A Woman Told Me This

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted/translated from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, "June 1871”

 

One who survived the massacres,
     a woman, arrived and told me this:

“I had to run away.
I held my little daughter tight
against my breast as I ran.
She screamed, and I knew her cries
would give away our hide-out.

 

Imagine darting to and fro
with a baby only two months old,
loud as a siren though she
was as weak as a house-fly.

 

I kissed her mouth to quiet her.
And still, she howled.
Even her moans were audible.
She wanted her mother’s breast.
I had no milk to give.

 

A whole night passed like this.
I crouched behind a driveway gate.
I wept. I saw the shining
rifle stocks go back and forth.
I heard my husband’s name
demanded at every kicked-in door.

 

Perhaps I slept a little.
Dawn was near. No sooner
had some expectant rooster
than I tried to raise myself,
the babe still swaddled close.

 

And then I knew. No breath,
the child as stiff as an armful
of kindling. I touched:
my cold hand on a colder brow.

If they killed me right then,
I could care less. One hand
around the dead child, one hand
thrust out the closed-up gate,

and I was on the street. My eyes
must have looked like those
of a lunatic. Some others,
about their own business,
as desperate as mine, perhaps,

in the not-quite-breaking day,

knew me and called my name;
a few reached out
     to give me aid.
I hurtled on. I ran.
The way to the countryside
was open, unguarded.

 

God help me, I don’t remember.
It’s just as if I walked in blindness.
I could never find that spot again
if I tried a thousand times, the place
where I dug with own hands a grave,
among tree-roots a shallow niche,

a hole just big enough to shove her in.
Oh, there was a fence, that’s all
I can bring to mind, a fence
angled behind and around me.

 

I came to my senses. My feet alone
had carried me there. My hands
were black with blood and soil.
A priest came along. He raised me up,
looked down at my inept burial
and stood and wept with me.
Then shots rang out,
close, and then closer still,
and each of us fled
    in opposite directions.
He had never asked my name,
     nor I, his.