Name the Living

I clinked my fingernail three times against the rim of Roman's mug. A thin sound, almost gentle. Emil raised his head before Roman had time to turn around. "Veksha," said the prisoner. I know that name, though the last time I heard it was back in forty-three. That year Roman bore it himself, and that was when he learned to fear the clinking: that was how the punitive guard woke the bound men to make them talk. He didn't remember that, of course - for now. I would fix that.

Roman had one hour. Then the exchange. Emil, a drone operator, was to be handed over alive. The sappers were waiting for confirmation of a route through the minefield: the unit sat half-encircled at the edge of the old town, beneath which walled-up passages still ran. In July a strike on his building had killed his wife. Who had guided the target, Roman didn't know. According to the intercepts, Emil had been working that very sector that day.

The phone was vibrating: his daughter was waiting at an evacuation point in another part of the city. Before leaving, he had promised to call. He declined the call. Poured water for himself - none for the prisoner. That was enough for me to understand what he wanted. He wanted to hear the killer's name before the route. "I'll only give back to him what he did to my family. I would never torture an innocent man."

I sat down across from him, on a mine crate. The shadow on the wall sat down half a second early. "Who are you?" Roman asked. "Dalenial." "What do you want?" "Only what you've already brought with you, soldier boy." "Do you know who he is?" Roman asked irritably, meaning Emil. "Yes." "Who?" "The one who strangled you." "I'm alive." "This time - yes."

He gave a short laugh, coughing a little. Then he took a length of cord from the table and began twisting it in his hands out of habit; he wasn't watching his fingers, and when he lowered his eyes the knot was already done: an old double slip knot, the kind used to bind wrists. Roman froze. He didn't remember ever learning to tie one. "He has tied it on you once before," I said. "When?" "When your name was Veksha and you kept silent for three days."

Emil stared at the knot and could not look away. I returned that death to him slowly. First the smell of tar. Then the fiber of the rope under his chin. Then the moment when his tongue grew too big for his mouth. Roman gulped for air. I was savoring it, which is why I had no thought of stopping. On the whites of his eyes the capillaries burst, one after another. It ran from his nose down onto his lips.

Roman shoved his fingers under his collar, searching for the rope, then began tearing at his neck with his nails. The skin split open, there was flesh under his nails, and still he kept trying to rip something off his throat. I admired the sight; I especially love the moment when a person finally stops fighting. He had recognized his own death - he had died this way before.

Without the least mercy, I let him breathe - an unconscious interlocutor understands nothing. Together with the air, the taste of his own blood from the year forty-three came back into his mouth. At last he remembered: the interpreter attached to the punitive guard had pulled that very knot tight on his neck back then. The last thing Veksha saw was the hands that bound him. Roman raised his eyes to Emil.

Emil was holding his palms on his knees, turned upward, as if already making excuses. "Name the ones who were there," Roman said to Emil. He thought he had composed those words just now. But I had heard them before - in the basement of the punitive guard, and beneath the wall of a besieged city seven hundred years ago. The words had not changed. "Did he kill my wife?" Roman shouted at me. "I don't know."

The louder he shouted, the more quietly I answered: "It isn't in your memory. I add nothing." "Then what do you do?" "I return." He grabbed Emil by his clothes and pressed his back against the earthen wall of the trench. I laid my hand on Roman's shoulder. Behind the prisoner's back the damp earth hardened into cold stone. The sandbags vanished; a low vault came down overhead.

Roman was a boy again, the one whose chest they piled stones on because he would not name the hidden passage. With pleasure I returned the first stone to him. Under his left ribs something crunched dryly. He doubled over and spat dark blood onto the ground. Now the second - it was heavier. Roman screamed - louder this time.

The vault dissolved. Around him was the trench again: damp earth, sandbags, dim light overhead. Blood interests me little, but people stop calling a memory an invention once they wipe it from their lips. He wiped away the blood and set about sketching on the earthen wall the profile of the passage: the bend, the cave-in, the exit past the riverbed. He had died back then without giving up that passage.

Roman photographed the sketch and called the sappers on the radio. He made no attempt to explain how he knew about the passage. He only asked them to check. Before long the sappers confirmed it: a hollow really did run underground, and the far exit lay already beyond the edge of the minefield. I expected Roman to throw the cord over Emil's neck and pull tight the same knot he had just remembered on his own. But he cut the tie on the prisoner's wrists and handed him water.

Mercy does not move me. More than that, it irritates me, and it means only one thing: I will have to dig deeper. "You think that's the end of it?" I asked. Roman wiped the blood from his lips. "Isn't it?" I smiled. "Of course not. You've only remembered the rope on your own neck. Soon you'll remember holding the other end."

At the exchange Roman handed Emil over alive. I waited until the vehicle pulled away, and returned one more life to him. A basement. A naked, bloodied man on the floor. A belt in Roman's hand. A bucket of water the prisoner could not reach. And his own voice, calm, almost bored: "How many of you were there?" Roman dropped to his knees right in the dust; the blood came from his mouth before he even remembered what the prisoner had answered him.

I could have taken the memory back. But why? Roman survived. So he had time to use it. Now he sometimes wakes already suffocating. Sometimes in the middle of a conversation he feels the weight of a stone on his chest. There are moments when he looks at his own hands and for a few seconds cannot remember who he was then: the one being bound, or the one pulling the rope tight on someone else's wrists.

I left him both answers. Oblivion between lives did half the work for people far too long. From now on, let them manage by themselves.