A Walk with Love and Death. Hans Koning

3

      My progress toward that house was fast; I think I ran part of the way. But I’m not certain, for with no food and the wine sloshing around in me, the world became a dreamlike place. The air grew cold, the low light of the late afternoon made everything sparkle, and I flew along.

      In the great silence I heard several times the sound of horses without seeing them, and then I let myself fall flat on the ground and did not stir. I thought, no matter what that captain may be, it’s a good idea to walk into his establishment as a guest and not as a prisoner of one of his patrols. But it was much more a game with me than deliberation. I lay down and put my mouth against the icy chunks of the earth which had been plowed but not sown. I decided earth tasted good and laughed a bit about that. And I thought, sleeping is like being in a tree, dreaming an animal, being awake a man, and exaltation is being like God. Perhaps not such a very striking thought, but striking enough to get kicked out of the university for, as I know.

      I liked that hour, I liked my fast journey with a hard evening wind and the setting sun pushing in my back. And then I was at the row of beeches and my exaltation ebbed away although I tried to hold on to it. I was no longer alone, there was a house, voices, steps. I so tired now that I could hardly draw breath. Opposite me the thin slice of the new moon was visible in the sky. It would be a dark night.

      I brushed the earth off my clothes and then marched out from behind the trees and toward the door without looking sideways where I heard men talking.

      The captain or what looked like a captain was sitting behind a table, leaning on it with his elbows; a heavy-set soldier, eating and drinking with both hands. He could be an army officer or the headman of a Free Company, which is a euphemism for a gang of bandits. He could be fighting for the English, for Navarre, or just for himself, he could be from anywhere and for anyone; perhaps he didn’t even know any more. It didn’t make much difference.

      I bowed and waited.

      “Who are you?” he said.

      “A student from Paris, traveling to Oxford in England, asking shelter for the night and a safe-conduct through your territory.”

      ‘‘How did you get here?”

      “On foot.”

      He cursed softly, probably because his men had not been more efficient. “What’s your name?” he said and picked up his meat again.

      “Heron of Foix.”

      He puckered his mouth. “From the family of the Count of Foix?”

      I wasn’t at all of that family but it seemed sensible not to say so.

      “I wouldn’t dream of taking less than fifty francs from a gentleman like you,” the captain stated.

      “All I have in the world is twenty francs.”

      “I’ll take those.”

      “I have a long way ahead of me.”

      “That’s what you think,” the captain said, laughing very hard.

      I began to laugh too, heaven knows why. That pleased him. “Sit down,” he said, “and eat something. I’ll take five. You’re lucky.”

      That night, he let me sleep on a bench in his room where there was a big fire. We were awakened at dawn by some of his men bringing in the old winegrower.

      “Captain, we found one,” they cried. “But he says he has nothing.”

      “Then cut his throat,” the captain grumbled.

      “No, don’t do that,” I said. “I know this man. He has nothing.”

      The captain sat on the edge of his bed, unbuttoned his shirt, and started scratching his chest. “They all say that, Foix. They’ve all got a pot of gold somewhere.”

      “Not me,” the old man cried.

      “Then cut his throat,” the captain repeated.

      “Captain,” I said, “this man is the only human being I’ve found between here and Paris. You can’t kill him. Don’t you see? He’s a link; if you kill him, you no longer control a province of France, you just run around in empty space. You must spare him for your own sake.”

      The men began to laugh at the word “province.” The captain was obviously only a little captain. The old man gaped at me. The captain lay down and went back to sleep without saying another word.

      I left shortly after, my pockets full of bread I’d stolen from his kitchen. He had never asked for the five francs, but I had no safe-conduct from him. I didn’t think he controlled much area anyway.

      I went due north from the house. For a long time I heard behind me high screams of the old man, They were torturing him in the courtyard, using meat hooks and ropes; I hoped he had a secret to give away.

4

      In the course of that morning I entered the woods. It wasn’t a gradual change: at the edge of a glary field the trees suddenly began, shadow, and thick undergrowth. Soon I came upon a path which seemed to go more or less in my direction, north; it was neglected but not difficult. I left behind me the wide moat of desolation surrounding the city.

      I had come to Paris as a small boy with my mother, from Hainaut in the north, after my father had died in the great plague. That was ten years ago. I had lived in Paris ever since, and everything and everyone I knew were bound up with that city where my first friends were, my first books, the first girl who let me make love to her.

      But I felt no regret now, just the opposite: leaving it all behind was like a liberation.

      We in the city knew that the world was dying around us. Armies and gangs of bandits roamed and fought each other and everyone else. The king was a prisoner in England but no one bothered about him except his own clique who tried to raise his ransom from the peasants. The peasants paid and paid and yet they went on growing food. Nothing since the beginning of the world has ever stopped them from doing that. At least not until this very year; this year, unbelievably almost, it truly seemed as if they wouldn’t any more.

      There had been fighting and burning and plundering before, but what was happening in France now was different: there was no mercy, no ending to it, no idea behind it. Men were like birds with iron beaks; hammering and hammering away at the almost hopeless land. More than half the students were in theology colleges, but there was no Christianity left either. The few who really believed didn’t sit in schoolrooms but went into monasteries and vanished from our sight.

      Yet it wasn’t at all a mood of misery which hung in the streets of the Latin Quarter. The older people, the priests and the professors, ignored what was happening, I think, except where it touched their private interests; when they talked about the outer world, which was rare enough, it sounded as it they were discussing the war between Caesar and Pompey.

      And the students just didn’t care. We did a lot of drinking and fighting, we argued and read too because through scholasticism we felt superior to the dirt and hunger around us, and we tried to make love to every girl. I don’t know what the other students did about confession; I and my friends always went to the same old priest, Father Morel, a great scholar and also as deaf as a post. He peeked hard at you when you stopped talking and if you then smiled in the proper open way he immediately gave absolution.

      But I remember a morning at the end of winter shortly before I was expelled. We were all sitting in the room of a friend of mine because he had a splendid fire going; some of us were playing cards, others were talking.

      There was a lot of shouting and laughter. Wolves came to the Paris cemeteries every night and dug up corpses; now it was suggested that we should stage a wolf hunt. It was the time of the full moon. We’d set out just before