They say we won.
He asked what they get for it and nobody answered.
The ground is still frozen. The spade goes in and stops. Two years unploughed, so it has set hard, and it takes three days to break ground like that.
He did not go to fight. They said he was past the age. So he was here, and he got through the winter here.
Last year they ate all the seed. There was nothing to eat in winter, so they ate what was meant for planting.
Do you know what that means. It means there is nothing to plant this year.
And still he ploughs the field. For when there is something to put in it. Waiting on what he does not have, digging what he does.
The spade caught on something.
He thought it was a stone.
It was not a stone.
It was a man. Lying face down. A piece of armour still hooked on one shoulder and everything under it torn away.
He took hold of that shoulder and turned him over.
It was his son.
He sent him last autumn. They did not take him — he went.
Twenty years he raised him in this field, and in three days he was gone. That day the father could not say anything. He could not even say come back safe.
And the words he did not say sat in his throat all winter.
The breath was still in him. So the father lifted him onto his back.
He was light.
Something you raised for twenty years cannot be that light.
He did not plough the field that day. He did not plough it the next day either. Three days he did not plough.
And spring came anyway.
Forty days he lay there.
Of the first fortnight he has no memory. They told him his father carried him home on his back, and he has no memory of that either. The shoulder will not heal, and on rainy days the bone cries. His mother boils cloth every day and the steam fills the room.
They say he came back alive. That is what the village says.
And it is true that he came back alive. But he does not know what it is that came back.
There is something inside his coat. He does not know what it is. A bundle of soaked paper, full of letters, and he cannot read.
It was the day the fighting ended.
A woman called him over from behind the tents. A woman who knew her letters. The one who wrote down the names of the dying. She had written on his arm too. He did not know then what it meant.
She took something out of her coat, wrapped in oiled cloth and wrapped again in hemp.
"Hold this for me."
"I am forty-four and you are twenty. That is all it is."
"Do not ask what it is. If you know, it gets heavy."
He asked why him.
"Because it looks like you will live a long time."
That sentence still frightens him.
If he could read he would have read it. And what he would have done then, he does not know.
Because he could not read, he kept it.
His mother scoops salt in the kitchen. It is a big jar, up to her shoulder. All winter they lived on what was inside it.
Salt does not spoil. And what is inside salt does not spoil either.
On the day she went to market, he went into the kitchen. One hand still cannot take any weight. He went in anyway.
He took out half the salt. He laid the oiled cloth underneath. He covered it with the salt again. He closed the lid.
He put the jar back where it stood, but the position was slightly off. It took him a long while to set it straight.
His mother moves the jar every morning. And listening to that sound, he knows it is still there.
Sixty years passed.
He is eighty and hard of hearing. You have to ask him loudly.
His granddaughter goes to lessons to learn her letters, and the teacher told them to go and ask the old people about the old days. She only has her grandfather, so she went to him.
"Grandfather, what was it like when you were young?"
And he starts telling her about the cow. How the cow was and how the field was, when it rained and when it didn't.
"No, not that. The war. The war."
And when she said that he went quiet. And after a long time he said this.
"Back then everyone went. Not because they told us to go, but because it felt like we couldn't not go. I was twenty."
He showed her his shoulder. Said it still hurts. Said on rainy days the bone cries.
That sounded funny so she laughed, and he laughed too.
But when he told her the next part his voice got smaller.
He said his father carried him home from the field. That he lay there forty days. That he does not even remember the first fortnight.
And then a woman came into it. He said she was a woman who knew her letters. The one who wrote down the names of the dying. He said she left something with him.
"Left what with you?"
"Paper."
"What paper?"
"Paper full of letters."
"Did you read it?"
"I can't read."
"Then who read it?"
"Nobody."
"Then where is it now?"
Her grandfather did not say anything for a long time.
She thought he had not heard, so she asked again, loudly.
"Grandfather, where is that paper?"
I don't remember, he said.
Whether he really did not remember, or whether he remembered and said that anyway, she does not know.
She should have asked one more time. But that day he said he was tired, so she just left.
She told the teacher about the cow.
She does not know where it is. She only knows that it was.
She does not know if that is enough — but here she is, telling it again.
My grandfather, see.
He went to war at twenty.
Five hundred years passed.
That field is not a field any more. There is no house and no kitchen. But the place where the kitchen stood remained.
Beneath the floor, one earthenware jar. It was full of salt.
People sweep the soil away with brushes. They are wearing gloves. They are holding their breath. Someone calls the others over. Paper, they say. There are letters on it.
One of them reaches out a hand. That hand stops above the paper.
Five hundred years ago a hand stopped here too. That time it came out empty. And that was right.
Today is different. This paper will not kill anyone now. Now it can be read.
She opened the paper. She read it. She could read it.
They were the names that came up out of the sea. What the water kept for ten years. The state's seal was stamped on them. They were the men who bought false testimony.
The seal is opened.
Today it is finally opened.
These names are already too late. That is what the woman said. Too late. Five hundred years too late.
But now nobody can erase them.
Fire burns
Salt preserves
Iron remembers
And a person writes