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IMMEDIATELY AFTER the Austrian occupation, a gendarmerie barracks was set up in Sokoc, a village on a high plateau. Its commander had brought with him a beautiful blonde wife from somewhere in the far-off world. She had large blue eyes that looked as though they were made of glass and, with her fragile beauty, her European clothes and possessions, she looked like a small luxury object some traveler might have lost as he passed over this mountain on his journey from one city to another.

The village had not yet recovered from its surprise and the young bride had not quite finished arranging her bridal room, full of cushions, embroidery, and ribbons, when bandits were reported in the district. As a result, a detachment of Streifkorps soon arrived at the barracks and the personnel was doubled thereby.

The commander began to spend whole days and nights out on duty, planning and directing the patrols. Bewildered and a little frightened by what was happening, the young bride passed the time with certain of the village women, in hopes of feeling less lonely. But she was always waiting. Sleep and food no longer refreshed or strengthened her; every feeling was drained by her constant anxiety. The village women pleaded with her and urged her to eat, while eating and drinking heartily themselves. At night some of them would come to talk, telling her anecdotes and stories in order to help her fall asleep. But in the end the women, tired out with their tales, would fall asleep and the young wife lying in bed would stare at them as they slept on the red rug, herself sleepless and oppressed by the heavy smells of milk and wool that rose from their bodies.

When, after several days of such waiting, the commander would arrive home, she could not even then feel much comfort and relief. He would return exhausted from tramping through forests and from sleepless nights, unshaven, spattered with mud, and soaking wet. Two boys would have to struggle to remove his sodden boots, pulling away some of the skin from his bruised and swollen legs as they did so. He would sit dejected and worried by the failure of his campaign, absent-minded, but at the same time planning new moves. The look of his face would be worn and haggard; the sun had burned it and the mountain wind had cracked his lips. During that short respite at home, his wife would tend to him as if he were wounded, but in three or four days he would be dressed and booted again at dawn, ready to set off with his men into the mountains. Again all her thoughts would be prayers; that the outlaws would be captured and that this terrible kind of life would come to an end.

The prayers came true one day. Lazar Zelenović, the chief and the shrewdest of the outlaws, was captured. The word went round the barracks and the village, and opinion was that it would now be much easier to capture or scatter the rest.

Lazar was caught by chance, by a patrol that had been tracking one of his men. It came about this way: two months before, when Lazar had first come from Hercegovina, he had been wounded by a bullet in the chest. To give himself time to recover, he and some of his men had built a shelter of dry branches, driftwood, and mud under the lee of a huge fallen log and alongside one of the mountain streams. Thus he was protected from observation from the paths that ran higher along the river line, and in this hole he lived. He lay there all day, bathing the wound in his chest with river water while the patrols searched everywhere among the cliffs and crags for him. If he’d had better luck, a better hiding place, and if the weather had not turned hot so early in the season,Lazar could have recovered. But, as it was, the heat made the wound septic. He protected himself as best he could against the flies and mosquitoes, but the wound continued to fester and the inflammation spread. His fever grew.

This was Lazar’s state when one of the younger men decided to bring him a little wax and brandy as a cure. The patrol happened to sight the boy just as he was leaving a shepherd’s hut to set off into the mountains. But, after he had nearly reached the stream, the boy looked back and glimpsed some of the Streifkorps men on his trail. He got away easily among the undergrowth along the river.

At the first signal, the commander had left his horse in a field and had gone on, running ahead of his men. As he came through the trees toward the river, he suddenly caught his foot against something and fell up to his waist in mud and slime. Just as he was beginning, with some trouble, to extricate himself to go on in further pursuit, he caught the terrible smell of Lazar’s wound and he noticed the low shelter against the log. He pulled himself from the mud and approached carefully; through the opening in the heaped-up branches he could see part of a sheepskin. He thought that he had run across the hiding-place of the man he had just been following.

To deceive the hidden outlaw, the commander called back orders to the Streifkorps patrol: “He must have gone further down river. Double time after him and I’ll follow along. I’ve hurt my leg on these thorns.” While he was shouting this, he signaled with one hand for the men to be silent, and with the other he motioned for them to move up around him. When three of them were there, they suddenly launched themselves into the hiding-place and seized the brigand from behind, like a badger in his hole. Lazar had a long rifle and a knife, but he did not fight back. He could barely move.

