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Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
Hebrews 11:1
The clouded night spreads down the grass with cold dew. The wall of a dark forest stands grimly, the way it stood a day, a month, a year and even hundred years ago. Thunderstorm is looming with the mist. It has been looming for quite a while, slowly, prolongedly, it tightens, electrifying the bitter air that smelled of burning, it’s about to come down, but not yet – the heavy clouds are crawling pretty low.
Kenny returned from the war in the eighteens, he and his pregnant sister left Paris afterwards in the same year. He said to Kuchel: “It’s time to finally live peacefully and see the world”, but now Levi understood - he knew the real war was still to come, and so the real hell. The elder Ackerman refused to go, so they had to leave him behind. Kenny and Kuchel left their country, their father and migrated to the States. His powerful friends helped them to legally settle in Oahu, where Kenny returned to his military service. Levi was born four months after their moving, as a citizen of the United States of America. He grew up in a big house, under the peaceful sky and bright sun of Honolulu. Levi couldn’t have known what fate awaited French Jews, like his grandfather, but he was always curious if the sun in Paris was as bright.
The doors creak when Levi breaks them down with his shoulder and then pushes them, pulling inside a body, too heavy even for the both of them. They put the body on the floor. The floorboards are squeaking under their nervous steps, the branches of the tree outside are scratching on the window pleadingly. Erwin’s barely breathing, barely pressing his side to stop the bleeding.
“We must light the fire” Hange’s voice is ringing in his ears, stubs like needles – first the eardrums, then the nape. Stings. It hurts.
Levi pushes the hair, which has stuck to his forehead, away and looks around: the house is old, moldered and rotten. He can feel the mold with his tongue. Above the edge of the forest the wind rises, the shutters whine and knock on the outside wall. The sky tightens with that cold, bone piercing electricity, and for a second his hand twitches…
“Levi!” Hange calls. Her voice slaps him out, and then she adds more quietly: “Levi, fire”.
…but doesn’t reach. The noise in his head dies out, and he rushes to the furnace.
Far above the roof, a roaring jet-fight was drowning into the density of the thick sky.
Levi remembers that day well, when he, against his mother’s hopes, made a conscious decision, just like his uncle Kenny, to join the land forces. He remembers how he met Hange, four-eyed brat from a medical college. A private, who had to prove himself a match to others every day, and a nurse, who got pale from the sight of blood. Though Hange always wanted to help people, and Levi, a little Frenchman among broad-shouldered lads who were one-two heads higher than him, – he wanted to see his homeland one day.
There are no chevrons now, no regulations, there is only Levi and his heart that sinks with every second breath that he takes. Hange is rummaging in the drawers, shelvings, cabinets and wardrobes. It seems like some huntsman’s family lived here. His hands are trembling, Levi lights a lighter with a click – it’s Erwn’s lighter. Levi gave it to Erwing long ago. Prior to “before”. Fingers don’t obey, they are stiff with cold, he clicks the lighter but the wick doesn’t spark. It doesn’t work neither on the fifth try, nor sevenths, nor tenth. It’s ringing in his head again, and again Hange is louder than that. She tears and throws into the furnace everything she could get: letters, newspapers, books.
Levi wants to scream, but at the same time he feels paralyzed – everything is too damp to light up, but it must.
They don’t have anything else, not even time. They only have themselves. Hange finds some hunting knife with a broken handle in the closet and puts it on a visible place – in case they’ll need it. She doesn’t have neither antiseptics, nor antibiotics, nor ethanol, nor medical equipment, and Erwin has three bullets in his abdomen near his liver, and he’s reached the verge even before Levi could find him. And now Erwin barely hears him.
Levi clenches his teeth, breathes through his nose and, while covering the wick from the draught, clicks the lighter again. It only needs to warm up a bit, to dry a bit.
They only need to wait a bit, to hold out a bit.
“Come on”.
Levi remembers the day he met Erwin, a tall commander with a terrible sense of humor, piercing gaze and a smile that reminded him of home he never saw. A new war was getting closer, the fire was already burning in Europe, and Erwin was showing Levi stars and saying that no matter how long the night is, the sun always rises. He promised that they’d see the sunrise in Paris. Together.
