Episode 84
The suggestion gradually turned into a strange certainty.
Little by little, his sight grew clearer. Borrowing the power of the opium, her delicate outline began to take on dimension.
It was an ecstasy beyond compare. He could not miss even a single moment. Ezekiel forgot even to breathe as he committed every scene to memory.
Her rosy lips parted, and a faint breath scattered. Ezekiel quickly pressed his lips to Rose’s and drank in her breath.
Next was the bridge of her nose. He set his own against her high, straight nose and gently brushed up and down. Whenever he felt her face like this, Rose’s long, neat lashes would at some point tickle the corners of his eyes.
Just like this.
Ezekiel raised a hand and stroked Rose’s eyelashes. Her eyes were quietly closed.
“Open your eyes, Rose. I want to see them.”
Ezekiel whispered into Rose’s ear. Rose’s eyelids trembled faintly.
At last, she opened her eyes. At an unbearably slow pace, Rose’s irises and pupils were revealed one after another.
He stopped breathing where he was.
It was an all too familiar impression. Only the color was different; he knew this face far too well.
It was that woman.
Rizan.
The woman who had ruined his eyes lay there with red hair spread loose and green eyes open.
❖ ❖ ❖
Nights in the camp were busy. It was because the prisoners locked in one room all moved about at once, each trying to find a space to lay down their body.
Even in a camp cell made up of nothing but gray stone walls on three sides and bars across the front, there were still places considered the best. In summer, the spots near the window were best, and in winter, the inner spots where less wind seeped in were best. On the days when Rizan’s body had been ruined by her miscarriage and she could not move an inch, she had occupied the best place under the protection of the middle-aged woman, but now that she could move about somewhat, she was shoved without exception into the cold spot.
“Ah, stop that and lie down too. Aren’t you going to sleep?”
The women called to Rizan. She did not yet feel like lying down, but if she did not secure a place to sleep in advance, she might have to sleep standing. The room was too narrow for all the prisoners to lie down. Every night, it was common for limbs to overlap with others’ or for someone’s leg to kick her head.
Even these days, Rizan woke several times in the middle of the night. Between the moans of the sick, the sound of snoring, the grinding of teeth, and people talking in their sleep while crying, she could not fall asleep at all. Yet when she woke and looked around, she was the only one tossing and turning, unable to sleep. Everyone else did not stir at ordinary noise.
Once, she woke to the feeling of something stepping across her face and found a rat before her eyes. With a bluish shadow between them, Rizan faced the gray rat’s short fur, black eyes, and long pink tail. The rat deftly climbed over the other prisoners’ bodies and slipped out through the bars of the camp. Rizan was more startled by herself for thinking it must be free than by any sense of disgust.
“What are you working so hard for? Even if you make that, there’s nothing in it for us.”
The middle-aged woman pressed her again.
In the end, Rizan set down the straw she had been diligently twisting. The heap of straw piled in the corner was work the guards had left behind in abundance, telling them to make rope. Rather than be tormented this way and that by complicated thoughts, it was better to empty her mind and focus on work, so Rizan spent all day twisting rope until the whorls of her fingertips turned red and blistered.
“I was like that too when I was first dragged here. Time passed so slowly that I wanted to do any kind of work. I didn’t know anything back then. Didn’t know we were making our own nooses with our own hands.”
When one woman took Rizan’s side, the floodgates of conversation opened. The other women began adding a word each as well.
“Seeing as they’re making us make rope, I suppose there really will be a trial soon.”
“Girl, you don’t know what that rope is used for, do you?”
Rizan was brushing the straw from her hands when she looked at the women. The middle-aged woman twisted the corner of her mouth with a snort.
“Who’s going to go quietly after being sentenced to death? Once they’re taken out, it’s the end, so everyone struggles with all their might. That’s why they bind their limbs with that rope and drag them out. I told you, it’s a noose. Their arms and legs are tied with rope they made themselves, and then they’re shot to death or strangled on the gallows.”
……So that was what it meant.
It was a hidden circumstance she had never heard before. No wonder everyone had been indifferent even after being given work to pass the time.
Rizan quietly lowered her eyes.
There is no need to go this far…… I have no strength to struggle, and no will to run away.
“It’s the same even if you’re sentenced to penal labor. Since they can’t have you escaping on the way, they tie you up in a line like a string of fish and transport you.”
“Ah, damn it, what’s with the weather now?”
Someone glanced outside the window without much thought and suddenly burst into irritation. In an instant, all conversation came to a halt. Since the surroundings had quieted, Rizan also turned her head toward the small window.
