The smoke was still hanging over the front line when Oren returned to his position.
No one asked him where he’d been.
There was no time for that.
An officer whose name Oren couldn’t recall shouted for additional ammunition crates at the third line, and that was enough for Oren to know what he had to do.
He reached toward the nearest crate, closed his eyes for a brief moment as was his habit, fixed his gaze on the ammunition crate, and felt the weight pressing at his head as he dragged it across the dirt, easing it carefully around the craters and the bodies until it reached the soldier’s feet.
The soldier didn’t thank him.
There was no time for thanks either.
Oren went back to look for the next crate.
He performed every motion with more precision than he was used to, as though his body had found in repetition a place to rest.
No excess thought, no hesitation, no question about the point of it.
A crate, a distance, a destination.
Then another crate.
He heard a name called from a distance the name of a soldier wounded in the last assault and Oren didn’t know whether the name meant the man was alive or that they were searching for his body.
He didn’t turn to find out.
He kept working.
He passed a large rock the soldiers had used for cover in past days, and remembered for a moment that one of them used to lean against it always, raising his right shoulder in a certain way, talking about something that had nothing to do with the war.
Oren didn’t finish the thought.
He carried another crate, moved it, then stopped at a soldier trying to lift his comrade’s body from beneath a burnt metal beam.
“Take this side,” Oren said, and helped him without looking at the body’s face.
Nearby, Daren was working too.
Oren saw from the corner of his eye how he set his hand on a cracked piece of metal, and how its surface slowly changed, hardening and straightening, until it became usable again as a temporary brace for a tent that had nearly collapsed.
Daren worked in complete silence, raising his head only when needed, and speaking to no one more than the necessary words: “Here,” “Wait,” “Ready.” A soldier passed beside them chewing something from his ration and joking with his comrade about the taste of army bread, and the comrade gave a short laugh.
A passing flicker crossed Oren’s face, vanishing as fast as it had come.
He didn’t smile.
He didn’t frown.
He only kept walking toward the next crate.
The fighting continued for more hours, but it seemed different from what it had been in the previous days.
There were no longer those sharp surges, those moments when everyone feels the earth will overturn beneath their feet.
It was more like a wave receding little by little, leaving behind everything it had swept up.
Then, sometime in the afternoon, different shouts began spreading through the ranks.
“They’re withdrawing!” The news passed from mouth to mouth, slowly at first, then with greater confidence.
There was no great cheering, no cry of victory, only long breaths released by men exhausted from standing.
The firing stopped gradually, as though the war itself were tired, and needed a rest before deciding to stop for good.
Oren looked around him.
There was no scene belonging to victory as he’d once imagined it, when he was a boy hearing the stories of soldiers returning from old wars.
No raised banners, no shouts of joy.
There were bodies covered with gray cloth, and soldiers walking among the craters looking for names they knew, and an officer standing at the edge of the line reviewing a list, crossing out a name, then pausing a long while before crossing out the next.
Some soldiers gathered the broken weapons into piles, and others collected the scattered ammunition as though it were the remains of a failed harvest season.
A faint smoke rose from somewhere distant, and no one knew whether a fire was still burning or whether the ground itself was breathing out the remnants of the battle.
A soldier sat on a rock, his hands trembling as he tried to roll a cigarette, while his comrade watched him in silence without approaching.
Oren heard a name called repeatedly from a distance, a name no one answered.
Oren didn’t sit.
He stayed standing amid all of it, moving what needed moving, helping whoever needed help, until darkness began creeping across the horizon, and the officers began announcing that the line was under control.
No one felt they had won.
They only felt they were still standing.
— The next day, it was announced that the soldiers would receive a week of rest before training resumed.
The camp in the morning was a different place from the one Oren had known for weeks.
There was no longer that usual noise filling the tents before sunrise, the complaints about the cold, the exchanged laughter, the endless questions about food or the next guard shift.
There was instead a heavy silence, broken only by the sound of slow footsteps and the rustle of tent fabric.
Oren passed an empty bed that hadn’t been folded up yet.
He didn’t ask about its owner.
He didn’t need to ask.
He saw a soldier sitting at the entrance of his tent holding a folded letter in his hands, looking at it without opening it, as though the words inside might collapse if he touched them.
He saw another eating his ration very slowly, his eyes fixed on a point in the emptiness with nothing in it.
He heard from a nearby tent the sound of muffled weeping, which stopped suddenly when its owner realized someone might hear.
One soldier tried to joke with his comrade, to recover a tone that had been familiar only days before, but the sentence stopped halfway, and the man swallowed the rest of it, settling for a silent shrug.
No one needed to explain what was going on.
Everyone already knew.
Oren sat on the edge of his bed, looking at the empty place where Silen used to sit every evening, talking about small things not worth recounting, but which filled the time somehow.
Oren felt no urge to cry now.
He felt only a quiet weight, as though something had settled in his chest and refused to move.
— He didn’t talk with Daren much in those days.
It wasn’t deliberate, nor was it any kind of punishment or anger.
Oren knew, without anyone needing to tell him, that Daren wasn’t in a state that allowed for talking.
He saw him on the first day of the rest sitting alone by the fire, his eyes red, his hands moving slowly as he fiddled with a small piece of metal to no clear purpose, shaping it, then returning it to its original shape, then shaping it again.
Oren came closer, and sat a short distance away, not right beside him.
He said nothing.
He didn’t ask “Are you all right?” because he knew the answer, and knew the question itself would do no good.
He didn’t say “You have to be strong,” because that kind of talk had never occurred to him as a correct way to deal with grief.
He only sat, and looked at the fire with him.