They fettered his hands with a chain and tied his feet with a rope. They carried him out like a log, over the steep pathless slope to the field where the commander’s horse was waiting. As they walked, they felt stifled by the stench from him and when they laid him down on the grass they saw the great red wound on his chest. A certain Zhivan from Gorazhde, serving as spy and informant for the Streifkorps, recognized Lazar at once. They came from the same village; they had both celebrated the same saint’s day, the day of St. John.

The commander was not sure. He asked Zhivan to confirm again that this really was Lazar. They all bent to look at the prisoner.

Zhivan said, “It’s you, Lazar!”

“You know me better than I know you.”

“You know me too, Lazar. Of course you do.”

“Even if I’d never known you, now I’d know what and who you are. Everybody in the villages, Serb or Turk, from here to Gorazhde, would recognize you. A half-witted kid looking at us for the first time would say: the one who is lying there tied-up and wounded is Lazar and that miserable thing leaning over him is Zhivan.”

The outlaw, in his fever, seemed to have a need to talk. Zhivan wanted to defend his reputation, and who knows how long they might have argued if the commander hadn’t stopped them in order to ask Lazar some questions. Lazar fell silent. He would not answer to anything about his comrades. The commander grew stern. He gave orders to the sergeant major that Zhivan should not be allowed a single drop of water, no matter how much he begged, until he was ready to speak about this.

While they were making a rough stretcher, the young commander sat alone at a little distance, trying to rest and collect his thoughts. He leaned his elbow on one knee and his forehead on his palm, staring at the fresh green of the mountainsides that rolled away in the distance like great waves of a static sea. He wanted to think about his success, the reputation he would get, about being at home again with his wife. But no real thoughts would form. He felt only the leaden fatigue that the traveler through night and heavy snow feels, and like that traveler he knew that he must keep himself awake. He stood up and gave the order to move.

Now they were nine in all. The stretcher was clumsy and there were many knots. One of the Streifkorps men went up to it and threw his overcoat onto the form of the wounded man. He did this in an odd way, turning as he let go, as if he were throwing the coat into an abyss. They went slowly. The sun was scorching. The commander at first rode behind the stretcher but he found the smell from the wound so terrible that he made his horse go on ahead. Late in the afternoon when they came down into the Glasinac valley they were able to commandeer a cart and oxen from a peasant. And so before sunset they made their way across the plain to Sokoc. They might have been men coming back from a hunt if the bundle of their prey had not looked and smelled so strange.

In the field that fronted the barracks the village women and children gathered to watch, the commander’s wife among them. At first she waited only to see her husband again and gave no thought to the outlaw. But, as the women talked more and more about the prisoner, as they told more and more fantastic tales of him, and as the small procession moved over the plain toward them — slow and spaced out like a funeral — she began to feel another kind of anticipation and a sense of fear. They arrived at last. With some noise and commotion the men opened up the left side of the main gate, something that was ordinarily done only for the cartloads of wood or hay. The procession moved up to the doors of the barracks. There the commander dismounted, landing heavily on the ground with the movements of a man exhausted. Then his wife felt the bristly several-days’ growth of beard against her face, and she smelled again the compound odor of sweat, earth, and rain which he always carried with him from these nights and days on duty.

While the commander was giving orders, his wife glanced at the outlaw, who was lying bound to the stretcher and perfectly still. Only his head was slightly raised on a block of wood and a little straw. He looked at nobody. She smelled the acute stench which seemed like that of a wounded wild animal.

When he had given the necessary orders, the commander took his wife by the arm and led her into the house in order that she should not see them untying and removing the prisoner. After he had washed and changed into clean clothes, he went out again to see how Lazar had been secured. The temporary prison was nothing more than the cellar under the commander’s house. It was not satisfactory because the door — which had an iron grille in the upper part — was hardly very stout and had only a simple lock. Therefore a guard had to be placed on the improvised cell at night.

