What is Truth? Chapter 3

They reached the stone culvert before dawn.

Thumper’s aunt never arrived.

Neither boy suggested going back.

At sunrise, refugees began emerging from the fields. Some carried suitcases. Some carried blankets filled with bread, photographs, silverware, clothing, or objects chosen during the final seconds before a life became luggage.

An old man carried a birdcage with no bird inside.

A woman carried a framed mirror.

A family pushed their grandmother in a wheelbarrow.

Bambi watched them pass and wondered what his mother would have carried if she had been given time.

She had carried him.

That answer felt too much like something adults said at funerals, so he rejected it.

Thumper sat beside him under the culvert.

“My grandmother said the dead can hear you for three days,” he said.

Bambi stared at the scarf in his hands.

“How did she know?”

“She was old.”

“That means she was close to dying. It doesn’t mean she had information.”

“She said people who die suddenly don’t realize it right away.”

“Then what happens after three days?”

“They go where they’re going.”

“Where?”

Thumper shrugged.

“Somewhere without war.”

Bambi pressed the scarf to his face. It smelled of smoke, mud, and something beneath them that might have been his mother.

“I hope your grandmother was right.”

Thumper looked surprised.

“You never believe anything.”

“I didn’t say I believed it.”

They joined the refugees heading south.

Someone said the National Army had taken Drenovo.

Someone else said the Liberation Front had taken it.

A third person said both sides had withdrawn and bandits were looting the houses.

By noon, Bambi had heard that the church was standing, that it was destroyed, that forty people were dead, that no one had died, and that the entire village had been erased.

He opened his notebook.

On a new page, he wrote:

Drenovo fell last night.

Then he crossed out fell.

A village was not a soldier or a tree.

He wrote:

Fighting reached Drenovo last night. Current condition unknown.

That was less dramatic but more accurate.

Mrs. Varin would have approved.

The refugees followed farm paths toward the town of Sava. Along the way, Thumper resumed talking.

Silence had become dangerous.

“My uncle says crying dehydrates you.”

“Everything dehydrates you eventually.”

“He says a man should never cry in front of women.”

“Why?”

“They lose respect.”

“Did your aunt respect him?”

“No.”

“Did he cry in front of her?”

“No.”

Thumper thought about this.

“Maybe he should have.”

At the edge of Sava, they found a schoolhouse converted into a refugee shelter.

The classrooms smelled of sweat, boiled cabbage, wet clothing, and fear, although Bambi could not determine whether fear had a separate odor.

A young nurse cleaned the cuts on his hands.

“What happened to your mother?” she asked.

Bambi looked at the scarf wrapped around his wrist.

“She stayed behind.”

The nurse understood the translation.

She did not ask again.

Thumper wandered immediately toward three girls sitting near the stove.

“Women find confidence attractive,” he whispered.

“How do you know?”

“Every man agrees.”

“Most men aren’t attractive to women.”

“That doesn’t disprove the rule.”

One of the girls looked up.

She had dark hair cut to her chin and a bruise beneath one eye. She was perhaps twelve or thirteen.

Thumper leaned against a desk.

“My name is Thumper.”

The girl looked at his bare foot.

“Did you lose a shoe?”

“I travel lightly.”

“You’re carrying the other one.”

“It has sentimental value.”

"You're weird"

"My mother says if you have nothing nice to say you shouldn't say anything at all."

"What did she say about having nothing smart to say?"

His heart thumped.

She turned away.

Thumper returned to Bambi.

“She is interested.”

“She stopped looking at you.”

“Girls pretend not to care.”

“Maybe she doesn’t care.”

“That is exactly what she wants me to think.”

The girl spoke without turning around.

“I can hear you.”

Her name was Laleh.

She had come from a town north of Drenovo. Her older brother had joined the Liberation Front. Her father worked for the government railway. Both sides suspected the family of helping the other.

“Adults say family is the most important thing,” she told them. “Then they invent politics that make relatives afraid to speak to one another.”

Bambi wrote that down.

Laleh pointed to the notebook.

“What is that?”

“Things people say.”

“Why?”

“To see whether they’re true.”

“You’ll need a bigger notebook.”

Next Chapter: The Country of Adults

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