There isn’t even any water to wash the hands. It starts to drizzle, the wind gets stronger, the windows shatter. Hange goes outside, rubs her palms, then wipes her hands with a handkerchief, only smearing the dirt and blood. That drizzle is not enough, but they can’t wait.
Hange spits on her fingers.
The newspapers in the furnace light up, curl and turn black, igniting half dry book pages one by one.
“We need bandages”. Hange turns around, putting the bloodstained handkerchief back into the pocket.
It draughts from every crack in the house, it’s dirty there, cold and disgusting, and Levi unbuttons his jacket, takes off his shirt, his pointed shoulders shiver; Hange rips the shirt and then uses the leftovers to roll a tight gag. She has done it several times already: she’s cut, stitched, pulled the bullets, grenades’ fragments, rusty fixture, pieces of wood out of people’s bodies, she’s amputated stricken with gangrene and wounded by explosions limbs, but she’s never done anything like that in such conditions. Because in such conditions they have more chances to kill than rescue.
They’ll kill him, kill, kill, and his blood, his suffering, his last breath will be on their hands.
“Tell me he’ll live” Levi looks her in the eyes and he’s not even asking, he’s demanding, even though whispering. He wears his jacket back. “Tell, Hange”.
Hange nods so Levi doesn’t notice how her voice shakes with insecurity, she pretends her lips aren’t numb and her blood doesn’t drain from her face. They have one faith for two, crystal clear, transparent like a thin ice on puddles when the first frost hits – if somebody steps on it, it breaks immediately. They both will break down, they know it. Each pretends it’s fine, so the other won’t give up.
If Hange doesn’t manage it, two people will die at once. Maybe even three.
“Let him bite on it, and then hold him down firmly”.
Levi remembers the day when Erwin became his commander and he – Erwin’s right-hand man. It was on the seventh of December, when the strong wind blew, and Pearl Harbor was burning. He remembers how the sky roared and shuddered, and how Erwin stole his first kiss. Remembers seeing death for the first time, and Hange not talking to anybody for three days after she’d pieced torn off bodies of those who got harmed in the harbor back together, chunk by chunk. At the Sunday service they sat and listened, Levi vaguely and Hange very attentively, about one’s faith defining one’s deeds. About how without faith nothing makes sense. The USA declared war on Japan, Germany and Italy – on the USA. The president announced full mobilization. The sun set. Levi remembers every day of the first year of war, and then everything blended in: blood, pain, death. Became almost ordinary.
Erwin looks up and breathes heavily, slowly, with pauses, he doesn’t press on his wound anymore, he’s lowered his hand, and when Levi leans closer, he forces a weak, unnecessary smile on his lips. The smile is so warm, as if everything is fine, as if he’s not in pain, not dying, as if Levi has had nothing to do with that. And Levi shudders, because none of that is true – nothing is fine.
“Le…”
“Shut up, don’t you dare-” please, don’t bid farewell .
He didn’t know their names, but he’d never forget how many people, how many thousands of French Jews were sent to the prison camps to be tortured and then killed by German Nazis. Kushel cried, because their relatives were there, their friends, neighbors… Maybe even Levi’s father. Kenny said it was a good thing their granddad hadn’t lived up to see that. They destroyed his heritage. They killed people and moved into their dwellings as if those were their own. They danced on blood and bones. Levi remembers listening to the news reports, remembers how it made him feel even more angry every time. And Erwin kept saying that no night can last forever.
“Look at me”. Levi sits on his shoulders, pressing his upper body to the floor as much as possible, and then shoves the cloth-gag into Erwin’s mouth, holding it firmly on both sides, with the ends of it tightly wrapped around his palms.
They have nothing more than their own selves, Hange’s hands and faith that everything will be alright; not because it’s possible, but because it must be. Faith in Erwin, that he won’t bleed out, won’t die from the shock pain or infestation. Faith in themselves, that they won’t die from the dampness or starvation, that after all of that they won’t be caught and gunned down. It’s too much to hope for in their conditions, really.
“It will hurt”. Hange breathes out and sits on his pelvis from the other side. His sticky shirt almost started to grow into the wound, she peels it off.
“Look at me” Levi repeats.
Their voices echo in Erwin’s head like a metronome that stands in an empty room with blank walls, it ticks.
A tree branch hits the window from the outside. The sky lowers its head on the ground, growls out the first thunder.
