The operation began in the square the same way it had three days before, but at a faster pace this time, as though the soldiers themselves wanted to finish before the day dragged on any longer than necessary.
One of them opened his ledger and began calling the names, while the others stood at the edges of the square, their eyes moving over the crowd in search of any movement that might draw attention.
Some of those called came forward on their own this time, their faces calmer than expected, as though they had spent the three days convincing themselves the matter was unavoidable, and had decided to see it through without further resistance.
One mother, standing near the wooden board, wept quietly as she said goodbye to her son, his hand on her shoulder for one last second before he stepped away toward the forming row.
Another father stood motionless, his mouth tight, his hands clasped behind his back, trying to appear steadier before his son than he actually felt.
At one name, a voice rose from the crowd saying the young man had been “gone since morning,” and the soldier wrote a note and moved on.
At another name the blacksmith’s son a moment of silence fell, then one of the soldiers moved from his place without waiting for an explanation, heading directly toward a side alley the villagers knew well, the road leading to the blacksmith’s house and his tool shed.
It was no surprise to anyone who knew the family; the young man had been seen going back and forth between the house and the shed all three days past, and word of it had likely reached someone a neighbor, a customer without necessarily any ill intent, just a passing word overheard in the wrong place.
The soldier returned minutes later, leading the young man before him with a hand on his shoulder no visible violence in the gesture, but no room for negotiation in it either.
The blacksmith’s son’s face was pale; he did not cry or shout, only stared at the ground before him as he walked, while his father stood at the door of the shed, unable to step forward any further, his hands gripping the wooden doorframe.
The young man was chained beside another man who had been arrested minutes earlier at the edge of the square, someone Oren didn’t know well but had seen selling vegetables at the weekly market before.
The two stood by the cart, no words between them, each looking in a different direction, as though looking at the other would make the matter heavier than either could bear.
No one who passed through the operation failed to notice that this was now happening roughly every two months, at a faster pace than the year before, and that the faces of those present, despite the real grief in some of them, also carried that cold resignation that comes from watching the same thing repeat more often than it should.
After the first part of the operation ended, three of the soldiers, accompanied by a courthouse clerk carrying a separate ledger, made their way toward the Archive building.
The supervisor had opened the section since early morning, perhaps anticipating what might happen, perhaps because administrative work does not stop even on a day like this.
He looked up as the soldiers entered, and tried to seem more absorbed in the page before him than he actually was.
“We’re looking for an employee who works here, named Oren,” one of the soldiers said, in an administrative tone carrying no direct threat.
“Is he here today?” “He hasn’t come to work in about a few weeks now,” the supervisor answered faster than he should have, then added, trying to make the sentence sound more natural: “He said he was ill.
I saw no reason to ask further employees fall ill sometimes.” The soldier looked at him a moment, then asked for his home address, and the supervisor gave it without hesitation, believing this partial cooperation would be enough to let him out of the situation without implicating himself further.
The soldiers left a few minutes later toward Oren’s house, leaving the supervisor alone with Martin, who had stood at his table in silence throughout the exchange, his eyes on the supervisor with a look the latter didn’t fully understand.
The soldiers reached the house a short while later.
Marin opened the door before they even knocked, as though she’d been waiting for the knock for hours.
“We’re looking for Oren,” one of them said.
“He hasn’t been here in weeks,” she said, in a voice she tried to keep steady.
“He left for another city, for work.
He didn’t tell me the details.” “And when his name was called in the square three days ago?” “I didn’t know his name would be mentioned.
I was as surprised as everyone else.” The soldier looked at her in a silence longer than a simple answer warranted, and she noticed his eyes moving, without her meaning to draw attention to it, toward his room at the end of the hallway, before she caught her mistake and brought her gaze back to his face directly.
“If he’s not here, then you won’t mind if we check for ourselves,” he said, and did not wait for her permission.
The soldiers went in and began searching the room opening the wardrobe, lifting the mattress, looking behind the crates stacked in the corner.
The search was not violent so much as methodical, men performing a task they were used to repeating in other houses before this one.
One of them found the leather notebook on the small shelf above the desk, opened it, and turned through its last pages most of them short lines about ordinary days, eating, working, the weather until he reached a page close to the current date, bearing a brief note Oren had written only a few days before.
“This is fairly recent,” the soldier said, holding the notebook up toward his colleague.
“Much more recent than a few weeks.” He looked at Marin, who felt her hand tense slightly at her side.
“Maybe he wrote in it before he left.” “And left the notebook behind?
A man who writes in it almost every day, and leaves without taking the one thing that seems to matter to him?” She found no quick answer, and the silence stretched between them for a long moment, long enough for the soldier to know that what he’d heard wasn’t the whole truth.
He stepped toward her, and said in a sharper tone: “Where is he?” “I don’t know.” He shoved her with his hand not with great force, but enough for her shoulder to strike the doorframe, and she felt a faint pain spread from her shoulder down her arm.
She did not scream, and did not cry, only held her ground, her eyes on his, fear plain in them despite her attempt to hide it.
“I don’t know,” she repeated, more calmly this time, as though calm itself were the only weapon she had left.
The soldier looked at her a moment longer, then turned and ordered the search to continue, not entirely convinced, but without sufficient proof to press further for now.
Meanwhile, Oren had arrived, about an hour before, at the place he had chosen two days earlier, when he had first begun seriously thinking through the details: the cellar of an old mill that had stopped operating years before, at the far southern edge of the village, a place no one visited anymore since a newer mill had been built closer to the water sources.
