Winter's End (39 page)

“Yes,” Milena agreed. Gerlinda, in tears, had miraculously found her again in the excited crowd.

There were no trams running, and no cars on the streets. The three of them raced down small side roads, Bartolomeo in the lead, the two young women following him. Making their way through the Old Town, they reached the square outside the arena fifteen minutes later, out of breath. To their surprise, there was turmoil there already. The crowd was a mixture of a number of horse-men, people from the city, and gladiators looking as if they had come from another age, bare to the waist or in their shirtsleeves despite the bitter cold. The two halves of the great gate were closed, but a dozen horse-men were advancing on it in single
file, an enormous beam found on a nearby building site under their arms.

“Out of the way!” they shouted. “We’re going to break the gate down!”

A space opened out ahead of them, and they charged the gate at a run. It was made of solid oak and groaned at the impact. They moved thirty feet back and ran at it again.

“They’ll never do it,” said Bart.

A gladiator with a stolid face, head shaved, was standing close to him. He was still holding his sword and looking around him, dazed, as if unable to understand where he was.

“Has there already been fighting in there?” Bart asked him.

“Yeah.”

“A boy called Milos — did you see him?”

“Dunno.”

“How did you get out here?”

“Small gate around the back. Don’t have any tobacco, do you?”

“N-no,” stammered Bart, taken aback by this unexpected question, and then he set off to go around the building, with Milena and Gerlinda behind him.

There was indeed an exit at the back, a narrow gate already under the control of a group of horse-men and insurgents holding weapons. They were letting out the gladiators and ordinary spectators but seizing any members of the Phalange who tried to escape by mingling with the crowd.

As she reached the place, Milena was not expecting another experience as strange as the one she had just shared with Bart on the Royal Bridge. Yet an extraordinary thing happened: a powerful man with a red beard, wearing a heavy overcoat, came up to the gate, his head lowered, in the vain hope of passing unrecognized. Fingers pointed his way at once.

“Van Vlyck! That’s Van Vlyck!”

Two horse-men seized him firmly, and a third handcuffed him. He seemed to be demoralized and put up no resistance. As they were about to lead him off, a woman’s voice rose in the crowd.

“Wait!”

Milena stood before him. They did not say a word, but simply stood there face-to-face.

Van Vlyck, mouth open, wild-eyed, stared at the girl, and one could guess that for him time had been wiped out. He saw before his eyes the one person he had ever loved, the woman for whom he had unhesitatingly sacrificed all that was best in his life, and whom in the end he had delivered up to the murderous Devils. She stood there younger and fairer than ever, fascinating, immortal. In this girl’s blue eyes he saw his devastated past and his dark future.

And Milena found that she could not hate him. In his eyes, as if in a magic mirror, she saw the image of her living mother.
I’m looking at the man who killed her,
she told herself, but the words did not get through to her mind.
I’m looking at the man
who . . . who loved her,
she thought instead,
the man who wept one evening fifteen years ago when he heard her singing in a little church in this city and who never got over it. I’m looking at a man who loved her to distraction, who looked at her as he’s looking at me now. . . .

And when Van Vlyck moved away, led off without ceremony by his horse-men guards and taking no notice of what was happening, it was as if he took away a living memory of the dead woman, a memory in the flesh that no photograph or recording could ever equal.

Milena felt shattered. It took her some time to return to reality, but a tremendous crash accompanied by shouts of triumph brought her out of her daze. Bartolomeo took her arm.

“The bar across the main gate has just given way, Milena — we can get in through it now!”

They ran back, still followed by the faithful and dogged Gerlinda. The battering ram had indeed broken the gate down, but those wanting to go in clashed with those in a hurry to get out, either gladiators or spectators who were ashamed of being there, and there was turmoil. The three young people managed to get through the crowd by dint of sheer determination. Bart shouted more than twenty times, “A boy of seventeen named Milos! Anyone seen him?”

No one replied. Milena even asked a gladiator with a face horribly mutilated by scars, standing proud as if a wild beast had once mauled him.

“Milos Ferenzy! A gladiator, seventeen years old! Was he in your camp? Do you know him?”

The man shook his head, looking dazed, and went on his way. Soon they gave up asking and climbed to the top of the tiers of seats, shouting as loud as they could, “Milos! Milos!”

Gradually, as the arena emptied, they came to the conclusion that their friend wasn’t there.

“He could be somewhere else in the building,” Milena suggested.

But it seemed unlikely. Why would he have hidden? He must have left, and they had missed seeing him; their paths had crossed.

They went along corridors at random, opening the doors of deserted cells to left and right. In the end they had gone all around the building and were back where they had started.

“Milos!” called Bart one last time.

His voice echoed under the vaulted ceiling and died away, leaving the place in total silence. As they were about to leave, Gerlinda pointed to the far end of a corridor.

“There’s stairs over there.”

They made for the staircase. Two worm-eaten steps were missing. Bart went up carefully in case any more collapsed under his weight. Halfway up, he stopped.

“Have you seen something?” asked Milena.

The young man disappeared from view without replying. She waited a few seconds and then,
hearing nothing, asked again, “Bart, have you seen something?”

There was still no answer. Fear was churning inside her. She went up in her own turn. A faint light came through a small opening in the mud-brick wall. Bart was kneeling beside a body curled up in a perfect curve like a sleeping cat. She made her way over on all fours and leaned against her lover’s shoulder.

Milos was wearing a dirty white shirt, its front soaked with blood. One of his feet, black with dirt, had been bleeding too. Unable to say a word, they looked at his tranquil face. It was like the face of a child of twelve.

