The second wave broke against us the way the first one had, and the third, and somewhere between the third wave and the fourth I stopped counting, because counting implied the numbers meant something and by that point I no longer believed they did.
We held the ridge for two more days after the radio operator's voice cracked with the news about the Bulgarians. I will not pretend those two days were heroic. They were simply continuous — fire, reload, fire, the mages circling, the walkers grinding closer along the valley floor, men disappearing from the line one at a time or several at a time, replaced by no one, because there was no one left behind us to send. The Ukrainian sergeant's section had lost half its strength by the second evening. Gheorghe kept firing and kept his low murmuring commentary going, though I noticed it had stopped sounding like analysis and started sounding like a man talking to himself simply to confirm he still could.
Radu hadn't slept properly in three days. None of us had. But something in him had gone past tired into a glassy stillness that worried me more than panic would have.
On the second night, lying in the dugout with the cold finding every gap in my coat, I made a decision I am not proud of and have stopped pretending I regret.
I decided to leave.
---
I want to explain this honestly, because honesty is the only thing I have left to offer anyone, including myself. It was not cowardice in the simple sense, though I understand if that's what it looks like written down. I had done the arithmetic the same way Gheorghe did his — the Empire from the west, the Bulgarians closing from the south, our own command structure fracturing into men giving orders that contradicted the orders given an hour before. Romania was not going to hold this ridge. Nothing I did with my single rifle in this single trench was going to change that by so much as a metre of ground.
What I could possibly still change was whether Ana spent the rest of her life as a widow.
I left without waking Radu or Gheorghe. I told myself this was mercy. I have had a long time since to wonder whether it was simply cowardice wearing a second, smaller disguise on top of the first one.
I took my rifle, because a man walking through a war zone without one was just a different kind of target, and I went over the rear lip of the trench in the deep dark before the moon rose, and I started walking south and east. Toward home. Toward Ana. I told myself I was walking toward something, even though I understood, somewhere underneath the telling, that home currently sat in the path of three converging armies and might not be reachable by any direction at all.
---
I walked for most of that night and the next, sleeping through the grey daylight hours in folds of rock and treeline that offered concealment if nothing else. I avoided the roads, thick with military traffic moving in directions I no longer wanted any part of, and kept to goat paths and field margins that a farmer's eye could find even in country he didn't know, because land tells you things about itself if you know how to listen.
It took me eleven days. Eleven days of stolen turnips and creek water and sleeping in barns that weren't mine, of skirting two more skirmish lines and one burned-out village I will not describe further than to say it confirmed everything I already feared about what this war was doing to the country I was trying to walk home to.
And then, on a grey morning with frost still on the grass, I came over the rise above Focșani and saw my own roofline, and my own chimney smoke, and I stood there for what felt like a very long time simply looking at it, because some part of me had stopped believing it would still be there.
---
Ana was in the yard when I came through the gate. She dropped the bucket she was carrying — I remember the specific sound of it hitting the frozen ground, the water spreading out in a dark stain that froze almost as fast as it spread — and then she was running, and then I had no more attention left to spare for buckets or frost or anything else in the entire world except her.
She held my face in both hands the way she had the day I left, except now she was crying, which she hadn't done then, and I understood that the not-crying before had been its own kind of strength that she'd needed for the leaving and didn't need anymore now that I was back.
"You came back," she said, again and again, as if saying it enough times would make it more permanent. "You came back."
"I came back," I said. "I'm here. I'm not leaving again."
I believed that when I said it. I want that recorded honestly, the same as everything else.
We had one day. I want to tell you about that day, because I think it matters more than anything else in this account, more than the trench, more than the mountains, more than anything that came before or after. We didn't talk about the war. We didn't talk about what came next, or what I would say if anyone asked why I was home, or what Constantin's opinions might be about a husband who'd returned without official permission. We simply existed together in the small warm space of our kitchen, and she made the stew I had thought about every single day in those mountains, and it tasted exactly the way I remembered it and somehow also better, because I had genuinely believed, more than once on that ridge, that I would never taste it again.
That night I slept beside my wife for the first time in months, and for those few hours I let myself believe that the war was something happening somewhere else, to other people, and that Ana and I had somehow found a small private exemption from it.
---
Tomescu came at dawn, riding fast, and behind him came two military policemen and a young lieutenant.
