Matthew Funk

Forest Apparition Excerpt

The unbelievable and unspeakable explode into the life of a cynical Soviet partisan as his war story is hijacked by an unusual embodiment of the classical hero. 

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4 

We had bombed the train, destroyed much of it, and when it came time to attack, we attacked, suddenly strangers rushing across an alien terrain.  Entering into combat is not like checking into one’s job, running an errand or spending a moment exploring one’s fancy.  We charge, as I believe all sane men charge, into a zone where previous frames of reference not only do not apply, but also are ridiculous.  Further deranging the matter is the impression that one cannot be performing such deeds.  I don’t just mean those acts that civilization has deemed morally reprehensible – maiming, robbing, killing other people.  I mean the whole exercise of the attack.  The running, the looking about, the ducking for cover.  Carrying a weapon, using it, repairing it, all while surrounded by the most confusing of phenomena – the battle itself.  I mean the entire game, which no men are fit to play and few know the rules.  The game that never ends, having no winners. 

I will relate as best I can; my account will serve as testament to my previous statement.  You, sir, are not a combat officer?  No, I gathered not.   You are too serious by far about the wrong rules.  Then take me at my word when I claim that battle kills all weak words.  Only the words you hear your flesh repeating while you sleep can endure.  They are the only things that define you in terms other than merely ‘lucky’ or ‘dead’.  You are a soldier hitting the deck.  You are a soldier advancing with marching fire.  You are a soldier flanking left.  You are a partisan, following orders.  You are a Soviet defending your land.  You are not tying yourself up for the enemy with thinking.  You are not thinking because you are doing, killing, as you are told.  You are not dead.  It is that simple.  I was an enlisted man; I followed orders.  I am an officer; I follow my own orders.  I do not question, not even myself.  There are no rules for undefined variables in an equation of action that amounts to a human life.  It is that simple.   

But that it never is.  Orders are that simple, but we are not and battle, convulsively complex, is not either.  Battle, like thinking, will always find you. 

We rose from the field like smoke from small fires.  I looked about, checking our numbers, and drew doubts to me like stray dogs.  They bayed at me, whimpered, strident and insatiable.  It was a clutter of keening, shaving away all rooted thought before it had any chance to develop.  A man had been out of place.  My arms were bitten and tugged at.  My legs were worried such that my knees were going to water.  Other men were out of sync.  My throat was seized, crushed solid. Would this assault develop properly or had they been waiting too long for their limbs to be other than rotten rubber?  I knew I was able to do so.  What about those who were less experienced or less hale?  Then I realized we had been stationary, raised standing but bent over, the whole time.   I was shocked at my thoughtlessness, my incompetence.  I was disgusted with how fearless I’d been.  Waving one arm to motion the crowd forward I used the other to raise my whistle and blow, signaling the group on the other side of the tracks to advance. 

We were crows in khaki, bent over with folded foliage wings trailing from our camouflage webbing.  We stalked towards the train, each of us wary and hungry for something to see.  The night had worn blue satin when she lay down with us.  Now that was strewn about in tatters; she lay stunned and prostrate.  Where the gown had not been entirely torn away stains of gelatinous red rolled over it.  Where she was open, she was black, wet, swollen red.  The ground heaved up where the train rose like a broken spine, as if it would loose a tremendous sob at any moment.  But the night did not move, remaining still as we advanced, rifles rigid at the ready, increasingly furious.  We were growing enraged, all of us, even the veterans, that we had lain this train – this whole night – low, and yet still hadn’t mastered it.  We were still at the mercy of our senses; we were desperate to see something, anything, even the enemy.  Especially the enemy, so that we would know where he was.  But anything would do, even a random explosion.  Anything but the waiting, the horrible recoiled silence.  The night did not move.  We would butcher her for that.  We would do them all. 

Yet, though the rage was real, the fear was painting a surreal landscape such that even that anger seemed false.  Everything was out to assault us.  While moving towards the train, we had to march through the rain – it was coming down like a shroud of sweat.  Shockingly cold.   You could not have convinced me, as I tried many times myself, that that cold was not the harbinger of some far greater menace.   While the cold was stenciling my skin, the rain had me straining not to react to its assault.  Every drop tapped, stabbed, shot me.  Every drop was the sound of a German creeping up from behind, the pop of a distant gun or the snap of an opening train door.  Every drop and I might have died.  Its fall distorted noise such that one moment my boots sounded titanic, the next all I could hear was the panting of the man next to me.  Vision was distorted by this willow-branch veil, cut into strips of shifting black, bent around globes of gray, running like ink on steel.  The world swayed, shivered and made no sense.  We marched into this – I marched into this – wondering where I was and why I was doing this. 

