Love is Always Write Anthology Volume 10

Yiddish phrase learned from his grandfather; he must have chosen it quite purposefully.
    Will Lange notice? Surely, this is a gesture meant to highlight his impotence. A killer of Jews muzzled by the exigencies of the Finnish alliance.
    Järvilehto quickly stoops and picks up the pencil for Joseph. "The rooms in the back are heated. Would you like to continue your writing there, with the men?"
    "Yes, thank you."
    Lange shifts his weight restlessly, but makes no other motion, no sign of recognition.
    The room Joseph is led to is packed with Finnish soldiers, all listening intently to the radio. A folk song plays. A chorus of women chant mournfully over an eerie melodic drone. The men are enraptured, faces slightly lifted, angling themselves, like antennas, to better absorb the waves of sound.
    Joseph greets the men quietly, finds a spot, sits down against the wall. His new cane is made of strong, smooth ash with a handle of reindeer horn; he rests it across his lap and begins to read over his notes.
    I'm restless and torn. With every sawing string note, the air vibrates and slithers against my phantom skin. None of the humans are so affected. They're all in separate worlds: the Finns wrapped up in the song of their people, Joseph wrestling with the words he desires to use as weapons, Järvilehto outside balancing on the tightrope of the borderline, Lange... Lange...
    I don't like to stray too far from Joseph. When I do, I lose my form and my sense of myself, becoming little more than a tenuous cloud of perception. Still, something calls me out into the night, and fearing the approach of Death, I answer.
    I drift through the stone wall.
    By the light of the moon and the stars, Lange trudges his way towards the barn. There's a pistol in his black-gloved hand and a ring of keys in the other.
    I skim over the snow crust and slip under the eaves of the barn. There are no animals inside, only five Soviet prisoners handcuffed to a beam. Their faces are all stamped with torpid agony—the uniquely stricken expression of humans who are half-dead from cold and know it.
    Lange is coming to put an end to their misery.
    The thought that in this way he is like me fills me with greasy revulsion, as if my intangible body—which has never so much as touched the soil of this world—now overflows with corruption.
    One of the prisoners hears Lange's footstep. He cranes his head toward the barn door, eyelids shivering with hope. It has to be hope.
    I rush away, in a panic, back to Joseph. My passage through the night air scours me, but doesn't clean . When I arrive back at Joseph's side I'm still in a profoundly disordered state.
    Partisan attacks continue behind the Finnish line, but frequent captures and failures indicate suggest that their efforts lack widespread support among the populace of Karelia.
    I can see it in the tilt of his eyebrows, the way his pencil rises up to the corner of his mouth. He senses something is wrong. Like an itch between his shoulder blades he cannot scratch. Is it his own distrust of Lange that nags at him, or is it something to do with me? The result is the same, but I still wish it was me. I need to know he hears me. If he could only acknowledge my existence one more time, I imagine that my happiness would overflow ten thousand lifespans.
    He draws twin lightning bolts below the last sentence, then crosses them out with such a savage stroke that the paper creases, almost tearing. He grabs his cane, rises swiftly to his feet, puts the notebook in his pocket and asks the soldier by his side for directions to the latrine.
    "None, yet. Piss out the back door, I suggest." The soldier returns to his contemplation of the sweet drone.
    Joseph leaves.
    Lange , I whisper to him in my way. Lange. Lange. Lange. Some part of me realizes I could be sending him to his death, but he'll kill himself if he goes on living this way. Death has been watching and waiting for so long now and won't be denied much longer, and if it's going to happen, I would prefer him die a hero, or if not a hero, at least satisfied by his death. Yes, that.
    The Finns have stacked their skis against the farmhouse wall. Joseph holds onto one for balance as he tests the ice-slick paving stones with his cane. He finds purchase, and then stares out toward the barn, where a little light flashes through the cracks of a shuttered window.
    "Lange," he whispers, shuts his mouth against the cold, and sets off.
    Joseph uses the path that Lange has already