The knock did not repeat. In fact, there were no further sounds at all. Staring at the inside of that door, the metronome of her pulse counted minutes into each passing second. The door handle grew large and unfamiliar, the empty coats hooks pinning her like an insect. Still she waited, as the silence filled her lungs to drowning point, 'til she could bear it no longer. She grasped the handle and yanked the door open with none of the caution she felt. And there it was. On her doorstep. The hated uniform.
The pallor of his visage, the dark patches of his tunic that spoke of wounds neither new nor bound. Barely more than a boy, a handful more summers than her own son had seen. If even. A crumpled, broken marionette, draped in the cloth of the occupier.
Just 4 weeks since the same uniform had finally left her and her farm in peace. Ostracised from her community and with a baby in her belly. Pariah. What choice had she had? Yes, she had encouraged the commander's attention. How could she not. The squad would have passed her around like a rag-doll. 4 times he had taken her at her own kitchen table. 3 times, shoved her forward into that table and pushed her skirts to her waist. Each time, with her cheek pressed to smooth wood, he had taken nothing from her and she had given him nothing. She felt no shame or humiliation. Her body was not her. She knew she would simply endure. But the fourth time. The fourth time. She burned yet with the humiliation of the memory. As he had pressed her once again towards the same spot, she had turned towards him. One of the monsters. She had hiked her own skirts, and her thighs had greeted his broad hips willingly. She had given him everything, and had had taken it. And somehow she knew, that was the moment, as he spilled his warm strong seed in her belly, that she had taken his child. Of course there were nights thereafter. Many nights after that, as she found herself retiring to a bed with him in it. Nights of, sometimes increasingly eager, coupling. But it was that day at the table had left her with child. The bastard child of a wicked regime.
And then one morning they left, even more swiftly than they had arrived. The house and the farm buildings emptied in minutes as they fled the approaching front. Or perhaps raced towards it. She knew not. And cared not. She knew only that she hated them and wished them all dead. Men like these who had left her without her husband, and without her son. Violators. Invaders. Monsters.
And now one lay on her doorstep. Helpless in her power. She. She could. A dozen terrible deaths raced out from her head to her hands. But they could not pass her heart. So instead her strong arms pulled him in over the threshold and towards the warmth of the fireplace behind her. His tall body impossibly light in her grip, as she wondered at the madness of her actions.
****
His eyes flinched from their first light in 4 days. His wounds cleaned and bound, and not even the ash of his uniform remained in the fireplace. The last few telltale bits of metal buried in the farmyard. The morning sunshine and the window over the bed framed her stern face in a worthy halo as she turned it towards him. He had not even the energy to cast about in panic, but merely lay there. Blinking at her in confusion as she rose from her chair to fetch water and thin soup.
She had wondered how she would feel when he woke up. If he woke up. Would she regret her actions? Did she already? What if attacked her? Memories of such thoughts now made her smile a little. He had proved as meek as a kitten. And as weak as one too. And though she couldn't yet explain to herself why she had done it, she knew wholeheartedly she did not regret it. He was neither soldier nor enemy. Just a lost boy that the universe saw fit to lay at her doorstep.
By degrees his color returned and he started to sit up in bed. She understood him well enough to know he sought the satchel he'd been carrying. That had been the first thing she had torn from him that first afternoon, looking for some terrible thing to rekindle her hatred - a trinket of some crime committed or live stolen. Instead the pitiful bundle of letters from an anxious mother, the last postmarked more than 2 years before, separated him irrevocably from the uniform on his shoulders. She gave him the letters. Her feeling at the bright uncomplicated gratitude of his smile confused and embarrassed her.
Her dreams had been anxious for many months, but they paled in comparison to his. As his strength returned, the horrors of his past crowded more closely around his bed and his nightly struggles grew more fevered - he moaned and whined and trashed about like a panicked, injured colt. Eventually she took to murmuring comforts at his bedside, stroking his hair and sometimes cradling his head until the episodes passed. It seemed to help them both to sleep with less restlessness, and became habit for her at night. Like tending to a squalling child. So when she heard his moaning, and the squeak of his bed, she rose and shuffled over, expecting to find him asleep and struggling. But the moonlight revealed not a nightmare struggle but stomach and buttocks clenching as an eager stroke brought forth a spill of seed. Then immediately he lay still again, his strings once more cut. She stood there, afraid to move lest he see her. And unable to look away from the evidence that this was no boy in her house. Once she realized he had indeed fallen to a deep and dreamless sleep, she returned shakily to her own bed. Her old dreams found they had new and confusing company - the unwelcome imaginings of welcomed touches, of trust eagerly betrayed and comfort repurposed. But she found she had neither the energy nor the will to fight them.
Before marriage, and childbirth, and the years that came with each, she had not been the only pretty young girl in the village. But few would have argued she was less than first among equals. And neither the ensuing years, nor her instinctive, agrarian modesty ever did much to temper that truth. Especially now, as the flower of maternity bloomed in her. Beneath her simple garments, her movements still whispered of the comfort and vigor of a farm-honed figure, rounded by new life. All days but Easter and Christmastide found her dark locks sequestered by braid. But no construction of function and modesty could mask her blue eyes.