The commander ate some food and talked for a long time with his wife. At first he spoke of trifles. He was animated and gay, like a child. He was enormously pleased with the outcome. He had captured the chief and most dangerous of the outlaws after five months of search and frustration, after five months of unwarranted reprimands from his superior officer in Rogatica and from Command Headquarters in Sarajevo. Now he would find out from Lazar where the other outlaws were hiding and the names of their collaborators in the countryside. The commander thought he could finish his job, set his heart at rest, and at last enjoy the recognition of success.

“And if he won’t betray them?” asked his wife anxiously.

“He will . . . He must,” answered the commander and would not talk any more of it.

The commander was sleepy. He felt an awful weight of fatigue stronger than the pride of his victory, than his hunger, than his desire for his wife. The freshness of the bed made him feel dizzy. He struggled to keep on talking to show that he was not really so tired, but the words caught in his mouth and the intervals between words became longer. In mid-sentence he fell asleep, his left hand resting on the small, white, rounded shoulder of his wife.

She did not want to sleep, though. She felt contented and excited — but at the same time frightened and sad. For a long time she watched the sleeping man beside her, the right side of his face sunk in the soft feather pillow, his cracked lips slightly parted as if he were trying to drink that pillow. Between our wakeful selves and the sleeper beside us there always forms a great, cold distance. It is made of non-understanding, a strange sense of desertion, and deathly loneliness.

The young wife tried to go to sleep herself. But she was jolted out of her first slumber by the noise of the changing of the guard in front of the cellar door. As if she had not slept or thought of anything else since the return, her mind was on the idea of the outlaw.

Zhivan, the spy and Lazar’s compatriot, was on guard. She realized that it was not so much the sound of the guard changing that had awakened her as the sound of Lazar’s voice calling for water. Now he was asking something again.

“Which of you is on duty?”

Silence.

“Is it you, Zhivan?”

“Yes. Shut up.”

“How can I shut up, damn you, when I’m dying of thirst and fever? Give me a little water, Zhivan, in the name of our patron St. John — don’t let me perish here like vermin.”

Zhivan pretended not to hear, in hopes that the prisoner would get tired of pleading. But the low, hoarse voice came again.

“If you have any idea of what suffering and captivity are, don’t refuse me, Zhivan, in the name of your children.”

“Don’t swear by the name of my children! I’ve got orders and this is my duty. Shut up. You’ll wake the commander.”

“Let him rot. He’s worse than a Turk to torture me with thirst on top of all my bad luck. Go on, shove me a little water if you’re a man.”

She discovered, from some further muffled conversation, that her husband had denied water for Lazar in order to force him to betray his men. The prisoner was tortured by violent thirst and fever, but evidently he found some relief in swearing, in stringing together wild words and curses, and in repeating the word “water.” For a few moments he would be silent, then he would let out a deep sigh, then he would utter a stream of words.

“Zhivan, Zhivan, curse you a hundred times for this torture. Give me a little water and you can kill me then — with good luck to you in this world and the other.”

But Zhivan had stopped answering.

“Zhivan, Zhivan! I implore you. I’m burning . . . ”

Nothing. The burnt-out last quarter of the moon came late into the sky. Zhivan stood in the shadow, and when he spoke again his voice was muted. Lazar yelled to the commander.

“Commander, don’t torture me any more, for Christ’s sake, when it’s no use.”

The silence seemed greater after his voice. In that silence, the outlaw would suddenly give a hoarse grunt and a heavy groan, no longer knowing what he said.

“Foul dogs suck your blood forever and never get enough! Let our blood choke you. Commander, where are you, damn your guts.”

The last words came in a stifled tone from his parched throat. Again Zhivan told him to be still and promised that he’d call the commander at first light. The commander would surely give him water if only Lazar told them what they asked. He had to be patient until then. But the prisoner would forget, and in a few moments he would scream again.

“In God’s name, Zhivan, water . . . I’m burning.” And he would repeat the word a hundred times, the fever and his uneasy breathing changing his voice, now loud, now low.

She sat on the edge of her bed and listened to all this, unconscious of herself and where she was, lost completely in the new horrors she heard in the outlaw’s voice.

