Episode 40 · Under the Ice

— V —

The first time the voices went silent, the boy was nine years old and under the ice.

A red mitten lay on the frozen pond behind the orphanage. The older children laughed at its owner’s bare hand. The boy looked at the little one’s blue fingers and stepped onto the ice. His coat hung past his wrists, and his thin face was almost lost inside its collar.

The ice held for two steps. On the third, it broke without a sound, like wet paper.

The water caught him first around the chest and stole his breath. Then it pulled him down, and the light above became a gray patch far away, its edges trembling.

And the voices went silent.

He had had them for as long as he could remember. Inside, beneath his thoughts: a woman humming in a language no one had taught him.

A man counting, angry about something the boy had never seen. Crying that did not stop when he stopped. Children who mentioned such things visited the woman upstairs and came back with pills. He told no one.

Under the ice, there was no one anymore.

Cold entered his bones and his chest burned, but over everything lay silence. A silence so vast and clean that the boy stopped struggling. He remained there with his eyes open toward the gray patch above and thought that this must be what it was like inside everyone else’s head all the time.

The hands that pulled him out belonged to the groundskeeper. He dragged the boy by the collar of his coat, swearing, one arm stretched across the ice and his belly pressed to the bank.

Air struck his face. With the air the voices returned, all at once, louder than they had ever been, like people crowding into a room where someone had made them wait too long.

The boy began to cry.

They wrapped him in blankets and kept him overnight in the infirmary. The little one sat beside him the next day, mitten on his hand, until they called him to eat.

The boy told no one why he had cried.

At night he sometimes found a gray garden behind his closed eyes. A tree stood in its center, light showing through the bark. Among the pale outlines of plants, some held a glow of their own. He could not walk far there without feeling someone nearby. He went back to the dormitory’s darkness, to the breathing of children he knew. The garden offered no silence.

After that winter, he learned something. Not all at once. The voices taught him slowly, the way a dog learns where the fence is.

When he was frightened, they came closer. When he was happy, the same. One evening, when an older boy took his plate and anger rose into his throat, the man who counted stood up inside him so quickly that the boy no longer knew whose hand had made the fist.

The other boy ended up in the infirmary missing two teeth. The boy ended up with the woman on the second floor. He said nothing about the voices. He said he was sorry, and he was, but he did not know to whom.

Strong feelings opened the door. That was how it happened to him.

So he learned not to feel strongly.

It was not difficult once he found the place. He pressed his thumbnail into the tip of each finger of the same hand, one at a time, and took one breath for each. Four fingers, four breaths. Then again. When even that was not enough, he looked outward. He searched for what other people were missing.

A blanket fallen from a bed. A spoon missing beside a plate. A child sitting alone at the end of the table. As long as he looked at what others lacked, there was no room left for what he felt, and the voices withdrew to murmur somewhere behind him like neighbors beyond a thick wall.

They called him the quietest child in the orphanage. Only the old cook said it like a disease.

At twelve, he wanted to sleep in the small room beside the storeroom, the one with a single window where no one stayed anymore. He did not ask. He began keeping the storeroom ledger without anyone assigning it to him, sheet by sheet, in handwriting the director could find no fault with.

He woke at five and made sure the large dormitory learned that fact every morning until the arguments reached the director. The director thought for a week. Then he summoned the boy and offered him the small room himself, provided he kept the ledger.

He kept the ledger. No one checked it again.

Families came on Sundays. He brought them chairs and answered their questions. They left with children who laughed, cried or clung to their hands. He watched from the storeroom window.

The little one left on a Sunday in April with a family that had a blue car. He turned at the gate to wave. The boy raised his hand.

That was when he began to believe he would not be chosen. He was too quiet. People did not take a quiet child home. They took a child who needed them.

The closest thing to being chosen was being necessary. They called for him when keys went missing or the stove broke. The director needed his ledger. It kept him warm on the outside, as a borrowed coat can keep you warm.

At eighteen, he had to leave.

The recruiter came on a Tuesday with a folder and a uniform that did not belong in the dining hall. He spoke about discipline, the future, brothers not joined by blood. The other boys listened with half an ear, looking out the windows. The boy listened to everything.

He was not thinking about brothers. He was thinking about the pond.

In nine years, that silence had never returned. Not in the small room, not in the ledgers, not on the nights when he counted his fingers until daylight. It had come only once, beneath the ice, where things ended. Perhaps it existed in other places like that. Perhaps, if he came close enough to their edge, he could find it again.

And perhaps this time no one would pull him out.

— Why do you want to enlist? the recruiter asked, pen poised over the form.

After a day of boys staring out of windows, he wanted something simple enough to write down.

— I don’t have anyone, the boy said.

It was true. The recruiter nodded, satisfied, and wrote.

On the train, the boy rested his forehead against the glass. Frost-covered fields passed outside, a narrow river with thin ice along its edges, villages with smoke rising straight from chimneys. The voices murmured behind him, quiet, tired too. He put his palm against the window. It was cold.

He pressed his thumbnail into the tip of each finger. Four. Four.

Then he closed his eyes and waited to arrive.

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