Erwin flinches, twisting his neck, bites on his gag when Hange opens up the edges of his wound with her fingers and then shoves her hand inside of it.
He was captured almost right after the beginning of the Operation Overlord. The sun didn’t get down – it disappeared. It wasn’t important who exactly rescued him, anyway they took him and escaped. For two months everyone was saying Erwin had already been dead, but Levi didn’t believe it, he still was looking for him, he was losing his people, the people he was responsible for and who he loved, and even Hange couldn't save them. Though Levi knew – he wouldn’t need neither Paris nor victory if the sun never rose again.
Hange scraps one of the bullets with her nail,swallows dryly, freezes, but doesn’t say anything: it’s an expanding one, it presses on a large vessel. The others are the same kind, though it is possible to take them out – they are not as deep in his body. It takes only one wrong move and Erwin will choke with his blood in a minute or so, with them watching. The bullet kills and saves him, it can’t be taken out nor left alone.
If Hange takes it out but doesn’t manage to stitch up the wound in time, he will die.
Take out and stitch up, take out and stitch out.
“Something’s wrong?” Levi tenses and is ready to turn over, but Hange says:
“It’s fine, hold him firmly”. She looks around and then, still keeping her arm inside of Erwin’s body, pulls up the hunting knife and sticks the blade into the fire. “God help us”.
Erwin knew everything a commander of a special squad would know about plans of their army, and so they tortured him. Two months they starved him and inflicted him pain, but he wasn’t going to tell Levi that, because Levi would probably yell at him, grind his teeth, and then sit somewhere all alone with his broken heart. He can’t endure his comrades’ suffering well. They were his family, and they always died. However strong he was, Erwin well remembered that irritable lad, who funnily wrinkled his nose in the sunshine and whom he promised to see the sunrise in Paris. Together.
Levi would forgive him weakness, and betrayal of their Homeland. The only thing he wouldn’t forgive him was death, but Erwin didn’t betray him nor his country. Levi spent one more week to get closer to them and to lose five of his last soldiers.
The hospital where Hange worked was attacked at midday on the seventh day – all the wounded were killed, she and a few other nurses were taken. Soldiers of the enemy had only one plan for women.
Levi tightens the cloth-gag.
“Now”.
“Look at me”.
It ticks .
The silence lasts one more second. And then there’s a rattle. The bullet rolls down between the floorboards. Hange holds the knife’s handle tighter and replaces her fingers with the red-hot blade, singeing.
Erwin bends, twists with his whole body, and he’s still strong – too strong for a person who was tortured, he howls with his strained voice through the gag.
“Hold him tighter!”
“Look at me!”
Something knocks on the window – tree branches, or thunder, or another jet-fight again, but it can’t be heard: the scream rings in the ears, the heart thumps in the throat.
When Levi came for him, the ones who held him hostage were already dead. It took him two months to find the right moment for escape. Before croaking, one of the bastards managed to shoot three bullets in him right before Levi’s eyes.
Hange managed to escape.
Hange wipes sweat off her face with her elbow, throws away the knife and bandages Erwin’s torso, firmly tightening the bandages. They’ll do everything right when they get to the nearest hospital.
They will.
Levi carefully takes the rag out of Erwin’s closed mouth. Takes his face in his arms, caresses his cheekbones and hoarsely repeats:
“Look at me”.
And he looks, watches the tear on Levi’s cheek so as not to close his eyes. Because if he did, if he relaxed, let himself go – it would all be in vain: three years of fire, lost lives, all the suffering, all the way up to here, all the promises, everything he has said.
Hange fixes the bandage and gets off Erwin. Perhaps they won him – them – some time.
“We did it,” Levi turns to look at her, and smiles weakly, though his face is in tears. “We did it”.
He turns back to Erwin, looks at him, but he already doesn’t look back.
They were left alone: cut off from American positions and who knows how far from any hospital, thought Erwin wouldn’t be able to get there anyway. Levi thought that he had accepted death as inevitable and natural long ago, but everything that he’d known dissolved and disappeared the moment death approached him from this side. It would be way easier to die himself than to watch Erwin dying in his arms so to bury him afterwards in a nameless grave in the woods of his ancestors’ lands that turned into the enemy’s range . Everything would be in vain, because the morning would never come for Levi without Erwin.