When she was a child in her parents’ house there were nights when she could not sleep. They came, usually, in the spring or the autumn, and in those hours she would listen the whole night through to troubled, monotonous voices that came to her from the dark outside: the wind honing on the edge of the chimney or banging the forgotten garden gate. The child lying there had given these sounds a human quality, imagining that they were living beings in trouble in the night, struggling, howling, moaning. Our childhoods are often repeated farther on in life. How wonderful if it were only childhood again, with nothing but the innocent terror that awoke the little girl — here in this remote village, here in her marriage bed. If the voice of the dying man were only the wind swinging a gate.

But it was not the wind on the chimney or the sound of hinges, though it came at the same regular intervals; it was unmistakably the human voice coming through dry open lips over the burnt tongue. “Water, water, water.”

When Zhivan was relieved by another guard, the prisoner’s cries did not stop, yet they became lower and more exhausted. The young wife continued to sit in the dark of her room, riveted, listened to every sound from below, ceaselessly thinking the same thought. How could she grasp and understand the life of these people? She saw only that some of them were outlaws and some of them were gendarmerie and that these were two faces of the same disaster. She saw that they would hunt each other mercilessly and that she would stay here between the two, hopeless with grief and pity.

There had been a great deal of talk about Lazar in Sokoc and she had heard all the tales of his cruelty: the way he tortured the villagers who would not submit to him, how he ambushed the gendarmes, leaving them dead and naked in the road. She knew that they were only taking their revenge now. But could revenge last forever? It seemed as if they were all staggering over some precipice and that they would all fall on just such a night into darkness, blood, thirst, and unknown horrors.

At times she had thought of waking the sleeping man on the bed and asking him to disperse all this nightmare with one word, one smile. But she did not stir nor did she wake him. She stayed motionless and alone with the voice from the cellar. She thought, too, of the prayers she had learned in childhood. But those protections were for a vanished life and they were helpless now. She resigned herself to the idea that the calling voice would forever plead and call to her, while the one who was sleeping here beside her would sleep on silently forever.

The night weighed, denser and heavier. It was no longer one in the chain of days, but a desert of dark time in which the last living man on earth was crying for help without hope and without the relief of one merciful drop of water. In the whole of God’s great world, with all its rivers, rains, and dews there was no longer even one teardrop of water left nor a living hand to carry it. The waters had dried up and men had rotted away. There remained in the universe just the one weak rush-light of her own senses as the only witness of it all.

*  *  *  *  *

At last the daybreak came. Disbelieving, she watched the wall turn slowly white, just as it had on mornings before this, and she saw the day, first gray and then russet, take possession of the room. Objects separated and took their own forms again.

She strained her ears and she could still hear the outlaw’s voice, but it seemed to come from a further distance. There was no longer a cursing but a hoarse, occasional groan. It was as if she guessed rather than actually hearing it.

The young wife had no strength to move. Stiff, bent, with her head in her hands, she did not even notice when the commander awoke.

The man opened his rested eyes and his glance fell on the bent shoulders and white neck of his wife. Then, after the first sleepy uncertainty, something like a warm wave spread through his body, a joyful sense of reality. He wanted to call to his wife, to shout her name. But he changed his mind. Smiling, he silently raised himself a little, leaning on his left arm. Then, still without a word, he suddenly clasped her shoulders and pulled her to him.

She struggled against him briefly and vainly. The quick embrace seemed terrible to her and, at the same time, she could not resist. It seemed impossible and blasphemous to betray, so silently and easily, the night world in which she had moments ago been living and suffering. She wanted to tell him that it couldn’t be, that she could not be dragged thus into everyday life, that there were heavy and dreadful things that she must make him understand. The bitter words welled, but she could not pronounce a single one. She twisted her body, but he did not realize this as a sign of resistance. She tried to push him from her, but her movement had not half the strength of her bitterness nor the speed of her thoughts. The warmth of that live, rested, wakeful body weighed on her like a burden. The bones and muscles of her own body began to yield, like an obedient machine. Her mouth was sealed by his. She felt him like a huge stone to which she was tied; they were falling headlong together.

She sank, drowning in the familiar passion, while all of the thought of last night’s human darkness rose like bubbles to the surface and vanished.

The ornamented room suddenly filled with the ardent light of day.