Esperantujo

With every hour the Białowieża Forest claimed a little more of him. At first it was voluntary–the torn insignia cast angrily aside, the shedding of his helmet and unburdening of his pistol. Then the trees started to take pieces off of his jacket and brambles tore skin and hair from his unprotected forehead. Mosquitos drank from his open wound, the mossy floor absorbed his fluids.

The autumnal temperatures did little to abate his flush. He was utterly unable to appreciate the untouched beauty of woods, whose canopies were alight with the sunrise. Through the haze of his fear and pain, the trees moved in a stop-motion blur, drawing nauseatingly close, stealing his breath.

He eventually came upon a stream, a cobbled road of shimmering stones. He took several gulps of water, slapped some into his face, puffed and gasped. The feldgrau canvas of his uniform had already fused together with the raw flesh of his shoulder. 

Adrenaline and animal terror had anesthetized him from the pain, but he could still hear the high pitched whistling of the bullet flying past as it took a chunk out of his deltoid and hit the ground ten feet in front of him. He was one of the lucky ones. The soldier running ahead of him had been caught square in the back of the head, shards of skull and brain matter spraying across his path. 

…Lucky?

He laughed, a bitter bark of a sound that escaped his lips in a cloud of vapor. 

The landscape downstream from him shifted, and he jumped, stumbled, and fell back. Six wooly bison gazed back with liquid brown eyes, their humps forming a dark mountain range over the waters. Trembling uncontrollably, he shimmied away and forced his abused feet to take on his full weight again. The small herd watched him go, disappearing through the golden undergrowth.

- - -

Paĉjo hates when I go too far into the wood, and I know he’ll have some words for me when he returns–but the morning is magic and the forest is alive! The plump boletes huddled near tree roots are my prize, their heads soft and brown like the tops of the doughnuts that Sinjorino Levy fries up every weekend.

“En la mondon venis nova sento, tra la mondo iras forta voko.”

I pluck the largest mushroom, inhale its muddy smell, twirl on the spot. A bubbling happiness rises from my fingertips, shivers through my body, releases itself in song. The sunlight drips warm paths through the trees.

“Per flugiloj de facila vento nun de loko flugu ĝi al loko.”

I let the words reduce down to a hum as I spot a patch of chanterelles, eager to add their dash of orange to my collection. My fingers part their spongy frills and brush suddenly against flaxen tufts of hair. I yelp and drop my basket.

A young man sleeps, partially covered by a patch of lingonberries. The chanterelles form a crown at the top of his golden head, his arms resting across his waist. There are two torn places in his shirt: over his left breast and on his right shoulder. Iridescent green flies flare erratically about the latter, landing on a wet, red slope of revealed skin. He’s shiny with sweat, his lovely brow troubled.

Like a tragic prince who must be woken from a spell with a kiss, his sadness is beautiful. I stare, forgetting all about the treasures in my basket with which I had been so pleased mere minutes ago.  

Oh, Paĉjo will be so cross with me.

- - -

He was aware of snatches of sensations as his consciousness drifted. A child’s singing, hands lifting his torso, a cool palm against his forehead. When he woke, it was with a thick quilt weighing down his body, heavy and comforting on his bare skin. 

From the open door, the voices of girls drifted in.

“Ĉu vi pensas ke li ŝatos fungojn?”

“Mi ne scias, Feliĉa.” 

Not Polish–he was certain of this. He could not forget the sound of those words in a shrieking falsetto. Closing his eyes conjured images of hanged villagers and piles protruding with miniature limbs and craniums. So he kept his eyes open, staring catatonically at the rows of logs comprising the ceiling. A banner with a bright green star was draped under the rafters.

“Ĉu Paĉjo koleros?”

A man’s voice interjected. “Onklo certe freneziĝos, Feliĉa.”

Not Russian either. The words were melodic and comforting–strangely familiar, like the meaning was just within reach. Their conversation continued, forming a soft texture of noise, lulling him to close his eyes.

A gasp. 

Without moving his head, he drew his eyes toward the door. She was standing in its frame, black hair piled in a watercolor splotch at the top of her head, embroidered shawl drawn around her shoulders. The healthiest looking little girl he had seen in a very long time.

“Ĉiela! Luĉjo! Li estas veka!” She trilled with delight and disappeared in a receding patter of footsteps on floorboards. The conversation beyond dimmed to a whisper.

He tentatively sat up, wincing as something shifted under his bandaged shoulder. Heavier footfalls returned to the bedroom door and the girl reappeared, followed by someone who could only be an older sister and a male youth not much younger than himself. Dark curled and freckled, they all looked fit, ruddy and at ease.

The little girl bounded into the room, and her two companions reprimanded her at the same time. “Feliĉa!”

The child tugged on the edge of the quilt with a show of disinhibition that unnerved him. She brightly articulated what was clearly a question, but his mouth felt pasted shut. Her hand was planted on a square of fabric next to his own callused knuckles, which he snatched back. Unbidden, the memory of tiny gray hands. 

“Feliĉa!” the sister exclaimed again, hooking a finger on the girl’s collar and tugging her away.

They looked up in time to see their guest open his mouth–but instead of words, he retched up stream water punctuated with bright red berries.

- - -

After the reappearance of the lingonberries on Ĉiela’s best quilt, it seemed best that he not eat any of the soup we had worked so hard on. He won’t talk to us, but big, fat tears sparkle in his eyes and fall down his face.  

His eyes are blue–I knew it. Such pretty eyes.

My cousin Luĉjo stays behind in the room and Ĉiela’s sends me to Sinjorino Levy’s with some of the mushrooms I had picked to get me out of the house. Well, that suits me just fine, because I know the Sinjorino will give me some pastries in return. Maybe the pretty golden man will like them too.