“No, no, look at me. Erwin? Erwin!”
Hange manages to grab him from behind, hug him, drag him on the floor. She wraps her hands around him in a soft embrace, so he won’t want to break out, and breathes out in his ear:
“It’s okay, it’s okay. He just needs to rest for a bit”.
“Is he..?”
“No, no. It’s gonna be fine now, Levi. He’s gonna be fine”.
Erwin hardly breathes, as if he’ll stop any moment, but Levi believes her. He’ll believe Hange even if she’s lying.
Hange is lying – she doesn’t know what comes next, but it doesn’t matter.
Levi breathes out and softens in her bloodstained hands.
The downpour washes the mist out from the earth. Above, over the roof, the thunder roars.
It wasn’t in vain.
They did it.
He’ll be alright.
Erwin ordered him to accept his death, let him go, be strong, as always, remember the things he said about the night and the sun, he bid farewell though Levi begged him to just shut up and save his energy, not to footle nonsense, not to hurt him like that, not to give up. They almost yelled at each other, and then Hange appeared from the woods – barely breathing, disheveled, with blood on her shirt. That blood wasn’t hers.
The thunderstorm has died out. It roars somewhere from afar, and it’s still raining. It pours monotonically, calmly and makes them sleepy. And thirsty, and hungry. Erwin breathes unevenly, and then – a stupid nightmare – twitches and sits up. Levi, forgetting his weariness, rushes to him, tries to lay him on his back again. It takes some struggle, because clearly Erwin doesn't want to lie down anymore. Stubborn as always, he argues and even orders something. As always, he doesn’t want to hear any objection.
Levi and Hange are helping him to get closer to the furnace when suddenly someone breaks into the house.
“Two people, one wounded, and some woman!” a man cries out to the others who follow him – three more people. You don’t often hear English around here, but Levi nevertheless stands up to hide Erwin and Hange with his back. Unconditional reflex.
“Have some respect,” Erwin croaks, trying to sit up, but Hange presses down on his shoulders. “It’s not just some woman in front of you, she’s a chaplain”.
Levi and Hange exchange a look.
A chaplain? Well, Erwin’s sense of humor isn’t just bad - it’s awful.
Taken aback, the guy opens his mouth to say something, but another one pushes him aside. Levi manages to see their chevrons. British. Another guy seems to be more quick-witted. He salutes and then says:
“Excuse us, sir. Sergeant Moblit Berner, Second French Armored Division. Captain…?”
“Levi Ackerman. Special squad of Fourth Infantry Division. This is my commander, Erwin Smith”.
“Yours?”
“There’s no one left”.
“Do you have a cigarette?” Erwin sits up again. Hange gives up – it was easier to deal with him when he was dying. “Any liquor?”
The guys give him a pack of cigarettes and a jar. Erwin doesn’t say anything, he drinks up the swill that reminds him of whiskey a bit. Clicking a lighter, Hange lights up a cigarette for him. Levi doesn’t shield them anymore. He looks at them and everything floats in front of his eyes.
“What are you doing here?”
“We’re patrolling the territory. We saw a smoke and thought that could be our people, you’re lucky”. And then sergeant Berner suddenly smiles. “You surely don’t know yet?”
Erwin smokes and watches the flashes of fire in the furnace, and Hange looks up at Moblit.
“Today, close to midnight, our forces made their way into Paris. We’re cleaning up the city at the moment”.
“What?”
“After four years of occupation, Paris is liberated. Tomorrow we’ll be there, too”.
It’s quiet outside the window, the clouds are getting higher. Not paying any more attention to the soldiers, Levi turns to Erwin, looks him in the eyes, and Erwin looks back, smiling.
“Told you so,” he says, holding a cigarette with his teeth, takes his hand. Caresses his wrist with his fingers.
“We must take him to the hospital,” says Hange, standing up.
Sergeant Berner nods, the soldiers help Erwin to get up and lead him out of the building. Levi follows them, and Hange hesitates a bit before leaving the warmth of the house. It’s raining outside, and she shivers with cold in her soggy shirt. Somebody throws a jacket over her shoulders. When she turns around, she only sees Berner’s wide smile when he says quietly:
“Soon it’s gonna be over. The war’s gonna be over”.
When they get to the camp, the sun already rises over Paris.