Free Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte Page A

his neck, his legs sunk halfway to his thighs in Lapp reindeer leather boots with upturned points like Persian slippers. His eyes were lowered and he was slightly stooped as he tapped the bowl of his empty pipe on the palm of his hand. When I reached him, he raised his face, looked at me smiling, and said, "Haivää päivää."
    " Haivää päivää ,Svartström ."
    He was pale, his brow damp with the sweat of fatigue and lack of sleep. As if apologizing, he told me that he had been in the forest the entire night with a ranger patrol.
    "Where is Colonel Merikallio?" I inquired.
    "He has gone to the lines," he replied. He glanced at me as he tapped the empty pipe in the hollow of his hand, and from time to time he turned toward the lake. I saw his nostrils quivering. He breathed through his nose as woodsmen do, as sissit —the Finnish rangers—do: a thin, cautious, suspicious breathing, just a thread of air.
    "You really want to go and see them?" asked Svartström. "It would have been better for you to follow the Colonel to the lines. He purposely went to the trenches not to see them."
    The wind was charged with the odor of the horses, that greasy, sweet odor.
    "I should like to see them for the last time, Svartström, before they take them away."
    We walked on toward the lake. The snow was sodden; it was already spring snow; no longer white, but ivory colored, with those green and yellow spots found in old ivory. Here and there where it filmed the red granite rock, it was the color of wine. And where the trees were thinner, it seemed to be covered with a thin coating of ice like a glistening piece of Orefors crystal through which pine needles, colored pebbles, blades of grass, scales of that white skin that clothes birch trunks could be seen. Twisted tree roots broke through the crystal sheet like frozen serpents,- it seemed as if the trees drew sustenance from the ice, that the young leaves of a more tender green took their sap from that dead, glassy matter. Strange sounds ran through the air,- it was not the wail of beaten iron, nor the sonorous shudder that bells make in the wind, nor the drawn-out soft note of a stroking finger on glass; it was not even the high, round hum of wild bees swarming in the thick of the woods, but it really was a wail; it seemed the moan of a wounded beast, the call of a lonely and despairing agony that crossed the sky like an invisible flock of doleful birds.
    Winter, that terrible winter of 1942, that had been the great scourge, the great plague of the Finnish people, the white plague that had filled the hospitals and churchyards of the whole of Finland, lay now like a huge naked corpse across the lakes and the woods. That huge decomposing body tainted the air with its lean smell of rotten wood, and the first spring breeze was already bringing its tired scents, its tepid odors, its intimate and bestial dog's breath—the very snow seemed to be lukewarm.
    For some days the soldiers had been less sad, more lively; their voices were a little louder, and during certain hours of the day a peculiar restlessness was creeping through the lines in the korsus, among lottalas, {5} through the trenches and the dugouts scooped into the thick of the wild Raikkola forest. To celebrate the return of spring, which is their sacred season of the year, the men of the North light great fires on the mountains, sing, drink and dance all night. But spring is the insidious disease of the North; it rots and dissolves the life that winter has jealously guarded and protected within its prison of ice, and brings its fatal gifts—love, the joy of living, the yielding to light thoughts and gay feelings, the enjoyment of strife, of idleness, and of sleep, the fever of the senses, the deluding weddings with nature. It is the season in which the eye of the man of the North is lighted with a turbid flame, and the proud shadow of death that winter sweeps clean and free, sets on his brow.
    "We have taken the wrong way,