The heads of chrysanthemums make the window sills on every house look puffy and yellow. The lane down to the Levy house is decorated with floating motes of pollen and fluttering insects. Neighbors I’ve known my entire life greet me by name.

“Sinjorino!” I cross her threshold and the aroma of yeast and oil fills my nostrils. The old woman wields a butter knife in one hand.

“Feliĉa, just in time.” Pushing myself up on the tips of my toes, I kiss her and she gently stuffs my mouth with a warm piece of pastry.

“I brought you mushrooms,” I say, my tongue maneuvering around the soft morsel. I set the basket down on her table.

“From what I hear, that’s not all you brought.” Sinjorino Levy has a strange, crinkled expression as she fills the row of doughnuts with jelly. 

“Oh, yes! Can you believe it? A stranger, let in by the forest! He was badly hurt, but Luĉjo helped us help him.” I swallow and the Sinjorino purses her lips. She looks up at the portrait on her mantle of another young man from another time, before we came here to Esperantujo. 

“Perhaps so, but Feliĉa you already know…” 

I take ahold of her apron, gazing up at her wizened face. 

“We did the right thing, so Paĉjo can’t be too mad at me.” I think about the way he cringed from me, and the huge tears pouring down from his eyes. “We always say that we must render charity to everyone. Right? That we must help each other–yes?” 

The woman smiles with her mouth, but her eyes look sad. She taps my cheek.

“Your father will understand, love. Now take these back for everyone while they’re still warm.”

- - -

Despite his overwrought senses, his body and mind collapsed and he succumbed to a fitful slumber. It was not a restful sleep; every noise in the cottage startled him awake, his hand instinctively reaching to a non-existent holster.

In the moments between consciousnesses, he registered the day passing him by. Children’s singing entered the room on a breeze through an open window. The patch of sunlight moved across the desk on the far wall, illuminating stacks of books in various languages. Conversation and laughter could be heard on the road outside, all in that strange, lilting speech. 

His only companion was the green starred flag rippling gently above him, in this world completely unaffected by the timeline outside of the forest. 

It was dim when he woke one more time to the sound of the girl, Feliĉa, being shushed by her older relatives. Her whisper was louder than her speaking voice so that every word was distinguishable.

As the young soldier turned his head toward the door, his eye caught the round form of what looked like a fat Berliner on the nightstand. A puff of a yellow flower was laid next to the plate, as if she were telling him ‘get well.’ 

He began to reach over. Then someone rapped on the door and he flinched and drew back. 

A man he had not seen yet, an older man, entered the room carrying an oil lamp. Unlike the ease of the strange children, the deep grooves of his face revealed a history of grief. Clean shaven and broad shouldered, he exuded an air of intelligence and authority. 

He removed his hat and hung it on a peg on the wall. The outsider realized that it was likely this man’s bed he was currently occupying. Feliĉa lingered in the doorway, exhibiting the first show of apprehension he had seen.

“Ĉu vi fartas bone?” the man asked in a gentle baritone, and his daughter responded from the hallway.

“Li ne parolos, Paĉjo.”

They had a few more exchanges, with the girl’s large eyes darting back and forth between the two men in the room. At her final, longest response, Paĉjo gave her an affectionate pat and kissed the top of her head before nudging her gently in the back, out of the room.

Once the door closed behind him, Paĉjo took a seat beside the bed, crossed his legs, enlaced his hands in his lap to regard the stranger.

Then, he began to speak in perfect German. The sudden scrutability and harshness of the words compared to the speaker’s previous cadence was a shock. 

“I know who you are.” He picked up the abandoned uniform that had been spread out on a nearby dresser, handling the frayed tear that once featured a patch of an eagle clutching a jagged emblem. “You must have suffered much, and seen much suffering. You’re just a boy.”

He put aside the uniform, expression mild.

“Now let me tell you who we are. We are Poles, Soviets, Frenchmen, Austrians and Germans. Many of us are Jews and humanists. But now, we are Esperantists who belong to no country. All these, your Leader raged about in His Struggles. Have you read it? Well. No matter.”

Paĉjo leans forward and the soldier matches his gaze.

“Here, all things are shared. We have abandoned the tongues of our motherlands and raise our children with the hope of a kinder society. But we’ve found that peace, like our language, must be artificially constructed. With the way things are now, every true paradise is, by necessity, exclusionary.”

He understood fully. The rhetoric he had been baptized in was the dream of an unblemished fatherland, a place where few could truly live–where conformity was the one true path to harmony. 

The deserter studied Paĉjo’s expression, illuminated from below by the lamp so that the ridges of his face exaggerated the creases there. 

“Outside, we could never exist, as I think you can understand. So we must protect our fragile existence. Do you understand what I am telling you?”

Yes, he understood fully.

- - -

The last thing I remember is falling asleep on the hearth rug in the kitchen, but in the morning I’m magically tucked into my own bed. Flinging the covers away, I stomp both feet on the ground and launch myself into the hallway.

On the kitchen table, a lump of bread dough proofs in the warm influence of the oven. There are small hints of Ĉiela everywhere, but she’s not here–Ah, there she is through the window! She is hanging her best quilt up on the clothesline, its colorful squares fluttering in the wind.

Down the corridor I pull the door to Paĉjo’s bedroom open. His bed is neatly made, and a quick glance shows an empty nightstand. The flag of Esperantujo waves at me, but nobody else is there to greet me. 

The village nestles into the blue mist, the yellow window lights blurred, the trees all around forming their protective borders. At the end of the yard, Paĉjo is smoking from his pipe, looking into the forest.

When I embrace him from behind, he smiles wearily, the kind of smile that makes the corners of his eyes crinkle.

“My kind, darling girl, Feliĉa.”

As I cling to him we both watch the woods, the edge of the world, for a moment longer.