Awakening
I woke to the sound of boots moving past my head.
Not marching. Dragging.
The sky was the color of boiled bone, flat and cold, pressing down until the ridgelines disappeared. Snow sifted into my collar. When I sat up, the world tilted and steadied again, as if it had decided to keep me for another day. A line of people stretched along the pass—hunched shapes wrapped in blankets and sailcloth, stumbling after one another like shadows that had learned to breathe.
A soldier shoved me lightly with the toe of his boot. “Up,” he said in German, not unkindly. “You’ll freeze there.”
I rose, legs numb, and slid into the column as if there had always been a space left for me. No one asked my name. Names had become a luxury, like sleep or hot water.
We moved east. That single word had eaten the map; there were no towns left in it, only the direction of our exhaustion. Somewhere far ahead, the land would flatten into a plain and a river would appear—the Narva, they said—where the retreat would harden into a choice: cross or die. I did not know if the river truly existed or if it was a rumor invented by the tired to keep their feet from stopping.
The wind rose and fell in long breaths that seemed to pause between the ribs of the mountains. The sound of it beat against my ears until it became a kind of company. We passed a burned truck half-swallowed by snow, its canvas blackened, its tires split. A kettle lay in the drift beside it, turned on its side like a discarded helmet. I could not tell whether it had belonged to soldiers or to us. The distinction felt foolish now.
A child cried behind me—three thin wails, then none. A woman murmured to the bundle on her chest and kept walking. I thought of the woman who had brought bread to the yard in Narvik and wondered if mercy could survive migration, if a small kindness had enough legs to keep up with a column like this.
We descended from the pass into a shallow valley where the snow lay deeper and the air smelled faintly of pine. The path narrowed between birch trees that creaked when the wind leaned on them. Somewhere to our right, hidden by timber, a wolf called out, long and careful, as if taking attendance.
A man fell ahead of me. The soldier beside him reached down, tested something at the throat with gloved fingers, and stood again. He looked at me and shrugged, a tiny apology he didn’t own, then moved on. I waited for the man to rise, but he did not. The snow made a delicate pile on the back of his coat, as gentle with him as the world had not been.
The hours lost their numbers. I measured time by how many times I remembered to breathe.
When we halted, it was beside a cluster of ruined cottages sunk to their windows in drifts. Smoke stains fanned from the eaves like black wings. In one, the door hung by a single hinge and knocked against the frame when the wind pressed in. We were allowed to huddle inside long enough to fool our bodies into thinking warmth was possible. Someone found a stack of shutters and broke them up for fuel. The boards gave off a smell like damp books when they burned, and for a moment I thought of my mother’s voice reading to me when the house in Narvik had been new and the future unspent.
I must have slept. I dreamed I was carrying a basin of water up a stair that never ended, and each step I spilled a little, and each step the basin weighed more. When I woke, my hands ached as if they had been holding something for a long time.
Outside, the world had shifted. Fog curled low to the ground, hiding people from the waist down so we became a line of heads and shoulders floating over a gray sea. The soldier in front of me wiped his glasses and cursed softly, and for a heartbeat his face blurred into another man’s—older, with a scar under one eye, a uniform I did not recognize. I blinked and the fog gave him back. The soldier did not notice the theft.
We moved again. The path broke into a notch where the valley opened, and beyond it a plain unrolled, white and endless, as if someone had spread a sheet over the earth to hide what it had done. Far across that blank, a smudge of darker gray suggested a treeline and beyond it, if rumor spoke truth, the river.
The wind quieted. Our breath made ghosts that did not vanish immediately; they lagged beside us like late thoughts. A woman began to hum—low at first, then clearer. It was the same lullaby I had heard in the pass, but older now, as if sung by the person who had taught it to her mother. Others lifted the melody without meaning to, like people turning in their sleep at the same moment. The column did not march so much as drift forward on that sound.
I watched my feet move without deciding, watched the ice form on my laces, watched the fabric of my glove grow a pelt of frost, as if I were becoming a creature designed for this. I felt nothing of my face. My thoughts had the clean edges of hunger.
A sign stood half-buried at the junction of two wagon ruts. The top half read something in a language I did not speak; the lower half had been painted over and repainted so many times the letters were only grooves. A boy beside me traced them with his mitten and whispered a name. I did not recognize the name, but it filled me with the certainty that the person who had borne it had once stood precisely there, had breathed this same air, had turned left instead of right. The certainty was so complete it pushed against my eyes until they watered.
We passed a small Orthodox cross hammered into the ice at the roadside. The wood had split along the grain. Someone had tied a strip of cloth to it, blue once, now the color of rainwater. The cloth moved in the wind like an exhausted hand saying, here. I knew I had never seen it before, and I knew I had seen it a hundred times.
I began to hear other sounds beneath the tread of our boots. Not the noises of this place: not the wind, not the creak of leather, not the mutter of German commands. These were layered faintly under them, like the ink of an old letter bleeding through onto a new page—hooves on mud, the rattle of a cart whose wheels had lost their circles, a horn calling men to a wall. They were quiet enough to dismiss, until I realized I was walking in time to them.
