In the moonless night, a gang of drunken deserters had no chance against two professional hunters who were intent on protecting their land and the lives of their family in the forest where they had lived and hunted all of their lives. Some few desperate vollies from the soldiers’ automatic weapons whipped through the branches and leaves of the trees, but the outcome was clear from the start. In comparison to the indistinct contours of boars and foxes in the dark, the shaved heads of the soldiers made easy targets. And if the two brothers had thought anything at all for the next few minutes, it would probably have been wonder over how normal it all felt.

Capture the target in your sight, squeeze the trigger and quickly, without waiting to see the effect of the previous shot, chamber a new round, seek a new target, squeeze the trigger, load – until there was neither sound nor movement in the area. The area where the wild boars hunt for food at night, the foxes fight in mating season, or where the dregs of a fallen empire seek revenge. Most of them died on the truck bed, a couple in the courtyard and one on the steps of the house. No one got as far as the door.

Beneath a massive tarpaulin, the now naked corpses of the soldiers were driven out to the great bog area four or five kilometers away. The brothers didn’t count their fallen enemies, but after the shooting was finished, they gathered twenty-three cartridge casings. And normally they did not have to shoot twice at the same target. The weapons and gear were thrown into the deepest bend in the river, the truck left burning on the highway, and the next morning they burnt the soldiers’ tattered, dirty uniforms behind the house.

Only then did they clearly recognize that it had not been a normal hunt, that there is a world of difference between lodging a good shot behind the ear of a wild boar and in the head of a human being. And both recognized also that you shouldn’t try to do anything like that many times if you want to retain your humanity. Not that they spoke about it. This was something they never really discussed. But their gray tired faces clearly told the same story when the last evidence of the night’s events was burned and the first traces of daylight began to lighten the sky.

Now it only remained to hope that the wild boars, foxes, ravens, and, finally, the worms would do their work. And that the soldiers – like thousands of other soldiers in that time of dissolution – were simply written off as deserters, mercenaries for other regimes, or just vanished.

***

Now, after nearly twenty years, in four more days, the two brothers could stop worrying about being caught. The new regime had decided that crimes committed under the old one fell under a general amnesty after twenty years. They would no longer have to bend an ear to the sound of steps on the stairs or the motor of a car that would take them to prison for the rest of their lives.

Then they would only have to try to erase the pictures from that night, to get the black-and-white film to stop running in their heads. And as they sat there on the terrace and watched the children playing in the garden, they thought perhaps it would happen one day, before too very long.

Four days later, they met again on the terrace and filled two glasses with a bottle of the very finest vodka that the younger brother had been saving for just this day.

-To your health, brother, said the one.

-To the future, the other answered.

 

Thomas E. Kennedy‘s many books include the forthcoming (in 2013) Getting Lucky: 20 New & Selected Stories, 1982-2012 and the novel Kerrigan in Copenhagen, A Love Story, the third novel of his Copenhagen Quartet, coming from Bloomsbury Publishers worldwide. He has lived in Denmark for many years and has translated many Danish poets and prose writers which have been published in American Poetry Review, New Letters, Mid-American Review, and many other journals.