Men of Winter

Chapter IX

She ran like a lunatic through the wide halls echoing her cry. —Iliad 22

Our route quickly led us from a derelict business section to a derelict neighborhood. The houses appeared much older than my pension on Division Street. The boardwalk turned to uneven cobblestones then paths of packed snow and ice. Footing was difficult. We could not walk quite abreast of each other because of the narrowness of the path, so I stayed a stride ahead. Old trees, though leafless, blocked much of the sunlight, making the day feel even colder. It was quiet; no birdsong or dog barking. Just the wintry wind in the tree limbs and our crunching shoes in the snow. I thought of asking Helena some questions, like why she was here in Iiloskova, but it seemed the sound of my voice would be a violation of nature. We walked on in silence. Helena had finished her cigarette and put her mitten back on.

Suddenly a noise, an explosion, stopped us dead. It came from our left. Instinctively we looked across the cobblestone street. Another explosion as a window was blasted out of an old sideways leaning house; it was a gunshot, I realized, while Helena and I sought cover behind a tree trunk. We heard voices, a man and a woman, then the front door of the house was thrown off its hinges by an enormous fellow stumbling toward the porch. He was wearing a sleeveless undershirt, and his arms were as thick and as hairy was an African gorilla's. I had seen one in a traveling circus and everything about the man reminded me of the beast, his too-small head clamped tight to his shoulders, his round belly, the way his arms moved at his sides.

The man regained his balance and began shouting back into the house. I did not recognize the language. Helena must have sensed my ignorance and said, "He is telling his wife she is a crazy woman. 'The police will take you away and lock you up,' he is saying."

The wife, a small woman in a gray dress and greasy apron, appeared in the doorway pointing the hunting rifle at her husband. She did not shout but we could hear her fierce words nonetheless. Helena interpreted, "Police? There are no police. Otherwise you would have been locked up long ago, you – " She chose not to interpret the insult. I used my imagination. The woman stepped onto the porch, and her husband, in spite of his enormity, was obviously afraid of her. He moved backward and his stockinged foot slipped on some ice; then he tumbled down five creaky steps, smashing two of them, and lay motionless in the snow.

His little wife was doubled in laughter at the sight of her oafish husband's fall. She came to the edge of the porch, her rifle still in her hands, and looked down on him. I was surprised that none of their neighbors came out to see what was happening. Perhaps this sort of thing was a regular occurrence in this street. The wife quit laughing suddenly as if she saw what I did at that same instant. Blood was leaking from the back of her husband's head and turning the snowy ground a brilliant red. The wife navigated the broken steps and knelt by her husband. She put the rifle aside and tried to rouse him, saying his name – "Yoot," a nickname perhaps – and slapping his cheeks.

"I suppose we must help," I said and stepped out from behind the tree. I walked across the treacherous cobblestones. "Madam, may I be of assistance? I saw your husband's fall." Helena was close behind me and translated. I assumed she did so verbatim. The woman looked up and began chattering wildly, probably telling her side of the story. Her green eyes were ablaze, her tousled hair a mess in the wind that had come up. Helena and I were on the opposite side of her supine husband. The wife rubbed snow in his fleshy cheeks to try to revive him. I removed my gloves (I did not want to stain them) and lifted his enormous head to try to determine the severity of the wound. I turned his face away from me, and Helena observed, "It is only a cut of his scalp," first in my language then in the wife's. "We must stop the bleeding, though," she added, twice.