Beauty and the Beast

The Crypt

I am standing on a pile of split and quartered logs, arranging them in neat piles. I pause to examine my hands, which are red and scraped from handling unsanded wood. I can't begin to count the number of splinters in my fingers that I've received in the process. I know I'll have to go home early to have my mother pick them out with a sewing needle.
I slowly straighten up and mop sweat from my forehead with the handkerchief hanging out of my pocket. The muscles in my back shriek in protest as I bend over backwards, stretching out all the kinks in my back.
Why does it hurt so much? I've been doing this kind of work all my life, ever since I was a boy. I've been doing this long enough to get used to the pain.
And then I look down and see my spindly legs with their browned knees, scuffed from playing outside on all fours. I see my smooth, callus-free hands, the veins on the backs of them completely nonexistent. I realize that maybe I have been transported back to a time when I was still new to this whole woodsman business, when I was too young to have calluses on my hands or veins on the backs of them.
Somehow, that doesn't strike me as strange or out of place. In fact, it pleases me, to be transported back to happier times, back when I still had my mother and father, back when my elder brothers and elder sister were still carefree young adults enjoying their twenties.

I bend at the waist and rest my hands on my knees, looking around, taking in my surroundings—the forests of Rajecke Teplice, Slovakia. My hometown.
When he was alive, my father and I used to go to the forest over the weekend and cut wood for my mother to light the fires in our house. I loved accompanying my father on his weekend trips to the forest. I loved hearing the praise he lauded me with as we walked home, bundles of quartered logs strapped to our backs. I loved being the only son who was willing to help my father, as my two older brothers Michael and Alexander preferred spending their weekends relaxing after a whole week at their desk jobs.

From a few feet behind me, there is the sound of a multitude of twigs snapping, of dead leaves being crushed underfoot. I turn around so fast I almost fall off the pile, merely because I can't believe I'm about to see him again, albeit as a man in my fifteen year old body.

My father emerges from the trees, his rimless, circular glasses hanging awkwardly off his face, a bundle of halved branches in his arms. He straightens up when he sees me, setting the pile of sticks on the ground before him and adjusting his glasses.
"Look, Papa," I say, leaping spryly off the log pile and gesturing for him to come closer. "I did it all by myself!"
Frantisek Gabcik nods approvingly, raking a hand through his dark hair, now flecked with streaks of white. "Well done, my son, well done." He briefly lays a hand on my shoulder, and I smother the urge to hold it there. "Thanks to you, we won't need to come back and cut wood for a long time now."
His praise warms me from the inside out. I suppress a wide smile and watch as he begins to gather the wood into small piles we will carry back home one at a time.
"What do you think of this sort of manual work, my son?"my father asks as he hands me a small pile of wood. "How do you like it so far?"
"It suits me well," I tell him. "Much better than sitting at a desk job like Michael and Alexander." My father smiles, and I continue: "I also like it because I want to be useful to you and Mama when you are older."
"Thank you, Josef." My father ruffles my hair. I can hear the relief emanating from his voice like seismic waves. "That's my boy."
We each strap a pile of wood to our backs and start off on our way home. It is a ten-minute walk through the forest on a well worn, serpentine path whose sharp twists and turns we know like the back of our hands.
Every now and then, I shift the leather straps digging into my shoulders, wincing in pain. Every night when I changed into my pajamas, my mother would lament the deep, red welts in my back and shoulders. "You'll be scarred for life," she always said.
"You know, I'm very proud of you, Josef." My father's voice brings me up short, taking my mind from the burning pain in my shoulders. I stop and stare at him, at his back that is still facing me. "And my pride in you only increases every day when I see the things you've accomplished throughout your life."
I smile now, a cheeky, prideful, fifteen year old smile. What can I say?
"You've done things neither I nor your mother ever dreamed you'd do." My father still doesn't turn around to face me. "All your life, you've dedicated yourself to helping your mother raise your sister and being the father I was never able to be to her. And now, you choose to jeopardize your life in the defense of your country. I could never have asked for a better son."
I clench my jaw as my vision blurs. My heart slowly begins to come apart at the seams. "Papa, I-"
"Your mother is also extremely proud of you. You are the jewel in her crown, the apple of her eye. You are the other half of her heart, walking this earth." My father slowly unhooks the leather straps holding the wood to his back and eases himself down on the pile, clasping his hands in front of him. He doesn't meet my gaze. "Ever since you were a boy, we always saw the future of our family in you, Josef. Not your brothers, not your elder sister."
And I know his words aren't meant for the fifteen year old boy standing before him. They transcend the barriers of time to the man this boy has become, who as of now lies asleep in the crypt of a church.
"Papa, you don't understand." My voice begins to tremble. "I've failed our family terribly. I let Sophie down, and I let my mother down." Not without difficulty, I swallow the heavy lump in my throat. "It's all my fault that that German was able to violate her and outrage the honor of our family. He would never have been able to lay a finger on her had I been—"
"You had no control over what happened to your sister at the hands of that man." My father's eyes are filled with sorrow, although his face is resolute. "None of us did. But you came back to save her. That's what matters most."
"Mama hates her now," I say, my voice cracking. "She can never have a normal life anymore after what that...that bastard did to her. Every day, I worry I'll wake up and get a phone call telling me she's dead. I'm her brother, I should have been there—" 
My words are lost in a deafening clap of thunder from above. My father looks up; I follow his solemn gaze to the once blue sky, now dark with angry storm clouds through which luminous threads of lighting dance.
"Your sister is stronger than you think she is," my father says, still looking up at the sky. "You helped make sure of that, Josef, by setting a good example for her in her childhood. Now you must believe in her, and trust that she will make the right choices in life."
"Father, I—"
Rain begins to fall. It falls lightly at first, then harder and faster, until suddenly I can barely make out the outline of my father still sitting on the pile of wood.
"They are coming," he says. As if to hammer home his words, a mighty clap of thunder rumbles through the forest, sending leaves and dead twigs cascading down all around us.
"Coming?" I ask. "Who's coming?"
I can hear him smiling, although I can't see him. "You have unfinished business, my son. Those who seek to make a transaction with you and your comrades are approaching fast."
"Transaction...?"
"You must go, Josef." I have to strain to hear his words as the sound of the torrential downpour carries them away. "You must go, now. Before it's too late."
"Go?!" I rip off the leather straps holding the kindling to my back and start to make my way through the rain to him, but every step feels like slogging through quicksand. I take one laborious step, then another and another. "I don't want to go!" I shout. "I don't want to go anywhere! I want to stay! I want to stay here, with you!"
"You have work to do, my son." The silvery curtain of rain that divides us has grown so dense that I can no longer see him through it. "Finish what you started, and we will go home together..."
His voice fades away into the pouring rain.
"No!!" I scream into the downpour. "Come back! Father!!"
But I get no response. And soon, the thunderous, rhythmic drum of rain falling through the trees is replaced by voices, urgent voices that start out in a murmur, blending with the sound of the rain.
"Josef..."
"Josef..."
"Josef..."
They amplify slowly, gradually, as crack after crack of thunder rips through the sky, making the soil beneath me tremble. It gets to a point where I can hear them clearly; they grow louder and louder until I have no choice but to heed their call.
"Josef...! Josef...Josef...!"
"Josef, wake up!"
"Josef! Kurva...Josef!!!"
And then, one voice above all the rest: "The Germans are here!"