The Silence of Trees Read Online Free PDF Page A

held as the rain pounded on my face.
    The line of time blurs with age, leaving only certain points pronounced in memory. The road from my parents’ home is a fog of bitterness and regret, but the day Stephan was taken is painfully clear. We had been given shelter in a small Slovak village by an elderly couple who had lost their own son in the war. Jan and his wife Bozka allowed us to sleep in their barn in exchange for a few days’ labor on their farm.
    The evening before his capture, Stephan and I sat sipping burned coffee in the old couple’s home. Until then, neither word nor affection had passed between us since we’d left my family’s farm. He begged me to go outside with him, to talk away from the old couple’s ears. How he pleaded, and he looked so ragged, stripped of the polish of his uniform. His pants were ripped at the knees; his shirt soiled down his back and under his arms.
    When I finally agreed, we went outside and sat beneath a large fir tree. I was so afraid and felt so alone. I wanted the nightmare to go away.
    Stephan had taken my hand. "Nadya, what would you have me do? I love you. I couldn’t have stopped them. Are you going to damn me like everyone else?"
    He looked so broken, so vulnerable that I wanted to kiss him then. Bury my face in his chest, have him hold me as everything else faded away.
    "Nadya, did I choose to wear that uniform? Even though we buried it, I still feel it. I can’t get rid of it."
    He stroked the beard brought on by weeks of travel. I had never kissed him with a beard; he had always been cleanly shaven, his face smooth. This was not a face I knew. Everything was foreign now.
    "Do you hear me? You just stare at me with those big green eyes like I’m a monster. I didn’t kill your family. I have enough guilt without that on my head."
    I clenched my fists. My family. Killed. As he watched. I wanted to spit in his face. Curse him for not saving them. Curse him for taking me away from everything.
    "God, you can’t imagine what I’ve seen. What I’ve been forced to do. Nadya, I am so ashamed. I try to escape in dreams, but even they are filled with blood. So much blood on my hands." He buried his face in his hands, his fingers pulling at his hair. I wanted to scream and weep at the same time. Cry in his arms. Push him away.
    I could smell his breath: mint and coffee. I wanted to take his hand, trace the scars on his wrist with my fingers. Rub my lips against the soft hairs of his arm.
    "If there is a Hell, this war will fill it with people like me." Stephan looked at me. He had such long eyelashes for a man. I knew he wanted me to say something, do something.
    But I did nothing.
    Instead I watched the shadow of leaves on his thigh, his hand resting there, scars on his knuckles, his fingers. Scars he could not cover. The winds brushed through the long stalks of grass; they sounded like hushed murmurs. Like prayers.
    While I sat staring into the hills, Stephan’s fingers brushed against my lips. Part of me lay buried under the ashes of my family’s barn. Yet, no matter how much I had tried to hide inside myself, I wanted so much to be touched, to feel alive. He was all I had now.
    When I felt his fingers on my lips, I kissed them despite myself. Closing my eyes, I bent back my head and inhaled deep and long, taking in the sweetness of raspberries crushed underfoot and the dark, moist smell of sweat and dirt. His fingers lingered on my lower lip before sliding slowly down my chin, down the center of my neck, stopping at the hollow above my collarbone.
    He leaned over and kissed me in a moment I wished would last forever because everything else faded away, but the old couple shouted for us to come back inside the house. Then the soldiers came. We tried to hide Stephan under the table, but they found him.
    Laughter. Loud laughter as Soviet soldiers stood inside the old couple’s house. Their faces were like my brothers. Not the angled, blond faces of the Germans, but brown