Words on Fire

So I turned to him and placed a hand in cupping shape behind my ear, then shook my head, suggesting to him that I hadn’t heard him because I could not hear.

His eyes narrowed and he asked my name in Russian. I squinted back and shook my head again. He swept one arm at me, knocking me to the ground and insulting my intelligence. I thought that was rather stupid of him instead, to have believed the inability to hear was somehow linked to one’s intelligence. He could hear fine and didn’t appear any smarter than the common pig.

I kept my place on the ground while he finished searching the bedroom. I knew he wouldn’t find anything in there, because I’d already removed the book … if there was only one book.

Except there wasn’t. When he returned to the main room, in his arms was a tall stack of Lithuanian books. He crossed to the fireplace and began stirring the embers of the fire that must have cooked a supper recently.

“No,” I mouthed. “Not the books.”

And no, it wasn’t the books. When the fire had rekindled, he grabbed the unburnt end of a fiery stick, pushed past me to enter the bedroom, then dropped the stick in the center of the bed. At first I thought the stick would burn itself out, but within seconds, the quilt lit and began to blacken, then the fire spread. The soldier eyed me until he was certain it had taken hold, then frowned, picked up the books again, and carried them out the door.

The instant he left, I ran to the bed and folded up the unburnt edges of the quilt in hopes of smothering the fire, but it had already spread to the mattress beneath. I dashed over to the pump at the kitchen sink, filling a bucket of water and dumping it on the fire to douse the flames.

Then I opened the door and peered out. Other officers were on this road by now, but when their attention turned elsewhere, I darted from the home and ran until I couldn’t see them anymore. If only I could have gotten far enough away to no longer hear what they were doing. One by one behind me, I heard the whoosh of flames as homes were lit on fire, preceded by the shouts of soldiers calling to one another the numbers of illegal books they had found in the homes.

“Tree.” Three.

“Vosim.” Eight.

“Nul.” None. The soldier laughed.

No books had been in that home. The soldier merely wanted to burn it.

Up ahead, I saw Lukas with another stack of books in his arms, racing up the hillside toward the forest. I started to follow him, when a young girl darted from her home with a single book. “Will you hide this?”

I nodded, but as I turned to follow Lukas, I crashed directly into a soldier who was emerging from another home. I fell on my backside, both books landing in my lap.

With a snarl, he grabbed my arm and hefted me off the ground, but once my feet were planted, I gave him a fierce kick on the shin, hard enough that I might have broken a toe to do it. He dropped my arm, allowing me to squirm out of his grip and run. He called after me, that when he caught me again I’d pay for this, but he didn’t chase me. Instead, when I looked back, he was picking up the books I’d saved and was walking away with them.

The books I’d meant to save.

The books I hadn’t saved.

My heart shattered.

A few meters ahead, Lukas was motioning me toward him, and when I caught up, he led the way into the forest. Others from the village had gathered here as well, and from behind the trees, sobbing women and children and stoic men with crushed hearts watched as a dozen or more homes went up in flames. Just as mine had.

“How many books did we save?” I mumbled to Lukas.

“Not enough.” He pointed to a pile of thirty or forty books, then looked up at me. “Come with me. There’s something you need to see.”

I trudged behind Lukas deep enough inside the forest that we wouldn’t be seen from the village but close enough to its border that we still got glimpses of the horror. I saw roaring flames with their light filtered against the layers of trees; I choked on the pungent odor of smoke as homes were destroyed. But was it only the homes?

Many of the villagers who hadn’t escaped into the forest had been herded into the square, and there I saw another fire in the center of the road.

Burning no buildings this time, no homes. But I knew what this fire was.

Books.

This fire smelled different from other kinds of fires. I knew it was different because it wasn’t only ink and paper being consumed by the flames, but also the characters themselves, and their worlds and feelings and stories. Did they cry out for themselves, begging to be saved? I believed so, for I was certain I could hear them calling to me.

A sudden panic sent a shudder through me. “Lukas, why are they—”

He put a finger to his lips, then led us closer to the village square. There, the fire burned bright, its flames crackling with a hunger for more fuel, greedy in its destruction.

Each lick of a flame took knowledge from us. It consumed our ideas and our stories, and what little freedom we thought we had claimed for ourselves with our smuggling.

They were burning our books, and with them, I felt like holes were being burned into my heart. How could they do this? How could they attach such venom to words on paper?