I Live With You (21 page)

I always enjoy the times when a man is recovering. I stay near the hut as much as I can. (The kitchen garden gets well tended.) I like it when he’s hurting too much for me to
really
get to know him so I can make up anything I want. I can pretend he’s on my side and we’re friends. Actually I pretend we’re lovers. We’re all starved for males here, though we don’t talk about it.

The prisoners are always wary—flinching at every noise or fast move. At night they groan and cry out. I make sure it’s quiet for them. My hut is set well back, away from the rest of the village. I do sing. I think a woman singing soothes them. Bathing helps, too. I bathe mine every few days. They always fall in love with me but it’s not real love. Being cared for after all that torture, makes them grateful. Some call me an angel. Of course later on, on the terraces, they change their minds.

The general mostly seems to listen… to the birds… to the sheep and goats when they’re brought in to be penned for the night…. (Mine are penned up at a neighbors for the time being and my daughter sleeps at friend’s.) I suspect he’s trying to figure out where he is.

He doesn’t talk but I haven’t talked either. I like it that way. When he starts talking I’ll have to face who he really is but for now I can daydream all I want. I pretend the war is over and here’s my husband, come back to stay.

Sometimes it’s right when the prisoners are getting better that they have the worst nightmares. This time I can’t wake him up. I stir the fire so I can see, then I shake him hard, and harder, but I must have hurt him more. He thinks he’s being tortured again. He lashes out at me. I shy away and bang my head against the stone fireplace. He won’t stop fighting. I don’t know what to do. Finally I lie over his shaking body and hug him. Hold him down. Right away he stops yelling and puts his arms around me and I feel, yet again, the lack of my man. I even think, serves my husband right. (I’d not, ever before, even been tempted to lie down on top of a prisoner no matter how he was yelling, but this one is my choice.)

He runs his hands up and down my back, pulls me tight against him … as if I’m his salvation. I feel his erection. I forget… that he’s a prisoner and I, his overseer—though he doesn’t know that yet. Perhaps he thinks I’m his rescuer. (They often think that in the beginning and are surprised when I, wearing my pistol, bring them to the fields to work.) He kisses me. First my forehead and cheeks (I feel his scratchy unshaven jaw against mine) and, then desperately, he kisses my lips (as if only my kisses could save him from more torture). I let him. His breathing …. mine also … is ragged. He trembles more than he’d done back when he was yelling. I do, too. He holds me against him by my buttocks. I let him. It’s been so long since I’d slept with my husband—or anybody.

But then I think how all I know of this man I’ve made up myself in my daydreams. Maybe I don’t even like him. I probably don’t really want to do it. I’d be in big trouble if anything happened. And do I want yet another half-breed of the enemy roaming about? Do I want my daughter taken from me—and me, thrown out of my village?

I pull myself away. I begin to cry… out of fear of what
I
would do, not what
he’d
do. He lets me go right away, so fast I feel abandoned even though I’m the one that stopped it. I’m on my knees beside him but I turn my back so he won’t see me cry. He’s still not well, but he sits up, groaning—I suppose in pain, and puts his hand on my shoulder. I’m tempted to turn around and let myself get hugged. He keeps saying how sorry he is and how good I’ve been to him all this time and how it won’t happen again. He seems to think it’s all his fault. I know I had a part in it. I say, “I tried to calm you but you kept shouting. I couldn’t wake you.” That’s my excuse but it’s a lie. I wanted to be close to somebody male again.

I build up the fire, and we sit on the pad before it and talk for the first time and I like him—more and more. Before, it was just my made up person that I liked, but now I like the real man. That scares me.

He’s the one, now and then, that reaches over to stir the fire or put on another log. I feel…. But of course, I picked him out on purpose to fall in love with. I hope he’s not as nice a person as he seems.

He asks me where we are. I say I’m not allowed to tell, but there’s a good view of Basin Mountain. I say that on purpose. I know he’ll know. He asks, is he a prisoner? When I say, yes, he says he thought so. Then he thanks me for treating him so well all this time. He asks my name. We’re not supposed to tell them, but I do. Mara. And I ask his. We’re not supposed to ask that either. We’re supposed to name them anything we feel like that’s short and easy to remember. (Sometimes their names are peculiar and hard to pronounce. I call all mine Don. A name I don’t care anything about.) He’s Sebastian. He says again how sorry he is. How I don’t have to worry, he’ll never do any such thing again.

