Название: The Trap
Автор: Ludovic Bruckstein
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Историческое фэнтези
isbn: 9781912545322
isbn:
His mother wept, his brothers talked, his sisters-in-law nodded docilely, his father was silent. Ernst’s mind was made up.
Ernst was a taciturn young man. He spoke sparingly and did not feel the need to justify his decisions. He was a stubborn young man, with a prominent, clenched jaw, middling in height, sturdy. His bronzed face was angular, as if whittled from hard oak. He wore his hair cropped short and combed back, so that it bristled like a coarse brush. He was a sportsman, a mountaineer. He knew all the Carpathian hills and mountains that surrounded the town. He knew the peaks and the valleys, the crags and the caves, each by its name. He knew the paths and the trails. He loved the mountains and was convinced that the time had come for them to repay his love by protecting him.
His mother lamented: Who would take care of him there, alone in the forest? Who would cook for him? Who would wash his clothes? Who would darn his socks? Ernst’s brothers tried to calm her; his father was silent. Ernst laughed softly at his mother’s ridiculous questions and tried to soothe her. A man isn’t alone up there in the mountains. In any event, he’s no more alone than in the middle of the most crowded city… True, there are no taps with hot or cold water, but there are springs and brooks of pure, clear water. And there are houses with shingled and thatched roofs in which to shelter, dotted over the hills and along the valleys. He knew those wooden houses well. In Vienna he had written a dissertation on the architecture of the peasant houses of Maramureș, which had drawn the favourable attention of his professors.
Up in the mountains there were sheepfolds with taciturn shepherds, sheep peacefully grazing, small, sturdy, thick-furred sheepdogs guarding against the wolves. Over the summer he would be able to survive very well, under a roof of leaves, with maize porridge and milk and whey and cold spring water. He would find shelter by a sheepfold or in the house of welcoming folk. Perhaps, Ernst thought to himself, he would seek shelter in the house of Simion Vlașin, on Agrișul Hill, who kept a milk cow, hens and geese, and who in winter chopped cartloads of firewood to sell in the town below. Often, when he went on excursions, Ernst would stop off in Simion Vlașin’s yard to rest from the tiring climb, on the porch, where he would drink a cup of frothing milk fresh from the cow. In the vast space of the mountains, where people were so sparse and lived so far from one another, they felt closer to one another than people in the town, who lived cramped together in their housing blocks. There, hospitality was a powerful, unwritten rule: if you are a stranger, the mountain man does not ask you who you are, where you are from, where you are going, when you turn up at his gate, but invites you into his house, to his table, and regales you with whatever he has: an unleavened loaf, a cup of milk, a chunk of sheep’s cheese. But no, he would not go to stay with Simion Vlașin, who had a hard life, with six children and a seventh on the way. Naturally, wherever he stayed, he would pay for his lodging, but at Vlașin’s house there was little room and many children’s mouths, which, unwittingly, might let slip an unguarded word and give away his hiding place.
Somewhat higher up the hill, about three kilometres from Simion Vlașin’s homestead, was the house of Ionu Stan, known as ‘Son of the Trustworthy One,’ after his late father, who was an industrious and wise peasant, also called Ionu Stan, but whom folk had nicknamed ‘The Trustworthy One,’ because all his life he had been a man in whom trust was placed, in other words, he was a forest warden. A small man, with an unruly beard and a face covered with scratches and scars, made by branches and thorns, with fierce, glowering eyes, he roamed the forest with an old flintlock, longer than him, scaring off poachers, but turning a blind eye when some poor man cut himself a cartload of deadwood to burn in his stove or hunted a rabbit without a licence from the Compossessoratus. His son, Ionu Stan, Son of the Trustworthy One, had, astonishingly, inherited not only the exact same appearance, but also the position, flintlock, gentle nature and wisdom of his father.
Yes, thought Ernst, he would take shelter in his homestead for a few weeks, for a month or two, until the storm passed. It couldn’t last long. After Stalingrad, the Germans were constantly ‘falling back to previously prepared positions, causing the Russian hordes heavy losses,’ as the newspapers put it. And in the spring of that year, 1944, the ‘hordes’ had reached the eastern flanks of the Maramureș Carpathians, beyond Iașina, which is to say, the border of the sub-Carpathian region of the then Hungary, where they had halted, turning their offensive southward, in the direction of Jassy. And the Red Army waited there, over the Carpathians, for many months, until Maramureș, which at the time belonged to Hungary, became Judenfrei, cleansed of Jews…
But Ernst Blumenthal did not know what was to happen in the spring of 1944, he knew only that he should not wait to be enlisted in a forced labour battalion or to have another encounter with young officers who studied art history in Berlin, but rather he should hide, vanish into the mountains he loved and whose turn had come to grant him protection.
Ernst was not superstitious, but it seemed to him that he saw it as a sign from Above, or from Destiny, whatever you choose to call it, when Ionu Son of the Trustworthy One came to his house that very same Friday morning. Friday was the day when Ionu came to market to sell his eggs and sheep’s cheese. Beforehand he paid visits to people he knew, selling them his wares, and then he went to the market to sell what was left over and to buy salt and gas, as they called lamp oil in Maramureș. Ernst took him aside and told him that he was going to come to Agriș, on a lengthier excursion than usual. Ionu blinked his small eyes, which were as dark as peppercorns. He understood very well what Ernst meant. Ernst gave him some money and asked him to buy him some peasant clothes, which should not be too worn: a pair of frieze trousers, a thick homespun shirt, a jerkin, a straw hat with an ostrich feather, of the kind young men wore in the Iza Valley, and a knapsack, of the kind worn slung over one shoulder, with a pouch in front and one behind. And not to say anything to anybody.
The peasant blinked his small, dark peppercorn eyes and by that evening Ernst had a pouch containing the items in his room.
In the Blumenthal household, that Saturday was sad and oppressive. Ernst’s mother sighed, his brothers paced restlessly from room to room, and his old father, with his rosy face framed by grizzled hair and bushy side whiskers à la Franz Josef, stubbornly kept his eyes fastened on a book, without seeing the letters, but only the black of their rows. And all were silent. There was nothing more to be said. On Sunday morning, at the crack of dawn, through the door of the Blumenthal house a peasant slipped outside into the street, a short, sturdy young man, with a bronzed, angular face, as if whittled from oak, and with a jutting jawbone. He was dressed in a coat and trousers of thick frieze and had a knapsack slung over his left shoulder. He turned down the lane that led to Mill Park, which lay at the bottom of Solovan Hill.
The streets were deserted. Silence. The air was fresh and cool. Ernst took a deep breath. He had got off to a good start, a very good start, even. There was nobody out and about at that hour to see him, and even if somebody had seen him, that person would not have seen Ernst Blumenthal, erstwhile student of architecture in Vienna, candidate for a forced labour battalion and mine clearing at the front, but rather a Maramureș peasant, wearing peasant shoes and a straw hat with an ostrich feather, who was on his way to Solovan Hill.
All of a sudden, he felt like laughing. Good God, how many ridiculous mistakes could a man make! First of all, he oughtn’t to have set off on a Sunday of all days. What peasant travels from the town to the village on a Sunday? On Sunday, the peasants of Maramureș, wearing their best clothes, stay in the village, СКАЧАТЬ