He remembered what he and Brauer had talked about all those months ago in Berlin. Had they burned away enough of themselves to survive this war that was not theirs? He knew now, as then, that he had not and that he never would. But he also knew now it was his war. It was just that he had been fighting it the wrong way. Head down, in the shadows, back bent, and every day a little more of himself sliding away to wherever the parts of yourself went when you lost them.
He remembered as well what he had told Begovic at the safe house in Sarajevo – that the track of his life was a scar that hid what was and what might have been. Scars healed well if they healed quickly, he thought. Was this such a chance? To change the track of that scar, alter it, make it something different? Heal it? Cauterise it? What image was he looking for? The past was what it was, and what might have been, could have been – should have been – lay hidden, lost, obscured by its weight. The past could not be changed, but the future was different, and it was here, now. It always had been.
He thought of the people in his life whose opinion he might have sought. Meissner, Brauer, maybe even Freilinger, certainly Claussen. Dr Begovic. His son, if he was alive. And Carolin, most especially. He unfolded her picture and held it in his hand, his thumb stroking that fall of her hair. Then he thought that all his life, he had waited on the good opinions of others and nearly always done what was expected of him, hoping it was the right thing. Often it was. Sometimes, it had not been. This time… this time, it felt right that there was no one to ask.
He shifted the tunic on his lap, his eyes switching back and forth between the eagle and swastika stitched onto the right breast, the Iron Cross on the left. Almost unconsciously, his fingers began to pick at the loose stitching along the eagle’s wing again, working and worrying it. Something had happened to him these past few days. He had found himself again, and found a new side to men he thought he had known well. He had found respect in the ranks of his enemy, and danger from his own side. He had become aware of another way of fighting this war, the presence of a fork in the track of his life, and in that hut in the forest he had taken the first steps down that different path.
He knew now he had never lacked for choices; it was decisions that were missing. So often, he had been passive in the face of what needed to be done. Running that confrontation in the forest over and over in his mind, pinned to the certainty in Goran’s eyes, he was afraid he still was. That he had only really decided when faced with the inevitable. It felt right, what he had decided, what he felt, but he could not help but ask himself – his old self-doubt surfacing – how genuine a feeling, a decision, was it?
He tried to imagine Alexandria, a place away from this war, of safety, and could not. All he could think about was Meissner, and Freilinger, and the others like them who fought a war of shadows. He thought of his functions in Sarajevo, the war of cogs and wheels and information and what a man might do within that system that could not be done from outside it.
His watch had stopped, and he wound it up slowly, thinking. It had come to him on his last day as a fighting man in the first war. Was it just chance, then, fortuitous circumstance, that it should come to him again on the last day of this war that he would choose not to keep on the way he had been going? The second hand slid into motion as he wound it, flicking around its little dial as if it, like him, sought a new north. One day, this war would be over, and there would be a reckoning. Every man would have to stand face to face with judgment of some kind, and often the hardest judgment came from the face you saw reflected back at you every day. A face you saw reflected everywhere, in mirrors and windows, in metal and water, sharp-edged or sunken, chopped or blurred. The splintered facets of yourself that stared back at you from a thousand pairs of eyes. A face you saw reflected within you.
The light slid from the sky, stars scattering themselves in its wake. There were no mirrors here, only the weight of mountain and sky and the image one held of oneself within. Somewhere behind him in the trees, a man began to sing. Others joined him in a refrain, soft clapping keeping time. The air smelled of wood smoke, and he breathed it in without flinching, without the image of those two boys grating at him. He paused, reflected on that, and then, face to face with the mountains, he made his decision. He smoothed down the stitching, stood and shrugged back into his jacket, medals and metal clinking dully, and limped back up into the trees.