quietly among the trees, awed by the beauty of the copper-black twigs against the powder-blue sky. At first, I attacked these unacceptable feelings with logic: the Enemy was trying to get a foothold in my thoughts. I reminded myself daily how much I detested his filthy customs, his sneaky nature, his simple-minded, worshipful attitude toward the trees, toward the animals of the world, an attitude that grants the unthinking routines of beasts something of a human characteristic. I reminded myself that the Enemy would love nothing more than to kick in the door of my family's house and murder us one by one, to shove aside our butchered bodies and take down the dinner plates, throw the cutlery into a heap on the table, raid our cupboards, tell his blood-weaned sons a long black lie about how my land and my city and my house had come to be theirs, the house they had stolen, the house in which they were now taking their ease and telling their tall tales, until the true story of my life was replaced by the Enemy's. My wife, our son, our life, our joys and sorrows . . . all of it forgotten, forever.
I hated the violence an enemy necessitated in my heart, when I felt that we were a people devoted to other people, to family life. When I opened my pack, I sometimes feared I would find my wife's head, sawed crudely from her body by the Enemy and snuck into my possession, as a way of destroying my mind. Or I feared I would stumble upon the body of my son, impaled on a broken branch along the ridge, or that I would wake to find that all of my fellow soldiers had been quietly knifed in their sleep.
I had always been able to summon scenes of incredible brutality effortlessly, and though I attributed these scenes to the Enemy, it struck me now that these scenes were entirely mine. In my daydreams, the Enemy thirsted for my blood, sacrificed his brothers, his sisters, his own children, in gruesome and ruthless military tactics—the unbelievable bloodlust of an enemy I had never seen. And an unseen enemy the mind must construct entirely from itself, from the raw material of its own desires and fantasies. I frightened myself.
Winter came. The earth was a white and flawless sheet: the muddy, rutted ground we had patrolled and patrolled suddenly pure, as if never trod upon. It was beautiful. I wandered into the immediate woods to be alone. I propped my rifle in the snow and sat upon an ice-cold rock to rest. The woods were still, bright, and silent—my mind wandered; like a man suddenly unchained from the wall of a prison yard, my mind set out full of life and hope in the direction of its own concerns. I sighed heavily in the winter air, watched the mist of my breath travel. Bright red berries thrived on the black limbs of the snow-capped trees. I tilted my head back to take in the startling heights of the evergreens.
Then I heard the devastating crunch of one of my fellow soldiers
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