He knew the place from his work; the old maintenance records that had passed through his hands more than once mentioned a cellar beneath the mill, once used to store grain before it was abandoned along with the rest of the building, and also mentioned a narrow passage connecting it to an old drainage channel running underground toward the fields, originally dug to carry off the mill’s excess water during the rainy season.
He climbed down into the cellar through a decrepit wooden door nearly falling off its hinges, the air inside heavy with the smell of damp and rotting wood, the darkness nearly complete but for a thin thread of light slipping through a crack in the ceiling.
He sat there, back against the cold stone wall, waiting for time to pass without knowing exactly what was happening in the village above him.
Long hours passed this way, a heavy silence broken now and then by the sound of an insect or a light scattering of dust from the ceiling.
He tried not to think too much about Marin, about what they might ask her, about how she would look when they confronted her, but the thought kept returning to him every few minutes despite his efforts.
Toward evening that day, he heard the sound of footsteps above him, light at first, then steadier, as though someone were walking around the abandoned building, checking something.
They were not a soldier’s footsteps; he knew this from their rhythm, slower and more deliberate than the walk of a man performing a routine task, closer to the walk of someone searching carefully, who knew exactly what he was looking for.
He remained completely still, listening.
The footsteps stopped at the decrepit wooden door, then the door slowly opened, and Oren stayed where he was, not moving, not making a sound.
He waited until he heard the footsteps stop entirely at the wooden door above, then a brief silence settled.
He didn’t know who was up there, but he understood that staying where he was no longer felt any safer, so he began moving cautiously toward the rear passage before the door opened.
The supervisor had begun thinking about the matter the moment the soldiers left the Archive.
He was not by nature a bad man; he was only a man afraid for his job, and for himself, and he had heard, before the soldiers left, one of them mention, in an informal tone, that any information leading to the capture of a fugitive would be rewarded not a large sum, but not a trivial one either, for a man in his position.
He thought of the consequences too; if it were discovered later that he had deliberately lied to the soldiers, he might lose more than just his job.
He didn’t know exactly where Oren was, but he knew the village well better than any stranger soldier who had arrived that morning and he knew there were only a few places a young man who worked specifically at the Archive might think of.
He thought of the old mill, not because he was certain, but because he remembered that Oren himself had reviewed its maintenance records months earlier, as part of an ordinary task assigned to him, and had mentioned to Martin at the time, in passing, a detail about an old cellar beneath it that almost no one remembered anymore.
He went out after noon under the pretext of checking on some matters, and walked toward the southern edge of the village, avoiding the main road, until he reached the vicinity of the abandoned mill.
As he approached, he saw a faint mark in the dirt before the wooden door a relatively fresh footprint, not something he could be entirely certain of, but enough to convince him his hunch had not been baseless.
He opened the door slowly and went down into the cellar, but found no one there.
He stood for a few moments, looking around the place in silence, then noticed, near the back wall, a fresh disturbance in the dirt, and near it, the opening of the narrow passage leading to the drainage channel.
He crouched before the opening and ran his hand over the dirt at its edge, finding fresh marks still clearly visible.
He needed nothing more than that to understand that Oren had been here, and that he had left by the other route.
The supervisor entered the passage a few steps, then stopped when it grew narrower than he could bear, and looked at the darkness stretching before him.
He didn’t know exactly where it led, and he was not prepared to crawl through it alone.
He came out of the mill and made his way back toward the square, thinking of the reward he might receive, and of what might happen to him if the soldiers found Oren elsewhere before he did.
Inside the cellar, Oren had not waited longer than necessary; the moment he heard the footsteps stop outside, minutes later, he moved cautiously toward the narrow passage he had already examined upon his arrival a low opening in the cellar’s rear wall, barely wide enough for his body if he bent completely, leading, according to what he remembered from the records, to the old drainage channel running beneath the fields.
He crawled through it, the rough stones scraping his palms, the air inside heavier and damper than in the cellar itself, the smell of old mud and stagnant water filling his nose with every breath.
His foot caught more than once on stone protrusions he couldn’t see in the total darkness, and he felt a sharp pain in his ankle after striking a jutting edge, but he kept moving forward without stopping, knowing that stopping now was a luxury he did not have.
The crawl continued for long minutes, seeming far longer than their actual length, before he saw before him a faint glimmer of light, a small opening looking out onto a shallow water channel at the edge of one of the fields far from the village.
He climbed out at last, his clothes soaked with mud to the knees, his hands scraped, and breathed deeply the open air, trying to determine exactly where he was amid the stretching fields in the fading evening light.
He did not yet know whether he had truly escaped, or was merely postponing something that, in the end, could not be avoided.
The supervisor returned to the square and went straight to the soldier who seemed to be the highest-ranking among those still there, standing before him a moment, catching his breath more than the walk had actually required.
“I think I know where he might be,” he said finally, in a voice lower than he’d used all day.
“The old mill, at the southern edge.
I’m not entirely certain, but there’s a cellar beneath it few people remember.” The soldier looked at him in brief silence, then nodded to two nearby colleagues, and the three began moving toward the southern edge of the village, with quick, organized steps, while the supervisor remained standing in place, watching them move off, with a feeling he could not quite determine was relief, or something far heavier than that.
Your support means everything.”