The fog thinned. The cold did not. We reached the treeline as the sky lowered its gray lid another inch. Beyond the trees, the world dropped away into a slow river banded with ice. Here and there the current showed through—dark water sliding like oil under a broken window. Figures stood along the bank, arguing in two languages that had learned each other quickly. A span of rough planks reached from our side to an island of thicker ice, then to the farther bank. It might have been safe if we had been stones.
The officer who had never looked at me in Narvik looked at me now. He pointed to the paper in my pocket—the one that had told the people of the hangings. I understood what he wanted without asking: Go to the front. Speak. Make them move. Give your voice to this crossing like you gave it to the rope.
I walked to the water’s edge. The ice made small detonations as it shifted, each one a decision the river was making about us. The first man onto the planks moved as if he were carrying a glass full to the lip. Halfway across, the boards groaned. He kept walking and did not fall. Others followed—three, then five, then too many to count, and the bridge flattened lower under their weight until the water licked its edges. The sound of the river grew louder without getting any closer.
“Speak,” the officer said softly behind me, as if asking for a blessing.
I opened my mouth and said nothing.
The lullaby found me again. It seemed to come from the water, from the ice, from the fog pressed low over the surface. It braided itself through the shouts and the crack of wood and the whip of the wind until those noises were only beads on its string. I did not know the words. My body did.
Across the current, beyond the second span of planks, a woman in a shawl stood ankle-deep where the ice had spread thin along the far bank. She was holding something I could not see. She turned her head as if she had heard me speak, though I had not, and for one instant her face was my mother’s, younger than I had ever seen her, the kitchen window behind her filled with summer, a smear of flour on her cheekbone like war paint. Then the fog took that too, and she was only a woman again, waiting her turn to step onto the boards.
A crack ran along the river’s skin with a sound like a zipper pulled too fast. The span dipped; a cry went up; the column on the far side surged forward and the boards shuddered. The soldier with the glasses reached out to steady a boy and lost his footing and did not fall because a hand I could not name closed on the back of his coat. I watched that coat lift against the gravity of the world, held for a heartbeat by nothing I could see, then settle again. He looked around, smiling foolishly, the way a man smiles when he doesn’t know whom to thank.
I stepped onto the bridge.
The wood was colder than metal. The river’s breath rose around my knees. In the fog, shapes moved ahead and behind me with the patience of sleepwalkers. Each board had a different voice. Some promised. Some warned. I placed my feet as if the planks could be persuaded.
Halfway, the sound of hooves returned—louder now, iron on stone. It came from below and from a long way off and from very near. I smelled tar and campfire smoke and, impossibly, wheat. I closed my eyes and the bridge became a causeway of old world and new stacked together like thin ice.
I saw a wall. I saw men with round shields pressed edge to edge, their mouths open not in shouting but in prayer. I saw a cannon mouth yawning like a black flower. I saw a medic’s bag, its leather polished by desperate hands, and the way a man’s shoulders soften when he is told he will live. The visions were not pictures. They were the knowledge of pictures, placed in my hands without weight.
I kept walking. The river spoke in cracks and sighs, answering a question I had not asked. My feet found the plank where the span settled from wood to ice, and for a step the world gave no sound back to me at all, as if I were moving on air. Then the ice boomed like a drum and the far bank came up, and I was there.
The woman with the shawl passed beside me, her eyes catching on mine the way a hook catches cloth. She looked at my hands as if measuring them for work and then nodded, a decision I did not yet understand.
On the bank, a priest made the sign of the cross over the heads that passed him, his breath turning the gesture into a small cloud. He touched my forehead lightly with two fingers and said something in a language that did not surprise me to hear. I answered in words that were not mine and were truer than anything I had said in months.
We moved away from the river, into trees that held their snow the way old men hold their coats—stubbornly and without grace. The ground rose, and with it the sound of artillery from some invisible distance, a slow heartbeat under the ribs of the earth. It matched the hooves. It matched the lullaby. It matched the sea.
I did not decide to stop. I simply understood that I had.
The column flowed around me like water around a rock. I stood with my hands open, palms burning with cold, and felt the air thicken slightly, as if filling with very fine sand. My breath hung between us, the earth and me, and did not move. The trees leaned closer. The sound of hooves became the sound of boots became the sound of a single step taken by a man too proud to kneel. Then it was quiet.
I forgave myself.
It was not a sentence. It was a weather change—sudden and obvious once it arrived, as if the air had always intended to be warmer and had finally remembered how. My heart did not lighten. My crimes did not shrink. They settled into place inside me like stones in a riverbed finding the bottom they had been dropped to reach. The water above them ran clearer.
When the world exhaled again, I was still standing in the snow. The column had not noticed any of this. The river still creaked behind us. A dog shook itself and scattered diamonds into the air. A soldier rubbed his hands together and swore at the cold.
But the fog had changed its color, and the light had the thin gold you see only in the hour after midnight when the night begins to doubt itself, and the map inside my chest had turned a page.