All of a sudden I’m worried about my freckles, my chopped off hair …. Do I have even one thing to wear that’s remotely female? And my calloused hands! How can my touch feel gentle and womanly? Then I think: What am I doing? At my age? At
my
age!

I could have talked ’till dawn, but I’m feeling so strange. And I’m still shaky. I know I won’t sleep, but I have to leave the firelight that flickers over his face, that sparkles in his eyes when he turns to look at me. Even with those old clothes I dressed him in, he has a kind of dignity. And when a sad man smiles …!

I have to think. I tell him we should sleep. Of course after I go to bed I neither sleep nor think.

My room is large. There’s a place for my loom. My bed is away from the fireplace on a kind of bench. It’s behind the table. (When there are guests they have to sit on my bed to eat.) I’m far enough across the room to feel safely hidden from him but I can hear the rustling of his every move, his grunts and groans.

In the morning he seems much improved. He sits up. Stretches. I think to wrap the blanket around his shoulders but I don’t dare get close. I don’t even dare go see to the fire. He does it. Things have changed between us. When I hand him the breakfast gruel I don’t look at him. Out of the corner of my eye I see him glance at me, as if to ask something. I eat at the table in the far corner by my bed. He eats on the floor by the fire. We don’t speak. We didn’t speak before either, but now it seems self-conscious. I’m in a hurry to leave. Besides, the turnips need putting away in the underground bins before the frost. I grab my hoe and go out without washing our bowls and without saying goodbye.

But I don’t go up to our field. I stay close and work in the kitchen garden. I have this feeling that I have to protect him. What if the other women knew he was a general and thought he was too dangerous to have around?

I leave the hoe and get down on my hands and knees. Working like this has always helped me when I felt upset.

Then … here he is, working beside me. I hadn’t heard him coming. Again, we don’t talk, but this time the silence is companionable. My birds warble. The donkey watches from over the fence. The sun warms us.

When we go in for lunch, and he’s walking beside me, I see he’s a smaller man than I expected—not much taller than I am. But it’s too late now, I like him even so.

Inside, I see he’s washed the bowls and put them on the shelf. Rolled the sleeping pad and stood it against the wall. He’s straightened out my bench-bed, too. When …
when!
has anyone ever, ever, ever done such things for me? I have to turn around and go right back outside. I wish there was a place where I could be alone. But there’s nothing to do out there except take a few big breaths and go back in.

I fix him bread and lard, but I can’t eat. Thank goodness he doesn’t say anything or look at me.

The minute I take him to work on the terrace, my daughter will have to come back. That’s the rule. You can’t hide things from children. They see right through you. I don’t want to take him to the fields but if the weather turns too cold the turnips will rot.

I’ll go up by myself. I can’t do much alone but I’d get some done. I have to get away and try to forget what I’ve started. I leave without any lunch. I’ll nibble outer cabbage-leaves. (The main part of the cabbages have to go to the army.)

All the fields are narrow terraces, one on top of the other. Mine is the highest of those still used. It’s a hard climb. My general will have to be in fairly good shape just to get up here.

Always, once I get there, I turn around and waste more time than I should, looking at the view. I feel renewed just looking. You can see all the way to headquarters. Farther on, you can see the flashes of the mortars, though you can only hear them when the wind is right.

When you look in the opposite direction, up to the snowy peaks, past the old, unused terraces, abandoned when the men left for the war, there’s an old castle so high you can just make it out. There are lights up there. They say it’s haunted. Once a woman went up. They found her at the bottom of the cliff, shot five times.

When I finally let myself climb down from my field, I’m so tired I don’t think I could blush if I wanted to. I stop where my daughter is staying before I come to my own hut. She rushes into my arms shouting, “When can I come back? What’s he like? Is he going to be a good one?” I say, “Soon as he’s a little better,” and, “I’m not sure if he’s a good one yet.”