“Milos . . .” murmured Bartolomeo.

“Oh, Helen!” cried Milena.

And with their heads close together, they mingled their silent tears.

Gerlinda’s frightened voice came up to them from below. She had stayed behind alone in the dark corridor. “Is there anything up there? Hey! Is there anything there?”

I
t seemed as if winter would never end that year. In the middle of March there were a few faintly springlike days, but then the cold returned. Deep snow fell again, as if Nature couldn’t shake off her covering of ice and frost. She might stretch and shift, but she always fell back under it, exhausted, frozen, defeated.

Helen spent a long time shut in her little room at Jahn’s Restaurant, coming out only for her shifts, doing her work like a robot. Milena and Dora, the only people she would see, did all they could to make her eat a little, forced her to talk, to wash and brush her hair. Twice they managed to take her for a walk beside the river.

At last, one afternoon, she said she wanted to go with Bartolomeo to see Basil in the hospital. The young horse-man’s wound had turned out to be much worse than it seemed at first, and he had a
perforated stomach, which caused him great pain. The hospital was on the hills, in a park planted with larch trees. Basil, looking sad and thin, was lying in a white room that didn’t seem the place for him at all. On this first visit Helen just listened to the two young men talking.

“Do you need anything?” Bart asked.

“Yes,” said Basil, fretfully. “I’d like to be able to eat real food — by mouth.”

As they left, Helen hugged him and told him she’d be back. She was good to her word and visited every day, first with Bartolomeo and then alone until Basil was discharged.

She had to go through the city to get to the hospital, and she took the tram to its terminus. The cheerfulness of the other passengers passed her by, but the final fall of the Phalange and the return of freedom had brought new light to their faces. Helen couldn’t understand it.
What do all these people have to smile about?
she asked herself.
Don’t they know my love is dead?
Then she walked through the park with her head bent to reach the hospital, where everyone came to know and greet her.

First she asked Basil about the boarding school. She got him to tell her about his first meeting with Milos the day when he gave Bart the letter and it all began. “Was it a fine evening?” she asked. “Or was it raining? What was Milos wearing?” Then she wanted to know about the training camp. What exactly did they eat there? Who shaved their heads? Who was the man he called Fulgur? Did they train
barefoot or in sandals? Basil had to tell her every detail and was impressed by the attention she paid. No one else had ever listened to him so intently before. He frowned with concentration as he tried to remember everything.

“Did Milos . . . did he ever talk to you about me?” she ventured to ask one day.

Basil might not be very clever, but his heart told him what to say. “You bet he did! Couldn’t stop!”

“Oh — what did he say?”

“Well . . . all sorts of things. Said you were very pretty.”

“What else?”

“All sorts of things, like I said. For instance . . . oh, I dunno . . . said you were very good at climbing ropes.”

And in this way, as the days and their conversations went on, they came to that last morning, the morning of the fights in the arena. First Basil told her about his own. He did so without much emotion until he had to describe the moment when he gave his opponent the death blow, at which point he unexpectedly burst into huge sobs.

“He — he wanted to kill me, see?” he stammered. “I didn’t want to die. Wanted to live.”

Helen bent over and stroked his forehead. “Don’t cry, Basil. You were only defending yourself — you know you were. It wasn’t your fault.”

“I know, but we horse-men, we don’t like killing folks.”

She left it there for that afternoon, but as soon
as she was at his bedside the next day, she began again. “Basil, tell me about Milos, please. I mean his last day in the arena. Tell me all you can about it. I need to know.”

For once the young horse-man began at the end. “It was Caius who killed him,” he said gravely. “I’m sure it was. He thought Milos was a cat.”

“A cat?”

Basil told her about Caius and his murderous insanity, and he went on to describe Milos’s fight with the old gladiator. Fascinated, Helen listened. Every word she heard was transformed into pictures of Milos alive. She clung to them with all her heart.

“Did you see it yourself?” she asked when Basil had finished. “He really spared his opponent?”

“Yes, I saw from behind the gate. I was just back from the infirmary. Fulgur had been sewing me up. Milos almost lay down on top of the guy; they talked, then Milos took his sword away. You have to be brave to do a thing like that! Then there was the battering ram at the gate, and after that it was all chaotic. I didn’t see him again, and my stomachache was terrible. I wonder what he was doing there at the end of the corridor — Milos, I mean. Everyone was running for it, and he went back. . . . Maybe he was looking for me.”

Helen nodded.

“I’m sure that was it, Basil. He was looking for you. You deserved it.”

As May approached, winter finally retreated. The sky was full of migrant birds returning, and the sun came out, warming everyone. Helen felt the claws of grief that clutched her heart relax their hold slightly. She went out more, caught herself laughing at Dora’s amusing remarks and the jokes the others made at work. Slowly her love of life was coming back with a light and hesitant touch. It felt like she was breaking out of the prison of her mourning, just as the city broke out of the ice of winter. But sometimes in a light-hearted moment she felt as if it were treachery, and the idea plunged her into grief deeper than ever.

One Sunday the city celebrated the return of freedom. In holiday mood, the capital hailed its heroes: the horse-men and the Resistance. There was dancing in the squares and on the streets all day. Every part of the city was full of music and singing. That evening a horse-drawn trailer arrived in Opera House Square, and when the tarpaulin over it was removed, Napoleon the giant pig appeared in all his glory, a monumental and astonishingly clean vision. Although applauded as a hero, he ignored his triumph, merely waggling his large ears, grunting, and snuffling around for food. He was hoisted up to a platform in the middle of the square by means of a system of lifts and straps.