The best warriors forget they are playing a game in which people are killed and remember only how to play.  They don’t think of how they were voted ‘Most Sensitive’ in their freshman English class and how tragic a misfit they are to such a brutal enterprise.  They don’t think about what their mother would do without them, however will the roof get mended, who will feed the dog?  They pay no mind to whether they’ve eaten their last meal, can’t die because they’ve always wanted to be a painter, should have been sent to the Navy.  They pay no heed to the possibility they are dreaming, doomed, or blessed in some way.  They don’t feel missed, feel loved, feel weird.  They don’t even realize that they have plenty of time to think about such things while in the trenches; they don’t have to realize this, understanding it immediately.  Everything is immediate to the best of soldiers – they are lines in a book, a record of their own efficiency and heroism.  They are the manuals on infantry combat; they are the matter of fact statement.  The best soldiers are action, reaction, action.  They charge, fight, kill because that is what they are there to do.  They are not what they know they are in battle to destroy, and that is men. 

 This is why the Army tries to train its troops until every function required of them is regulated and activated automatically by signal.  The Army knows it is only a cruel waste to send a man to die.  It is better to send a weapon to kill. 

I thought of home, yes, and of whether I could remember my mother as other than her death.  Certainly I remembered what she did, I remember the things we did together, but could I remember her?  I wondered whether a life without such memories was hollow and, if so, whether I could repair it before I died.  Hadn’t she, after all, tried to befriend me with dinners out alone together, with trips to the movies during schooldays and by listening?  Had she been successful – did she know me when she died, even though I was not even sure if I knew her now?  Did such things matter; wouldn’t I be better off not concerning myself with such things while trekking into battle?  But then again, I thought, if I could be killed any instant, shouldn’t I concern myself with the things that mattered most to me?  Who else’s life was I living?  Who else’s life would I have to lose? 

I believe Afnasi, Eli and Boris were killed during that period.  I know they died before I reached the place where the field rose, went bald and met the rail; I later found their bodies on the way back to the forest.  Still, I cannot say I noticed them go.  All of them were good men, Afnasi especially.  He gave his silent, personable presence so generously – he was a reward, even to those who raged at their own worthlessness, for he would not leave even them.  And yet he died without a sound, as Eli and Boris died, as I now know my men on the other side of the tracks had died.  Ten men gone, and I can say nothing of their passing.  I was thinking of the value of lives, not of lives themselves.  This, and of my own fear. 

Instead of concentrating on all the reasons to hit the dirt and stay put, I waved my hand and so forced all of us onwards.  I even looked around at this time, glancing over my shoulders at where I expected seven men to be advancing.  I saw nothing, being too alarmed to see anything except for the rain.  I was cursing the rain, cursing all my enemies.  The stone in my shoe, my blisters and the soggy cocoon of water that undulated on the bare flesh of my foot, I cursed.  I cursed the weight of my rifle, some fifty kilograms and gaining; I cursed my uniform, how it gulped moisture, grew fat and coarse with it.  Cursing the noise of the rain, I cursed the silence as well.  I cursed the night most of all for being so still, coy and deadly.   So damned deadly that the act of thrusting one foot in front of the other, of marching into the certain, faceless danger, was physically exciting.  I couldn’t believe I was doing it, cursed myself for a fool; I cursed my enjoyment that I persevered all the same.  I cursed Hitler, cursed Stalin, cursed my own weakness.  The air was sooty, the breath of a sleeper in a troubled dream.  I sucked it in great tooth-blackening swallows and cursed again.  Sometime during this period, Levi and Sasha were shot.  I didn’t notice, in fact I waved my hand to keep going.   I had to keep going.  That I was almost at the train offered some measure of relief – though I was going to be walking right into a ruptured, smoking hornet’s nest, I would no longer be exposed in the middle of a field.  I dreaded the train, but it was a dread I could control. 