I understand now, in the way you understand things only after they've already finished happening to you, that he must have seen me on the road home, or heard from someone who had, and spent however many days deciding what to do with that knowledge, weighing it against his own fear for his son Ion, still somewhere in those collapsing mountains, until the weighing finally tipped in a direction I hadn't let myself imagine.
I was in the yard when they came through the gate, the same gate Ana had run through to reach me a day before. I didn't run. I had run once already and look what little good it had purchased me — eleven days of stolen turnips and one day, one single day, of a life I'd already understood was being lent to me rather than given.
"Matei Aldea." The lieutenant had a list. The whole war ran on lists, beginning to end. "You're charged with desertion in the face of the enemy. Identified by a civilian informant." He didn't need to say the name. Tomescu sat his horse at the edge of the yard, not meeting my eyes, looking instead at some fixed point on the middle distance that I understood, with a clarity that didn't even carry much anger in it anymore, was where he had decided to keep his attention for the rest of this.
Ana came out of the house at the sound of voices and understood everything in less time than it takes to describe understanding it.
"No." Just that, at first. Then, as the two policemen moved to take my arms: "No — please — he came home, he's home now, please, you can't—"
"Ma'am." The lieutenant's voice carried genuine discomfort, which somehow made it worse rather than better. "I'm sorry. The order doesn't leave room for that."
"He's not a danger to anyone! He's a farmer! Please, I'm begging you—" She had hold of my arm now, and then hold of the lieutenant's sleeve, her composure from the day before entirely gone, replaced by something raw and total that I had never seen in her before and which I understood, even as it was happening, I would carry as the very last image of her for whatever time I had left to carry anything at all. "Please, *please*, take me instead, take anything, just don't—"
"Ana." I said her name as gently as I could manage with my own voice failing me in ways I hadn't expected. "Ana, look at me."
She didn't want to. I understood that too. Looking at me meant accepting what was happening, and not looking felt, in that moment, like it might somehow prevent it.
"Ana. Look at me."
She looked.
"I love you," I said. "I came back. Whatever happens now, I came back, and I got my day, and that's more than most men in those mountains are going to get. Do you understand me? That's more than most men get."
She was sobbing too hard to answer. The policemen had my arms now, pulling me toward the gate, and she came with us, still holding whatever piece of my coat she could reach, still begging, the words no longer fully forming into sentences, just sound, just the raw shape of a woman trying to hold onto something already being taken from her by men who had a list and an order and no room in either for what she was asking.
---
They took me to the edge of the village, to a low stone wall behind the mill, and Ana was not permitted to come past the gate, though she fought the policeman holding her with a strength I hadn't known she possessed, and her voice carried the whole distance, still begging, still saying my name, still saying *please* in a register that I will carry with me, if a dead man carries anything at all, for longer than I carried anything in life.
There were six of them. I did not know any of their faces.
The lieutenant asked if I wanted to say anything. I found that I did not have words left that hadn't already been spent in the yard, on Ana, where they belonged. I simply shook my head.
I looked past the rifles, past the wall, toward the sound of her voice still carrying from the gate, and I held that sound in whatever part of a frightened, ordinary man is built to hold the last thing he chooses to listen to.
The lieutenant gave the command.
I did not close my eyes. I am not sure why. Perhaps some last stubborn farmer's instinct insisted on seeing the field, even this one, even though it had never really been mine and certainly wasn't now, right up until there was nothing left in me capable of seeing anything at all.
The volley took me cleanly. I want that understood, for whatever comfort it's worth to anyone who reads this and has wondered, in the quiet hours, whether it was quick. It was quick. It was the only mercy the day had left to offer, and it was offered, and I was already past needing anything further from this particular field by the time the sound of the shots had finished rolling out across the frozen ground and back toward the gate where Ana was still screaming my name.
---
I have thought, in whatever way is still available to me to think anything, about Tomescu often since. About his son Ion, still in those mountains the last I knew of him, still as much in danger after his father's report as he had been before it, the betrayal having purchased nothing for anyone — not safety for Ion, not vindication for Tomescu, not anything at all except one more grave dug slightly ahead of schedule and one more widow added to a war that already had more of them than it knew what to do with.
I do not know if Gheorghe and Radu made it off that ridge. I do not know if Ion came home. I know only that I got my one day, and that Ana's voice at the gate was the last sound I chose, and that some part of me has decided, in the end, that this was enough — not because it actually was, but because a man has to decide something was enough eventually, or the wanting simply goes on forever with nowhere left to put it.