Free Tzili by Aharon Appelfeld

spoke of reassessment and reappraisal, of diversion and camouflage. Tzili understood none of his many words, but this she understood: he was talking of another world.
    “Don’t go.” She clung to him.
    “You have to understand,” he said in a gentle voice. “Once you conquer your fear everything looks different.I’m happy now that I’ve conquered my fear. All my life fear has tortured me shamefully, you understand, shamefully. Now I’m a free man.”
    Afterward they sat together for a long time. But although Tzili now said, “I’ll go down. They know me, they won’t hurt me,” Mark had made up his mind: “This time I’m going down.” And he went down.

21
    M ARK RECEDED RAPIDLY and in a few minutes he was gone. She sat still and felt the silence deepening around her. The sky changed color and a shudder passed over the mountainside.
    Tzili rose to her feet and went into the bunker. It was dark and warm inside the bunker. The haversack lay to one side. For the past few days Mark had refused to go into the bunker. “A man is not a mole. This lying about is shameful.” He used the word
shameful
often, pronouncing it in a foreign accent, apparently German.
    The daylight hours crept slowly by, and Tzili concentrated her thoughts on Mark’s progress across the mountainside. She imagined him going up and down the same paths that she herself had taken. She saw him pass by the hut where she had bartered a garment for a sausage. She saw it all so clearly that she felt as if she herself were there with him.
    In the afternoon she lit a fire and said: “I’ll make Mark some herb tea. He likes herb tea.”
    Mark was late.
    “Don’t worry, he’ll come back,” a voice from home said in her ear. But when twilight fell and Mark did not return anxiety began dripping into her soul. She went down to the river and washed the mugs. The cold water banished the anxiety for a moment. For some reason she spread a cloth on the ground.
    Darkness fell. The days she had spent with Mark had blunted her fear of the night. Now she was alone again. Mark’s voice came to her and she heard: “A man is not an insect. Death isn’t as terrible as it seems.” Now these words were accompanied by the music of a military band. Like in her childhood, on the Day of Independence, when the army held parades and the bugles played. The military voice gave her back a kind of confidence.
    Mark was late.
    Now she felt that the domestic smells that had enveloped the place were fading away. Fresh, cold air blew in their place. It occurred to her that if she took the clothes out of the haversack and spread them around, the homely smells would come back to fill the air, and perhaps Mark would sense them. Immediately she took the haversack out of the bunker and spread the clothes on the ground. The brightly colored clothes, all damp and crumpled, gave off a confined, moldy smell.
    He’s lost, he must be lost. She clung to this sentence like an anchor. She fell to her knees by the clothes. They were children’s clothes, small and shrunken with the damp, spotted with food stains and a little torn.
    Afterward she turned aside to listen. Apart from an occasional rustle or murmur there was nothing to be heard. From the distant huts scattered between the swamps, isolated barks reached her ears.
    After midnight a thin drizzle began to fall and she put the things back into the bunker. This small activity revived an old scene in her memory. She remembered the first days, before the bunker, when she had brought him the tobacco. The way he had rolled the shredded leaves in a piece of newspaper, the way he had recovered his looks, his smile, and the light on his face.
    The rain stopped but the wind grew stronger, bending the trees with broad, sweeping movements. Tzili went into the bunker. It was warm and full of the smell of tobacco. She breathed in the smell.
    She sat in the dark and for some reason she thought about Mark’s wife. Mark seldom spoke of her. Once