It was white.
Snow was pouring down without a sound. It could not have been long since it had begun, yet the flakes were already quite thick, as if they meant to fall all night. The snowflakes fluttering beneath the dark night sky were like a white veil.
Suddenly, an emptiness opened in her chest. In the North, where Rizan had spent most of her not very long life, snow and rain had fallen very often. People had not particularly welcomed the damp weather, saying it was dreary, and Rizan too had felt that way at Milena Girls’ School.
But when she had been with Ezekiel, it had been different. The cold, foul weather had become a good excuse to burrow deeply into each other’s arms.
From the start, the reason she had met him had also been thanks to the snow. If the dormitory chimney had not collapsed under the heavy snowfall and many students had not fallen ill, and if she had not heard the rumor of the Derosa estate from the doctor who came on a house call, she would never have even thought of running to him.
“What filthy weather.”
“You can say that again.”
Curses followed from all directions.
Rizan silently closed her eyes. In truth, at this moment, reminiscence was a luxury. Realistically, the other prisoners’ reactions were correct. When snow piled up on the streets, the camp prisoners were the first to be mobilized to clear the snow so the roads would not freeze, and to shovel and carry filth as well. The guards bound the ankles or wrists of the prisoners who had left the camp so they would not dare think of escaping, and watched them with guns in hand.
Nine times out of ten, tomorrow they would be forced to wake before even the first light of dawn. The sick were no exception.
“Still, at least this isn’t the northern camp. They say snow comes down there at all hours, don’t they? Since they’re hit by snowstorms every other day, their arms and legs freeze blue and they all have frostbite, and they say lots of people freeze to death every night too.”
“I heard that place is different from ours, and people are happy if they’re sentenced to lifelong labor. Life in the camp is harder than the labor.”
“I’ve heard too that if your crime is especially foul or you cause trouble in the camp, they deliberately send you north.”
“By the way, if this place really is going to be cleaned out on a large scale soon…… don’t you want to see the family you left outside before that? You said you had a daughter.”
Perhaps because the end of the year was drawing near, the subject kept circling toward the end. Rizan heard the middle-aged woman rustle as she shook her head.
“What’s the point of showing her this? It’ll only tear the child’s heart apart.”
“Well, that’s true too.”
Rizan inwardly agreed as well. If her mother and father saw her in this state, each would feel too guilty toward the other to bear it. She had not acted knowing the ending, but in the end, each time, it had become as though she had drawn only the worst hand. It was not something she could blame anyone for. It was the result of her own foolishness.
So even if I miss them, let me not miss them.
That person too…….
The man’s existence caught in her throat like a thorn. Ezekiel. When she repeated the name, it pierced painfully into her heart.
The eyes she had ruined with her own hands had recovered healthily, and she had seen for herself the way he had regained all the honor he had lost. Furthermore, she was now paying the price for the crimes she had committed not as Rose, but as Rizan.
She had no right to miss him, nor any right to grow sorrowful. Now there were no more seasons left for her to continue on with him.
After slowly counting over the face that had briefly come to mind, Rizan pressed at the corners of her eyes.
❖ ❖ ❖
Ezekiel dreamed all night.
No, he did not know whether it had truly been a dream. He wondered if the terrible longing had finally driven him mad. Yes, he had lost his mind and seen something that was not there. There was no doubt.
He had breathed in opium to meet Rose, and yet that woman had appeared. That could not be. It was impossible.
As the vision lifted, reality grew increasingly clear. He sprang upright and stared at the empty bed. Naturally, there was no trace of anyone other than himself on the bed. Usually, at this point, he would suffer from a sense of loss and fight the temptation to inhale laudanum again.
But today was different. Summoning every bit of patience and reason, he traced Rose’s silhouette once more. The delicate frame, the familiar body heat, the long red hair with light shimmering upon it, the translucent green eyes in which his face was reflected.
And then that woman, Rizan’s features, were gradually overlaid with increasing clarity.
Ezekiel covered half his face with his large palm. His skin, deprived of proper rest, was rough.
“……Rose. What on earth did I see?”
It seemed that, after drawing Rose’s face countless times with his imperfect senses, he had recklessly overlaid Rose onto the face of any woman. He felt anew just how horribly tangled the inside of his head had become.
He calmed his heart, which was thrashing like a wild beast.
There was no need to be so shaken. He only had to call someone and confirm it.
As it happened, there was someone nearby who knew Rose’s face.
As soon as Ezekiel had composed himself, he shook the bellpull and summoned a servant.
“Bring Merlot to me at once. Hurry.”