Long minutes passed.
Then Daren said, without lifting his eyes from the piece of metal: “He was going to ask me to make him a knife for cutting onions.” Oren didn’t answer.
There was nothing to say.
He only nodded a small nod, and set his hand on Daren’s shoulder for a moment, then lifted it away.
In the following days, the same thing repeated itself in different forms.
Oren would pass Daren while he was eating, and sit near him without starting a conversation.
He’d see him awake at night, staring at the tent’s ceiling, and not ask him why he wasn’t sleeping.
He’d see him working on a piece of metal or wood, transforming it to no clear end, as though his hands needed the motion more than his mind needed the thinking.
They exchanged very few words during that period.
Sometimes a single sentence in a day.
Sometimes nothing but a passing glance as one walked by the other.
But that silence wasn’t cold.
It was, strangely, as close as anything could be to speech.
Each of them knew the other was there, and that this presence needed no justification or explanation.
Oren wasn’t trying to fix something that couldn’t be fixed.
He was only staying close, leaving Daren the space he needed to carry what he carried in his own way.
On the fourth day, Daren began moving more.
It wasn’t recovery, and Oren didn’t feel it was.
He saw him rise from his place and help arrange some equipment, speak a few words with another soldier, smile a half-formed smile that stopped halfway.
It wasn’t a return to what he’d been.
It was only a body moving because military life leaves no long room for stopping, not even for grief.
— One evening, Oren sat away from the tents, holding a small sheet of paper and a pencil he’d borrowed from another soldier.
He thought for a long while before beginning to write.
He didn’t know exactly what he wanted to say to his sister Marin, but he knew clearly what he didn’t want to say.
He wouldn’t tell her about Silen.
The decision wasn’t so much difficult as it was clear.
Marin knew Silen only superficially, a name mentioned in a previous letter or two, no more.
There was no reason to make her carry a grief whose real dimensions she couldn’t understand, nor to add to her worry for him, when she already waited for every letter with a fear she never voiced.
He began writing: “Dear Marin, I’m well.
The battle I told you about in my last letter has ended, and things here are calmer now.
They’ve given us a week of rest.” He paused a moment, the pencil hanging over the page.
He thought of Silen, of his voice talking about onions, and of the moment he’d said he didn’t want to die there.
He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them, and continued writing.
“How is the house?
Are you still working on that fabric you were talking about?
I hope the winter there is milder than it is here.
I remember the woman who sold thread near the market always complained about the early cold is she still there?” He wrote a few other small questions, about the state of the house, about their old neighbors, about things carrying no great weight but meaning a great deal when they come from a place as far as this.
He didn’t mention Silen’s name even once.
He didn’t mention the battle in detail.
He wrote a calm, simple letter, carrying no poetry and no exaggeration, because that had never been his style.
At the end he wrote: “Don’t worry about me too much.
I’m careful, as you’ve always known me to be.
I’ll write to you again when I can.
Your brother, Oren.” He folded the page carefully, and looked at it a moment before putting it in its place.
He didn’t feel the complete relief he’d hoped to feel after finishing the writing.
But he felt this was the right thing he could do now.
— In those nights, something began slowly taking shape within Oren, not so much a clear idea as a sense creeping into him in the quiet moments.
All his life, he’d tried to be a practical person.
To weigh the options, to choose the least dangerous road, to act with a caution that protected him and those around him.
He’d believed, without formulating the thought clearly, that right decisions led in the end to good outcomes, and that caution was a kind of guarantee.
But he realized later that Silen had leapt to push Daren away from the knife, only a reaction springing from something deeper than thought.
It wasn’t a wrong decision.
Silen wasn’t a fool, nor was the decision itself bad by any standard one could judge it by.
But the result was that Silen died, and Daren survived, and that nothing in this was fair or logical in the way Oren had been used to thinking.
He sat one evening at the edge of the camp, watching the fire dance before him, and thinking about that.
Perhaps there were no decisions that actually guaranteed a good outcome.
Perhaps all a person had was to choose his act, then carry what followed from it, good or bad.
The thought wasn’t complete in his mind yet, and he didn’t try to force it to completion.
He only let it settle there, beside the image of Silen talking about onions, beside Daren’s silence, beside everything he’d seen in the past days.
He didn’t feel this understanding gave him any comfort.
But he felt it was honest, and that was enough in that moment.
— On the fifth day of the rest, the soldiers were gathered in the morning to hear an announcement from the command.
The officer stood before them, his face carrying few expressions.
“Under the new orders, the remaining rest days will be converted to intensive training.
The situation at the front is unstable, and we don’t know when the enemy may try to retake his position.
We must be ready.” There was no great complaining.
There was no surprise either.
It seemed like a natural continuation of what they were already living, a war that grants no adequate reprieve, not even for grief.
The soldiers began moving, gathering their equipment, preparing to return to the training ground.
Oren looked around him, saw the tired faces, the beds not yet folded, the empty places no one had filled.
He looked at Daren, who was standing a short distance away, examining a piece of his equipment in silence.
Oren said nothing.
He didn’t need to.
Daren looked at him a moment, gave a small nod, then went back to what he was doing.
There was no need for words between them.
Everything that could have been said had already been said in other ways, in the past days, in the silence, in the sitting close without asking.
Oren shouldered his bag, and looked one last time at the camp behind him, at the place where Silen used to sit, empty now as it would remain.
Then he walked toward the training ground, Daren walking beside him with silent steps.
The war hadn’t given them enough time for grief.
It had taken Silen, then asked them to continue, as though nothing had happened.
But something had happened.
And Oren was carrying it with him now, in silence, as he stepped toward training once again.