The Last Man

"Come here, all of you. Sit down, children" he says to them. "I have something to tell you." The three young people sit down around the table and reach for the cigarettes. "Drink" says Smet "go on, it's good for you."

He looks at the three young faces, two of them he's recruited and trained, and the the third, the girl, he has sworn to protect with his life. Here they are, all assembled before him. His little ones, as he likes to think of them.

He takes a big drink and begins "I'm a very old man." Maria smiles, a bit giddy from the cognac. "Though still man enough to handle a young wench like you" he says. She leans back and laughs, shaking her head. 

The old man continues. "But when I was a boy, long before your parents were even thought of, we were at war. The Nazis were stomping their way through our country, and we resisted. We fought them with hunting rifles, with pitchforks, with rocks and stones and bricks, if we had to. And to no avail. We were willing to fight them to the last man or woman or child. And we often did just that.

"In one skirmish, I don't know, out in the farm country somewhere, I was the last man standing." He pauses to take a drink and light up his pipe. "So what happened" asks the girl "did they kill you?" Her sarcasm doesn't faze him.

"Yes, you could say that." He pulls back a deep wrinkle in his forehead that might have once been a scar. "They shot me here, right here. And I fell amongst the dead and the dying." He pauses again. "Go on" says the boy "then what happened."

"Well, some hours or days, I don't know which, but sometime anyway, I woke up and I was in this little fruit cellar at a farm place, one of those little hole in the ground dug outs beside the house. You lift up the wooden door and there're steps going down, a place where people would store vegetables, potatoes, that sort of thing.

"It was cold, I remember, and dark. And I was in a little dug out room that was hidden away by some wooden shelving where you'd store jars of canned fruit and the like. It had a plain white cloth on the back, like a curtain. And you couldn't see through the curtain and the shelving and the jars. And the funny thing was, there were these two little girls at this farm. I don't know, maybe they were eight years old and six years old, something like that. Sisters, I suppose.

"Anyway, I never saw anyone else there. I don't don't know how I got there, even. But these two little children, they wore those funny long dresses and heavy colored cloth scarves around their heads, like the peasant people did in those days. Maybe those were their Sunday clothes, I don't know. And there were beads that they wore around their necks, for some reason.

But these two little kids would care for me and tend to me, changing the wrapping on my head, ever so often. Bathing and cleansing me with cold water from the well, I guess. And they'd feed me yogurt from a wooden spoon and talk to me like I was some kind of doll that they played with. And "eat now, soldier boy, eat the good yogurt" they'd say to me. And "drink your milk now, drink it before it sours."

"I don't know how long this went on, several days maybe. I was in and out of consciousness in that dark little room. I hadn't the strength to get up off the straw that I was lying on." He stops and takes a big drink. "Then one day... soldiers came, I could hear... the little girls screaming and crying and running as I lay there... frozen with fear.

"There were shots, then it was quiet, all quiet. And I lay there weeping like a little baby, hidden away in that cold dark room. Then later, much later, it was dark out now, night time. I crawled out of that little place on my hands and knees. It took all my strength... and I went to each one of those soldiers. They were drunk and sleepy from the wine and foods they'd found to eat, I guess. And I went to each one with my knife and slit their throats, one after another, seven of them in all. And each time I did that, cut their throats and felt the blood run down my arms and hands, I felt stronger and stronger.

"At sunrise... I found the two little girls, I didn't even know their names, each one had been shot in the head, once, like executed. They were sitting there in the farm yard, leaned up against each other like two little dead dolls, all white and lifeless with black blood stains down the front of their faces.

"I left them there like that and went away, but I took the beads they wore. "Here" he says, lifting them out from under his sweater and shirt. "Look at them, the blood stains have long since disappeared."

(an except from the book "Princessa, a story of love and war")