No. All of that is true, but none of it is the reason that prophecy is funny. Rather, it is funny because prophecy often tells us one thing, but we distinctly hear something else. It is as if God in heaven decided to give us a message, and chose to do it through one of our fellows. Somewhere along the line, the message is garbled, like in those games we played as children where we sat in a circle and passed some sentence around, so that the last person heard something totally different from the original intended message.
Couldn’t God, if he were inclined to give us a message, find a more suitable way than to pass it through gossip? Couldn’t the people be saved from their vices if they were simply inclined to listen a little better, perhaps to see with their own eyes?
Of course not. Because prophecy, by definition, is pointing to something that hasn’t happened yet. And we, in our moment, only see what affects us in our immediate space. Everything that hasn’t happened yet to us is speculative in our eyes.
That was the case with Lang as he sat as still as he possibly could, pressing his head against the stone wall, feeling its cold against his temple. His memory suddenly flashed to a prophecy given by his hero, the great writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. “The next war…” Solzhenitsyn said, “…may well bury Western civilization forever.” That should have suggested to him the larger picture of the wider world. It should have made him remember the long talks with Volkhov in which the old man had told him of impending worldwide calamity.
Instead, as he sat nursing his bullet wound, trying not to cry out in pain, all he could think about was how “western civilization” had come, in his own mind at that moment, to equate with him—just him. That somehow he was the entire focus and culmination of history. Being wounded, and living through it, had a way of drawing a man inward, and as he sucked in his breath and felt the tug as Peter stanched the blood, he wondered whether the war that was around him would bury him like it seemed to be burying western civilization.
The crossing of Highway 17 hadn’t gone smoothly. They’d decided from their vantage point at the tree line overlooking the road that they would move as silently as possible up the highway access road, camouflaged within the thick stands of trees that pushed up against the clearing. They were looking for a better place to cross. Peter explained that they wanted to make their move sometime after dark, and they looked for a place where the clearing between the trees narrowed and the crowd thinned somewhat.
They found one, a place where the road was somewhat more destitute of refugees and obstructions. They walked a mile up the highway, toward the north, and as they walked they noticed that most of the traffic had stopped for the night. The road there turned straight westward and took a short dip to the south, and they found a little bend in the highway that they determined would be the best place for them to attempt a crossing.
As darkness descended like a curtain on the area, the three halted their plodding through the trees, hid among the bushes, and surveyed the scene before them.
The refugees on the highway huddled in small groups and started large bonfires from anything they could find that would burn in order to stay warm. While there was scattered violence here and there, the people down below them seemed to be intent on hunkering down for the cold night on the highway and its easement for some reason devoid of any appreciable logic. Misery loves company, but less often is it recognized that company, especially the wrong kind, often invites misery. As the three looked down on the scene, they saw that there was less company here perhaps, and therefore less attendant misery, so they determined that it was here that they would take their shot.
Peter spotted a place where there was at least a football field’s distance between campfires, and he pointed out quietly to Lang and Natasha that there were no campfires burning in the woods in the distance across the wide expanse of roadway and greenbelt. “This is where we cross,” he said, as they looked down on the stygian scene.
The plan was to sprint the distance in irregular intervals so that they would not all get caught out in the open at the same time. Looking out across the distance, they determined the shortest route and marked a reference point to run towards, and they decided that Peter would go first. He would carry both his own bag and Natasha’s. “If something happens to me, God forbid, if I stumble or fall, I’ll throw the bags as far from my body toward the opposite side as I can, and you must try to gather them in on a sprint as you make your own way across.” Lang thought of stories that Volkhov had told him of the storming of the beaches at Normandy. The soldiers, when taking heavy fire from the enemy, had tossed their guns up the beach so that, if the worst happened, the soldiers who actually made it farther up the sand would have more firepower ahead of them in their fight.
“Don’t look back, or to the side. Just put your head down and fly,” Peter said as he touched them each on the shoulder. With that, he gathered his breath in and turned to run.
Lang and Natasha watched his burly figure push out across the snow and then gather speed when he reached the road, keeping low to the ground. In a normal circumstance, Peter’s movements would have appeared clumsy and bulky as he sprinted like a bear across the clearing with the two bags heaving on his back. Perhaps from the perspective of anyone who might have seen him, he did appear to be a bear, but in any event, he made it safely across without even raising a protest from the distance, and he disappeared into the woods beyond. Lang was shocked. Maybe this is going to be easier than we thought, he tried to encourage himself.
Once on the other side, Peter made his way into the trees and found a safe place to stow the bags, and, returning to the tree line, he stood poised to watch the others cross, to be ready in case they needed help.
Natasha crossed next, and she did well enough, though one of the parties surrounding a campfire spotted her and a shout of “Hey! Over there!” rang out through the night. Peter was on alert to see if she was going to be chased or followed, but she wasn’t, so before long, panting and out of breath, she joined Peter in the trees on the south side of the highway.
There was a stirring in one of the camps, so Lang waited several more minutes. When no one came out searching, or ventured over near the wire where the two had crossed back into the woods, he decided it was safe to make his own venture across the Rubicon. He thought of old black and white films of East Germans sprinting for freedom before a shot would ring out, and their bodies would tumble headlong into the razor wire. That ought to keep me running, he thought, and he reached down with a stick and cleared the snow from the soles of his boots.
Lang made his start, and, almost from the beginning, Peter could see that the attempt was not going to go well. Lang tripped at the starting gate and fell, sprawling into the snow on the upwards low climb to the main highway, and Peter, from his vantage point, noticed that some men to his left, who had reacted to Natasha’s dash across the roadway, were gathering and pointing toward the shadow he made on the snow. They began to approach the area at the top of the incline where Lang was struggling to regain his footing. Peter watched as Lang regrouped and began his run in earnest.
The men broke into a jog toward him as he crested the low hill, and Peter saw that they had an angle on him, so that they would almost certainly cut him off before he could make it to safety. He watched as the men converged on Lang’s path and anticipated whether he would have to run to his aid.