He’s asleep when I get back. I don’t see anything changed this time, but I’ll bet he’s been snooping. Things don’t look quite right but I couldn’t say why. I sit down over tea, to rest for a while and look at him. He’s sleeping as though exhausted still, curled up and covered with the blanket. I’ll not wake him by stirring the fire. I’ll use the propane burner to heat the grease to fry the finches.

It’s the smell of frying birds that wakes him. I lay two places at the table. He gets up, is about to sit down, then hesitates, asks, “Is it allowed?”

Of course it’s not, but I say, “Yes.” And then I realize I can’t do it when my daughter comes back. “That is, until my daughter comes.”

“You have a daughter.”

I say, “And a husband.”

I see him hesitate with half a bird in his mouth. He chews more slowly, thinking.

I tell him that when I take him out to the field, I’ll have to bring my pistol or else the women will wonder. He says he understands.

I always like nights in front of the fire, making things or repairing things. That little goats-wool cap of his won’t be much help up here. I start on a wide brimmed hat.

That night it happens again—he yells, but this time I manage to wake him without too much trouble. I hold him as he calms down. Then he sits up beside me and we hold each other. This time it’s companionable. At first. By now we know each other better. He says, “It’s going to be all right.” But then he’s kissing me again. Suddenly he stops. And says it, too. “Stop me!”

But I don’t want to. I don’t care what happens.

We fall asleep in each other’s arms, warm by the fire. I’m thinking, he’s right, from now on, everything is going to be fine.

I wake when he brings me tea the next morning. I can tell it’s late. I pop up. “I haven’t time for tea. Did my daughter come by?”

“I told her you were tired. She looked in at you. She wanted to wake you but I told her not to. I’m coming to help you. You were so exhausted yesterday.”

“But when my daughter sees you on the terrace she’ll have to come back home.”

“I want to help. Isn’t that what I’m for?”

My cheeks are scratched from his needing a shave. I wonder if it’ll show and the women will all know what happened.

“I have to take my pistol.”

“I know.”

He still limps, (they had torn out toenails), but he climbs to my terrace with no trouble. At the top we do what I always do, look down on the village and the switchbacks and then headquarters, all laid out as if a map.

Below us, here and there, prisoners and women work on the terraces. One woman, one prisoner, one donkey to a terrace. Here and there a child helps out.

Then we turn around and look up. Above, on the old deserted terraces, are the sheep, and above them, on the ground too steep even for terraces, are the goats. I wave to my daughter. She’s hardly more than a red dot. She waves back like crazy, even does a little dance. She knows a man on our terrace means she can come home.

He says, “Is that High Peak outpost? I’ve not seen it before. Looks to be a day’s climb.”

“I suppose. We don’t go there. There’s lights up there at night.”

He looks at it as if thinking about it, as if judging the trail up, then turns and looks down one more time as if memorizing everything, and then we get to work.

That night I’m happy even with my daughter here. She talks and he talks back. She even asks him what they call him. First he says, “I told you, Sebastian.” She says, “No, I mean when you were little, like they call me Sisi though my name is Simone.” He says, “Basti.”

Sisi says, “I knew it!” though how could she?

I love to see a sad man throw back his head and laugh.

She says, “Shouldn’t you sleep outside by the door like you’re supposed to?”

He says, “You’re right,” and gets the blanket and gets ready to go out, but she starts to cry. “I didn’t mean you should do it. I want you to be warm in here with us.”

“We’ll give him the bench,” I say before she has a chance to say how nice and warm she’ll be sleeping with us both. Is she too young to know we shouldn’t?

He slaughters a sheep for us. We leave parts to simmer as we go up to the field. Sisi goes on, up higher with the goats. Of course we have to share the mutton. You can’t butcher a sheep and not have everybody know about it. That night we give Sebastian the head in broth, all to himself. I tell Sisi not to tell anybody he got the best part.

I like to see a strong man struggling with the plough in a way I couldn’t do. He’s good at it, too. He works like a peasant. I ask him how he knows … he, a general … all the things an ordinary man would know, plowing, butchering, and such. He says he
is
an ordinary man. He says he became a general in the field.

He still has nightmares. I think he was tortured more than the men I usually have. Since he’s a general, he probably knew things. When he yells, I rush to the bench to wake him. Sisi starts to cry. She only stops when I tell her to come and help me comfort him.