I don’t remember the moment I hit him. I remember my blood beating madly in my temples and neck. It even throbbed in my hands, in the fingers white from gripping the handle of the shovel. His blood, on the other hand, just spilled over the floor, like black ink under the gas lamp. “No one should know this,” my mother told me and dug up the earth by the wall with the bloody spade. “When they ask for him, we will say that he escaped, that he went to the mountains, that he told us for days that he should not have fought against us… that we were the same, that we were brothers…” And so it was, so we told everyone. They believed, especially when they realized that he also stole documents from the headquarters. That’s what we said after they left after ours came down to the city again. That’s what we told my father when he came back. Tired from the long return home, he fell asleep like a dead. In the bed against the wall, a meter or two above the dead soldier. My father fell asleep, but I couldn’t. I could never sleep in that house again.
I left home a long time ago and I know I will never return. I never called; I never wrote where I was. I wanted to forget, and I wanted to be forgotten. And yet, all these nights that I spend awake I imagine again and again that someone is digging the foundations of our house and there, against the wall, they find the dead soldier. Sometimes it’s a skeleton, sometimes it’s a smelly, decaying corpse. Sometimes, however, I imagine that they dig him up untouched by time and earth, the same as he was when I killed him – young, smiling, almost alive. I shake with fear and try to think of something else, of this other life of mine, of this other name of mine…
But as I told you, this story is made up. When there is no land to see in front of you, when the eye perceives only flat blueness from all sides, a person starts to invent all kinds of things. All sorts of fantastic things. That’s how I invented this story. I invented it, so now, while everyone is sleeping, I am telling this story to you. I don’t know where I find these words that I told you, these assumptions, these lies…
And you look at me with those gentle, soft, shiny eyes of yours. Like black stars under the white sky on your forehead. You look at me sadly, as if you are losing yourself. How to understand me, how to trust me. Run, run big fish! Run until they are asleep until they are not awakened to see you until they realize that you are here – you, the one we have been hunting for days.