Lakia ran in front of her owner
and then waited for a bit. After all, Madame Greska was an elderly woman that
needed a cane to support her weight. Even so, she liked to take a walk around
the village every single day with her dog, as she had done for years and years.
Her husband used to join them for the walk but he had died very recently and
now a stroll around the fields was the only thing really making her feel alive.
There was nothing more for her in this world, so she took what little she had
around.
And one of those things was the
nature and beauty of her village’s surroundings. It was a very small town, deep
into a very steep mountain range, so the modern world had been kept largely at
bay. There was electricity and hot water but that was basically it. Very few
people came but those who did chose the town precisely because it seemed to
have been frozen in time. Madame Greska’s clothes were even the traditional
attire for women of the region, something women did not wear anymore elsewhere.
But in that place between the
mountains, people lived a different kind of life. As she smelled the deep and
beautiful smell of the lavender fields, the woman looked at how peaceful it all
seemed, how untouched and perfect the countryside was and that could also have
been said about the town itself. The homes had been built almost three hundred
years ago by hand, stone by stone, and they had been kept in the same
conditions since then. No major changes had ever been done.
Even when electricity came,
people came up with ways to install the whole thing without having to modify
their homes or the general look of their town. And it was a success because no
one would have ever thought those interventions had been made there. The town
was made up of about twenty to thirty houses, all very similar, some of then
containing the post office, the mayor’s office, the restaurant, the bar, the
hotel and some other dependencies needed in the town’s daily life.
They celebrated festivals in the
summer as well as in the winter and they also had a small church on the
outskirts to praise the Virgin Mary, the protector of the mountain towns. It
was there that they prayed for days and days during the hard times, that had
never come to the mountains but that had been looming around them for quite
some time. The town was never in the middle of any historical occurrence but
they had been very close in a number of times and only prayer and keeping their
traditions had seemed to do the work and keep all the bad things at bay, away
from their paradise.
One of those bad things was war,
both great wars in this case. During the first one, Madame Greska had not been
alive yet. But her parents told her when she was young how they feared for
their lives when a messenger arrived, having been sent by the royal house hold
in order to announce all over the country that the war had begun. For them, it
had been the announcement of a tragedy; something that they just knew would
change their lives forever. So they prayed and prepared, and waited and waited.
But the war never came to them.
The small town stayed as it had been for hundreds of years and its people,
although fearful, were able to live normal lives, plowing their fields and
harvesting their crops. They had animals and even did a little bit of commerce
between themselves and neighboring small towns. It was only in those
opportunities when someone would come back, updating everyone about what was
happening beyond the mountains. But somehow, all of it just seemed like a
bedtime story.
No soldiers ever came and those
machines that people had invented to fly had been simply considered
exaggerations. No one there ever saw a tank or even a rifle. They had no idea
what mustard gas was and how it affected people. In time, many years after the
end of the war, some travellers did tell them about what they had heard and
seem. So the war did become a little bit more real but probably not real
enough. For the people of such a small town, all those grandiose stories were
just that, stories.
Madame Greska grew up during the
times between the wars and she remembered those days fondly. She remembered
frolicking around the meadows in the spring, catching tadpoles with her sister
and running after some dog, probably Lakia’s grandfather. Something she had
always loved was when, in winter, they would offer her ice cones in the town’s
festival. They were made out of ice collected in the mountains surrounding the
town and they would then add some flavoring, most likely some kind of berry.
Her parents her very caring
people, the farmer type. They had a couple of cows and would sell the milk in
the town’s market, every single day. Her mother was the one that had to do the
heavy work and her father was in charge of selling the product. She never knew
why her mother had to carry such heavy buckets and walk the cows to a prairie
where they could eat. Her father didn’t seem to do that much at all. But he was
such a nice and funny guy that, no one ever really seemed to be able to be mad
at him. He was just the kind of person that would lift your spirits any day of
the week.
That was until the Second World
War. The town was left untouched by that one too but they were more affected by
it in ways very few people can understand. Again, no soldiers ever stepped on
the stone streets of the small town nor they walked among the lavender fields.
But it was people that heard about what was going on and how now it seemed to
be worse than the last time. The atrocities people talked about were so heinous
that some people even qualified them as fabrications and dismissed them
completely.
But by the end of the second year
of the war, people noticed that it did seem like something completely different
that before. More and more, people that had been beyond the mountains would
tell everyone in town about the battles being fought and the threats being
fulfilled. And those people would almost always come with some kind of proof,
mostly in the shape of flyers and newspapers, which had become easier to find.
They came with detailed stories and even with pictures of the horrors.
This caused town to prepare once
again. And even knowing the war would probably never get to them, they did try
to cut off some ties with the outside world in order to prevent anything bad
from coming to them. Some youngsters were even thinking about the bigger
picture, what would happen if the enemy won the war and was able to take
everything for themselves? They thought about it for a long time until one day,
something happened that made them take a step that their families would regret
for life.
One night, a large group of
planes passed over town. They were noisy and seemed to be flying really low.
Most villagers thought their tie had come. But no, the planes continued for a
bit and then started dropping their payload on a neighboring town, much larger
than Madame Greska’s village. It was beyond the mountains but the explosions
were so potent that they could be seen from afar. This event caused many young
men to decide joining the army and fight for the freedom of the whole nation.
None of them ever returned. Only
letter with their uniform and a picture of their battalion would get to their
families, who would mourn them forever. Brave young men that had decided that
their ignored village was more than enough to be able to fight tyrants and
monsters.
Two of those men were Madame
Greska’s brothers. And she was so affected by the tragedy that she was never
able to have children. Her body was able to do it but somehow inside seemed to
prevent any pregnancy. It seemed her soul had always been in mourning and would
always be.