It is all about control, isn’t it, officer?  When I was crossing the field, I was thinking of my past, of how it might have squandered my future, and wasn’t lost in thought about the conditions of the present.  Certainly I felt exposed, but to say such a thing about a combat experience would be no different than commenting that one felt the air or one’s heart beating.  You breathe exposure in combat; its what pushes your veins and keeps your flesh alive.  Without it, you are certain, you would be taken unawares and soon be dead.  With too much of it and you run from the dust in your trench, your uniform, your own shadow – anything that touches you, holding in contact with your bare skin like a disciplinarian’s hand.  You run and, more often than not, you’re cut down.  You’re killed because you lost control.  So marching on the train, I maintained control by reassuring myself over and over that ‘it wasn’t that bad’.  The rain battered at me, wearing soot boxing gloves, stinging my eyes.  It wasn’t that bad.  The rain had turned the grass into a hairy green pulp; it sucked at my boots.  It wasn’t that bad.  The grass lay on ground so uneven, it was like walking across a field of human backs.  Not bad, not bad, such things were not that bad.  Just check the submachinegun’s action, check the doors of the train, check the fires for movement but don’t look into them and it will not be that bad.  I had no idea.  I was salving my scratches while the world bled out around me.  I had been reassuring myself with repetition, formal gesture, and the ether of memory.  I had kept what fear I had from bringing me down.  I had no idea.  I could not have been afraid enough.   

And this is where I failed at truly being the soldier I valued myself as – this is where I discarded control for comfort in fantasy.  I had been walking in the steps of soldiers and I made the motions they did.  For a time, I had command of the situation, by having command of myself.  I gave it up true control over the game all the same.  I let myself forget.  Truly possessing control meant knowing when someone else had it over you.  I had forced myself to forget.  I had to keep moving. 

I was twenty, perhaps yards away from an upset passenger car when I first heard the shots.  The rain had muffled them until they were impacts on a pillow.  Hard, fast, they nonetheless sounded as if discharged in a water drum.  I almost did not register them.  I did not excuse them as ammunition cooking off near a fire, I did not think they were the snapping of glass settling under a train car’s weight; I thought nothing of them.  Then they sounded again.  A precise, clipped burst – a musical killing.  Three shots knocked at the flat door of the air and then drew away, into memory, under rain, and then that was all there is.  I found myself pressed to the side of the train car, having bolted the last ten yards – I pressed my face to the upset wooden roof, as if seeking the shape of danger in the grain of the planks.  The smell of pine, seasoned by a hint of smoke, rose to veil my face, just as April air runs like a girl’s hand across your face when you wake to find you had fallen asleep outside.  This hand took the sweat away, bead by bead.  It spread my features back from a funereal mask into the shape of my face.  And for a time I knew I needed to close my eyes; needed it more than legs, hope, or my gun.  I shut my eyes – I let the smell of pine shut them – and listened to the delicate havoc of the rain.  Eyes shut, mouth open into an amphitheatre, I let the sound and the smell fill up my world with this moment until it stretched and sighed.  I collected the wood with my cheek.  I thought of sleeping outdoors at the camp, hands flexing around the absence of a gun, and of waking to April mornings.  I opened my eyes.    The rain slapped them with wet smoke.   The sun was nowhere to be seen, not even gazing vainly at its mirror.  There was only fire, rain, the pasty emptiness of my body’s needs, and the gun.  Always the gun.  And there was, though I refused to see it at first, enough light.  There was enough light stroking the field I had passed through to show that my comrades lay there.  They were twisted pathetically, tossed aside by whatever angels had animated them, left to be only wax and a matter of time.  They were no longer what they might be.  They were only what was. 

I would have tightened the grip on my weapon and raised it to the position Sergeant Nureyev used to indicate by sticking my shoulder with his baton.  I would have raised it to firing range position, scanned the area from 10 to 3 o’clock, and kept my finger loose to squeeze the trigger.  I would have squeezed the trigger, not pulled it, and leaned into the shot. 

I would have sunk down, guarding my position.  I would have found cover.  I might have stayed there. 

I would have been furious, criminally violent.  Sadness over my loss, over what my friends lost, would have passed through me like a stone.  I would have been afraid. 

I would have been terrified. 

But the voice from above me, from atop the capsized train car, spoke more suddenly than her gunshots, and in beautifully accented Kievan.  She spoke saying, “Hands up now, Captain.  Be slow.  Your fourteen are dead.”  

I would have acted as a soldier, a Russian, a boy waking to twenty years’ darkness. 

She gave me no time to be these things. 

I was only a prisoner

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