Free Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte Page B

Svartström."
    I no longer recognized the path I had so often followed during the winter on my way to the lake to see the horses. It had become narrower, more winding; the forest had grown thicker. As the snow thaws and changes color and the spring chrysalis bursts into flight out of the shining icy cocoon leaving the bare dead slough of winter, the forest regains mastery over the snow and the frost and becomes thick again—entangled, secretive—a green, mysterious and forbidden universe.
    Svartström stepped slowly and cautiously; he stopped now and again to listen, detecting in the rhythmical silence of the forest, in that musical silence of nature, the crackling of the branches, the patter of the squirrel in a pine tree, the darting rustle of the hare, the anxious sniffing of the fox, the call of a bird, the whisper of a leaf, and far away—diseased and defiled—the voice of man. The silence around us was no longer the dead silence of winter, frosty and transparent as a block of crystal. It was a living silence, shot through by warm streams of colors, sounds and odors. The silence was like a river that I felt flowing around us; I thought I was being carried down the current of that invisible river, between the banks that were like warm, moist lips.
    The mellow heat of the rising sun was pervading the forest. As the sun gradually climbed up along the arch of the horizon raising a slight pink mist from the silvery surface of the lake, there came with the wind a far-off rattling of machine guns, solitary rifle shots, the rapt song of the cuckoo; and at the end of that landscape of sounds, colors and odors, within a break of the forest, there flashed something opaque, something shiny, like the shimmering of an unreal sea—Lake Ladoga, the vast frozen expanse of Lake Ladoga.
    At last we stepped out of the forest onto the shore of the lake and saw the horses.
    It happened last year in October. The Finnish vanguard, after crossing the Vuoksi wilderness, crossed the threshold of the wild limitless Raikkola forest. It was full of Russian troops. Almost the entire Soviet artillery of the northern sector of the Karelian isthmus had rushed toward Lake Ladoga to escape the stranglehold of the Finnish army. It had hoped to ship the guns and the horses and to bring them to safety across the lake. But the Soviet lighters and tugs were late in arriving; every hour of delay could prove fatal for the frost had set in, gripping and savage; the lake was likely to freeze at any moment, and the Finnish troops, formed of ranger detachments, were gliding through the thick forest and pressing the Russians on all sides, attacking them from the flanks and the rear.
    On the third day a huge fire flared in the Raikkola forest. Men, horses and trees clutched within the circle of fire sent out awful cries. The rangers, firing through that wall of smoke and flames, blocked every avenue of escape. Mad with terror, the horses of the Soviet artillery—there were almost a thousand of them—hurled themselves into the furnace and broke through the besieging flames and machine guns. Many perished within the flames, but most of them succeeded in reaching the shores of the lake and threw themselves into the water.
    The lake is not deep there, not more than six feet; but a hundred yards from the shore the bottom suddenly drops. Pressed within that narrow space (the lakeshore curves inward there forming a small bay) between the deeper water and the barrier of fire, the horses clustered, shuddering with cold and fear, their heads stretched out above the surface of the water. Those nearer to land were scorched by the flames and reared and struggled to hoist themselves onto the backs of the others, tried to push a way open by biting and kicking. And while still madly struggling, the ice gripped them.
    The north wind swooped down during the night. (The north wind blows from the Murmansk Sea, like an angel of doom, crying aloud, and the land suddenly dies.) The