Page 13 of No Man’s Territory

Tomasz's hand found Alistair again. Not to cover his mouth this time, but just to hold him. To grip him with a gentleness that was almost unbearable given what had just occurred. Alistair pressed his face against the larger man's chest. The uniform was far from clean, marked by stains of survival. It had always been this way. His small body convulsed slightly with something that was not quite crying but was not quite breathing. The body responded to the overwhelming sight it had just witnessed. A human life had been erased. The decision to do so was made in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

The cellar held them captive. The body on the floor had them frozen in place. The realization of what they had just created in that instant—its irreversibility, the sheer commitment it entailed—kept them rooted. Meanwhile, in the village streets, other German soldiers swept through the ruins. They were unaware one of their own had just entered a darkness from where there is no return.

***

TOMASZ RELEASED ALISTAIR carefully, setting the officer down on the dirt floor, and then he went over and knelt beside the body of the German soldier. His enormous hands hung at his sides. Even in the dark, Alistair noticed Tomasz's fingers tightly clenching and then relaxing.

The cellar around them continued to hold the residue of what happened. The air was still charged and thick with nervous energy. Dust swirled around them, refusing to settle. The infernal sound was still ringing in Alistair's ears, a high-pitched tone originating from somewhere inside his own skull. His vision was fragmented, his sense of spatial positioning confused. He hardly heard Tomasz’s breathing. The ringing in his ears made it difficult to process anything. The continuous, shifting tone overwhelmed every other sense.

Tomasz was not looking at the body. He was looking at his hands. The blood began to cool and thicken. As the light from the hatch above shone on it, its darkness became more visible. His palms and fingers were covered in it. The blood splattered up his wrists, and he stared at his hands in disbelief, as if they belonged to someone else.

His lips moved. He made the sign of the cross several times over. He looked up at the ceiling. Sound came out, but it was not directed at Alistair. It was something spoken toward the body, toward the earth, toward the darkness. Words in a language that was not French, that Alistair did not recognize. Polish. The vowels were different from what Alistair was used to hearing. The consonants clustered in a way that the Romance languages did not allow. Whatever the words were, they seemed to be an incantation, a prayer, a statement of fact that needed articulation even though no one was present to hear it.

The ringing in Alistair's ears began, gradually, to diminish. Not disappear but recede from the immediate center of his consciousness to something that could be backgrounded. The sounds of the cellar began to reemerge. The drip of water somewhere in the deeper darkness. The slight movement of air through gaps in the structure above, the wind finding its way through cracks and openings. Tomasz's breathing was calm, but it felt unnatural. It did not match his real panic or what his body was going through.

It was this that precipitated the moment. It was the understanding, arriving with the force of revelation, that Tomasz was grieving. Not for the soldier who lay on the earthen floor. But for something else. For the part of himself that died along with the man’s last breath. For the line that had been crossed, that could not be uncrossed, that placed him in a new category of being. He was now a killer, not merely a soldier. He had taken a life with his bare hands, with the intention and precision and the absolute understanding of what was being done. A quivering began in his shoulders and gradually spread through his body, slow and inexorable, as though something heavy had settled inside him and every muscle strained to hold it in.

Alistair did not let himself think. Thinking would bring doubt, and doubt would freeze him. So, he pushed his small frame to move. The pain in his legs was immediate and searing, but he compressed it, contained it, forced his body to follow his will. His right hand, the one that could move, extended from his position in the earth. It was shaking. But he reached out, and he placed his hand on Tomasz's arm.

It was barely more than the brush of fingertips. But it was the first time since Tomasz lifted the beam that Alistair initiated contact. Alistair's hand, still slick with the German's blood, moved to Tomasz's arm before he could think to stop it. The wool of the overcoat was matted and stiff, caked with mud and something darker beneath. His fingers found the bare skin underneath the sleeve's edge, just above the wrist where the pulse fluttered, bright and furious. Tomasz's bicep flexed, but he did not pull away. He only looked at Alistair, eyes bloodshot and wet, and for a moment neither of them breathed.

The corpse between them was already cooling, the pool of blood soaking into the dirt and straw, but Alistair could feel Tomasz's heat through his sleeve, the tremor that ran the length of his arm. He tightened his grip in a silent testimony: Yes, I am here. Yes, I am still alive.

Tomasz's other hand hovered, uncertain, then settled over Alistair's. His palm was enormous, callused, and raw, and it engulfed Alistair's hand as if offering shelter from the horror. They knelt like that amid the ruin, surrounded by the stench of cordite and the hush of snow melting and dripping through the broken rafters.

Alistair did not speak. He did not need to. The feeling of Tomasz's hand pressing on him was enough. A gravity held him in place and refused to let him drift away from this moment, or from the man who had carried him across half of France. The world outside the ruined cellar was still at war, but here, in the stillness after violence, there was only the shared thrum of blood and the knowledge that neither would let go first.

Then Tomasz moved. Deliberately. His massive hands rose, and they reached for something in the shadows. He found a piece of fabric that lay discarded in the corner of the cellar. It was threadbare, once white, now gray, a canning rag or piece of cheesecloth. He moved to the body of the German soldier with a gentleness that seemed impossible for hands that size, for hands that had just done the unthinkable.