I walked on. The ground did not feel different beneath my boots, and yet I knew it would never be only ground again. Somewhere ahead, the plain opened to a city’s edge, and chronologies waited there with their doors ajar. I did not know their names yet. I would learn to.
Behind me, the river sang to its own broken surface. In its voice, I could hear the splinter of a shield, the whistle of a shell, the zipper of a tent in a desert wind, the scratch of a pen writing in a book by the light of a kitchen window in Narvik a lifetime ago. All of it braided into one sound: not a command, not a promise. A task.
I did not argue.
I had been sent to walk.
The Bridgehead
The camp grew from the riverbank like frost. First a handful of tents, then canvas squares stretched between wagons, then fires smoldering in hollow pits scraped into the snow. The smoke curled low, refusing to rise, as if the sky had grown too heavy to accept it.
I found a place near the outer ring where the wind was weakest, beside a stack of crates that smelled faintly of onions. My legs trembled when I sat. The warmth from the fire reached only far enough to remind the skin what heat used to mean.
Across the river, the bridge had already been swallowed by fog. The sound of cracking ice drifted from time to time, but I could no longer tell whether it was today’s ice or yesterday’s memory repeating itself.
The priest moved among us, a small man with shoulders rounded from years of listening. His cassock was mended in too many places to count. He spoke to each person not with questions but with silence, as though waiting for them to remember what language was. When he came to me, he nodded once, and I realized he had been the same man who marked my forehead at the crossing. His eyes were clear, untroubled by the arithmetic of miracles.
“You have come far,” he said.
“I have nowhere left to come from,” I answered.
He studied me for a moment, as if measuring the truth in my voice. “That is the proper distance,” he said softly, and moved on.
I watched him kneel beside a woman whose hands were raw from carrying buckets. She offered him a small bundle of cloth — her child, or her confession. He blessed both, I think, then turned his face eastward, toward whatever waited there.
As the fires faded into coals, the woman with the shawl appeared again, the same one who had stood in the river. She carried a wooden bowl of thin soup, steam rising like forgiveness. Without a word, she placed it near me and walked away. The fabric of her shawl was frayed at the edges, and for a moment I saw it not as cloth but as time itself — unraveling, rewoven, unraveling again.
The soup tasted of barley and smoke. It was the first thing I had eaten since Narvik. Each swallow steadied the world a little more, as if it were being rebuilt inside me one cell at a time.
Later, when the fires burned low and the camp settled into the rhythm of exhaustion, I took a scrap of paper from my coat pocket — a fragment of the decree I had been forced to read at the hangings. The ink had bled where snow had melted across it, leaving only a few words intact: obedience, security, order.
I turned the paper over and wrote on the blank side with a stub of pencil I found in my satchel. My hand shook, not from cold but from the weight of choosing words again.
If Providence governs all things,
then even the silence between them must be part of its design.
It was not a prayer. It was an admission.
The pencil broke after the third line, but the pressure of the letters remained in the paper, deep enough to be felt with a fingertip. I folded it carefully and placed it in the inner pocket of my coat. The first entry of the witness, though I did not know it yet.
Morning came pale and strange. The fog lifted unevenly, revealing parts of the landscape that did not belong to one another. To the south, a line of burned wagons. To the north, a cluster of houses that looked untouched, their roofs glittering clean with frost. Between them, men moved with the practiced disorganization of an army that no longer knew which direction was retreat.
Someone shouted orders in German, another voice answered in Russian, and both fell silent at the sound of artillery far in the east. The war was still moving, indifferent to what it had already consumed.
I went to the river’s edge again. The planks were gone, pulled up or lost. Only the frozen ruts where they had lain remained, like scars that had forgotten their wound.
The woman with the shawl stood beside me.
“Where will they go now?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Wherever the snow allows.”
“Will you go with them?”
“I go where I am sent.”
Her voice carried the certainty of someone who had stopped arguing with destiny. I envied it. She turned, and for a moment the dawn light caught her face. It was neither young nor old, but constant — the kind of face you recognize before you understand why.
She gestured toward the priest, who was kneeling in the snow, sketching something with a stick: a cross, perhaps, or a map.
“He says we are on the edge of the world,” she said. “I think we are only at the beginning.”
Then she left me with the river.
By midday, the camp began to move again, splintering into smaller groups. Some followed the tracks east, toward Narva proper. Others turned south, chasing rumors of shelter. I remained until the last fire died. The priest came once more, laying a hand on my shoulder.
“The world needs someone who will remember,” he said. “The living will not.”
“I am no saint,” I told him.
“Saints are only witnesses who stayed too long,” he said, smiling faintly.
When he walked away, I felt the emptiness close around me like water. I looked down at the footprints freezing in the snow — hundreds of them, layered until they became a single texture of movement — and realized that they all pointed forward, never back.
I do not recall choosing to follow them. I remember only the sound my boots made — a rhythm I would later hear echoed on fields they had not yet traversed.
To be continued