Jean-Claude Mourlevat - Winter's End

“They’re leaving! They’re clearing off!”

It was the signal for a great roar of voices that rose to the hills and echoed back from them. Bart and Milena, feeling they were waking from a dream, realized that they had crossed the entire bridge. The last trucks, the ones barring the exit from it, were starting up in their turn and driving away. They saw the frightened faces of the truck drivers quite close. Some of them couldn’t be much older than themselves. They hardly had time to step aside: a human wave was already sweeping toward them, and nothing could contain it. A similar torrent of men and women shouting for joy poured over the two neighboring bridges. The city lay ahead.

In a few minutes, the banks had been invaded, and the great peaceful army led by the horse-men flowed into the icy avenues of the capital. Windows were opened as they passed; people shouted acclamations. Shouts of hatred for the Phalange could be heard too, as if no one had ever wanted anything but to see it fall. Then the liberated citizens came out into the road to join the crowd, and the immense procession made for Phalange headquarters in the New Town.

“The arena!” cried Bart. “We must go to the arena!”

“Yes,” Milena agreed. Gerlinda, in tears, had miraculously found her again in the excited crowd.

There were no trams running, and no cars on the streets. The three of them raced down small side roads, Bartolomeo in the lead, the two young women following him. Making their way through the Old Town, they reached the square outside the arena fifteen minutes later, out of breath. To their surprise, there was turmoil there already. The crowd was a mixture of a number of horse-men, people from the city, and gladiators looking as if they had come from another age, bare to the waist or in their shirtsleeves despite the bitter cold. The two halves of the great gate were closed, but a dozen horse-men were advancing on it in single file, an enormous beam found on a nearby building site under their arms.

“Out of the way!” they shouted. “We’re going to break the gate down!”

A space opened out ahead of them, and they charged the gate at a run. It was made of solid oak and groaned at the impact. They moved thirty feet back and ran at it again.

“They’ll never do it,” said Bart.

A gladiator with a stolid face, head shaved, was standing close to him. He was still holding his sword and looking around him, dazed, as if unable to understand where he was.

“Has there already been fighting in there?” Bart asked him.

“Yeah.”

“A boy called Milos — did you see him?”

“Dunno.”

“How did you get out here?”

“Small gate around the back. Don’t have any tobacco, do you?”

“N-no,” stammered Bart, taken aback by this unexpected question, and then he set off to go around the building, with Milena and Gerlinda behind him.

There was indeed an exit at the back, a narrow gate already under the control of a group of horse-men and insurgents holding weapons. They were letting out the gladiators and ordinary spectators but seizing any members of the Phalange who tried to escape by mingling with the crowd.

As she reached the place, Milena was not expecting another experience as strange as the one she had just shared with Bart on the Royal Bridge. Yet an extraordinary thing happened: a powerful man with a red beard, wearing a heavy overcoat, came up to the gate, his head lowered, in the vain hope of passing unrecognized. Fingers pointed his way at once.

“Van Vlyck! That’s Van Vlyck!”

Two horse-men seized him firmly, and a third handcuffed him. He seemed to be demoralized and put up no resistance. As they were about to lead him off, a woman’s voice rose in the crowd.

“Wait!”

Milena stood before him. They did not say a word, but simply stood there face-to-face.

Van Vlyck, mouth open, wild-eyed, stared at the girl, and one could guess that for him time had been wiped out. He saw before his eyes the one person he had ever loved, the woman for whom he had unhesitatingly sacrificed all that was best in his life, and whom in the end he had delivered up to the murderous Devils. She stood there younger and fairer than ever, fascinating, immortal. In this girl’s blue eyes he saw his devastated past and his dark future.

And Milena found that she could not hate him. In his eyes, as if in a magic mirror, she saw the image of her living mother. I’m looking at the man who killed her, she told herself, but the words did not get through to her mind. I’m looking at the man who . . . who loved her, she thought instead, the man who wept one evening fifteen years ago when he heard her singing in a little church in this city and who never got over it. I’m looking at a man who loved her to distraction, who looked at her as he’s looking at me now. . . .

And when Van Vlyck moved away, led off without ceremony by his horse-men guards and taking no notice of what was happening, it was as if he took away a living memory of the dead woman, a memory in the flesh that no photograph or recording could ever equal.

Milena felt shattered. It took her some time to return to reality, but a tremendous crash accompanied by shouts of triumph brought her out of her daze. Bartolomeo took her arm.

“The bar across the main gate has just given way, Milena — we can get in through it now!”

They ran back, still followed by the faithful and dogged Gerlinda. The battering ram had indeed broken the gate down, but those wanting to go in clashed with those in a hurry to get out, either gladiators or spectators who were ashamed of being there, and there was turmoil. The three young people managed to get through the crowd by dint of sheer determination. Bart shouted more than twenty times, “A boy of seventeen named Milos! Anyone seen him?”

No one replied. Milena even asked a gladiator with a face horribly mutilated by scars, standing proud as if a wild beast had once mauled him.

“Milos Ferenzy! A gladiator, seventeen years old! Was he in your camp? Do you know him?”

The man shook his head, looking dazed, and went on his way. Soon they gave up asking and climbed to the top of the tiers of seats, shouting as loud as they could, “Milos! Milos!”

Gradually, as the arena emptied, they came to the conclusion that their friend wasn’t there.

“He could be somewhere else in the building,” Milena suggested.

But it seemed unlikely. Why would he have hidden? He must have left, and they had missed seeing him; their paths had crossed.

They went along corridors at random, opening the doors of deserted cells to left and right. In the end they had gone all around the building and were back where they had started.

“Milos!” called Bart one last time.

His voice echoed under the vaulted ceiling and died away, leaving the place in total silence. As they were about to leave, Gerlinda pointed to the far end of a corridor.

“There’s stairs over there.”

They made for the staircase. Two worm-eaten steps were missing. Bart went up carefully in case any more collapsed under his weight. Halfway up, he stopped.

“Have you seen something?” asked Milena.

The young man disappeared from view without replying. She waited a few seconds and then, hearing nothing, asked again, “Bart, have you seen something?”

There was still no answer. Fear was churning inside her. She went up in her own turn. A faint light came through a small opening in the mud-brick wall. Bart was kneeling beside a body curled up in a perfect curve like a sleeping cat. She made her way over on all fours and leaned against her lover’s shoulder.

Milos was wearing a dirty white shirt, its front soaked with blood. One of his feet, black with dirt, had been bleeding too. Unable to say a word, they looked at his tranquil face. It was like the face of a child of twelve.