He lifted the soldier's head with great care and closed the dead man's eyes. He acted with similar reverence as before, when he was checking the bodies and gathering the supplies for the sling at his own destroyed encampment.

Tomasz arranged the fabric over the face, but the German’s twisted features were only partially covered by the lacy cloth. The act itself created a different atmosphere. The soldier was no longer a specific human being with a specific face and specific attributes. Instead, it became a body, a thing, just a motionless object that could be considered without the constant implication of its humanity.

When Tomasz finished, he stayed kneeling. His massive shoulders rose and fell with his breathing. His hands, still dark with blood, rested on his thighs. Then, slowly, he turned his head. His dark eyes found Alistair in the dimness. He watched the officer, quiet and unmoving. In that moment, he was just there, completely present. Alistair looked back. The ringing in his ears diminished further, and now he heard nothing but the sound of their breathing. Tomasz's was deep and controlled, his own shallow and fragmented.

Tomasz's eyes found his. They held there, across the cooling body, across the blood darkening on the dirt floor. Alistair did not look away. Neither did Tomasz. A wordless understanding passed between them, beyond language and deeper than gesture. More than a look, it carried the essence of being seen. They both realized that the violence altered them in a fundamental way. There was no going back to who they were before the moment in the cellar changed everything.

Then Tomasz straightened. He moved back toward Alistair. His enormous frame rose up from the kneeling position with the lethargy of someone who was very tired, who was operating on the edge of exhaustion. Yet he continued anyway because the work required it. He gathered Alistair as he gathered him before. His blood-stained hands moved the smaller man with the same care he used for every action.

The sling received Alistair's body. Tomasz arranged the fabric with great care. It felt almost meditative. Securing the officer in the sling was all that mattered. When he was finished, Alistair rested against his chest once more. Chest to chest. The blood on Tomasz's hands was drying, cracking, and flaking off, settling on the sling's fabric and Alistair's clothes.

Neither man moved. The cellar held them in its grip. Tomasz was crying, not weeping. There was no delicacy or restraint in it, no childhood memory of grief, nothing that suggested this was something he had ever been taught to do. It was as if the body had to invent it, as if the body had been storing up this reaction for years and now, finding itself in darkness with no audience except Alistair, the corpse, and the earth, it decided to let go. The sound that came out of Tomasz was as ugly and violent as birth.

The trembling in his arms became unmanageable. He pressed Alistair against his own chest, then doubled over as if he might vomit. The huge frame convulsed, and the air around them filled with the desperate, pulling gasps of a man whose soul was trying to escape his ribs. His mouth was open, pressed to Alistair’s hair or the top of his head. Alistair was not sure. He could barely orient himself within the violence of the trembling. There was a long moment in which Alistair was convinced Tomasz would unleash a scream that could alert the entire village. Something that would get them both killed in the simplest and most idiotic way possible: by making noise.

Above, boots began to return. Alistair heard them as a distant vibration at first, then crisp and distinct as they crossed the boards of the ruined floor above. Multiple pairs. The Germans were coming back. They called out for their missing comrade, following a routine. The words were indistinct, but the tone was enough. They noticed the absence. The boots stopped immediately overhead. The shadow of movement crossed the open gap of the hatch, briefly blocking the gray light, then passed on. There was a shout, a name, closer now, then the sound of two or three more soldiers gathering. The scrape of rifle butts on wood.

Tomasz was still out of mind. The gasping became a kind of hiccuping sob, an animal's helpless sound. Alistair put his hand up between their bodies and pressed it hard against Tomasz’s sternum, the way you might press down on a spooked horse, trying to convince it of the safety of stillness. He found the edge of the greatcoat, the fabric, and bunched it in his fist.

“Shh,” he whispered, or tried to. There was almost no air in his own lungs now; he could only hope the shape of the word was enough, that Tomasz would remember the meaning from some other life before this one. He pressed his palm more forcefully, feeling the wild gallop of the man’s heart, the heat of it beneath the layers of uniform and sling, and their shared sweat.

“Tomasz, you must—” He could not finish.

The boot steps overhead made the blood in his skull roar, a white noise that threatened to drown out everything else. He pressed his face into Tomasz’s neck, smelling the salt and iron that worked its way into the man’s skin.

For a moment nothing happened. The shuddering continued, the great trembling, and then it began to slow, fractionally at first, then more so. Alistair dug his fingernails into the fabric. He wanted to hurt, to remind, to anchor. He began to hum, tunelessly, a vibration more than a melody, barely audible. He could feel the vibration in his own mouth, in the point of contact between his jaw and Tomasz’s throat. He hummed the old school song, the one they were made to sing every morning at Saint Bartholomew’s. He hummed it until it was almost a growl.

The shuddering slowed further. Tomasz’s arms, so powerful a moment ago, became heavy, almost limp. He was squeezing Alistair, but not as if to crush; more as if to keep him from floating away. Alistair thought of the hands that killed, the same hands holding him now. He wanted to be sick, but there was no time, no room for it.