BURIED ALIVE

My grandmother’s light blue eyes sparkled even after her shoulders hunched under the weight of her advanced age. To simply say that she was pretty in her youth wouldn’t do justice to her presence that lightened the dark world between the wars into which she was born. She was already withered by time for as long as I remember, but the twinkle in her eyes never faded, reflecting the expanse of the bluest sky. Dark age spots speckled her gnarled hands, and countless life experiences etched in the deep lines upon her forehead, that indicated she had countless stories to tell. Despite getting close to the end of her life as she neared the age of ninety, she still had a sound mind right up to her last day when she died of a heart attack while pruning a tree in her garden.

Her life story wasn’t unique to the many who fled the advancing of the Russian army commonly known as “The Red Barbarians.” At the same time as she had lost her husband on the battlefield, the occupying Germans captured her with her two children and put her to work as a nurse in a hospital for German soldiers. They found her useful and treated her well, and that is when she realised that the enemy were humans and she could survive with her two children.

After the war, she continued working as a nurse, assisting doctors during operations. One early morning, while cycling around the outskirts of town on her way to work, she noticed a man hurrying towards the forest. Finding it odd that he would choose the path leading into the woods, she decided to investigate further, following in his footsteps with the curiosity of a rabbit preying on a fox. The man was clutching a box in his arms, walking purposefully through the trees, casting furtive glances as if he sensed that he'd been shadowed by somebody.

As the distance closed between them, she watched uneasily as he selected a small clearing where he began digging a hole in the soft earth with his bare hands. Her heart probably raced to see him placing the box in the shallow grave, covering it with leaves and loose soil. He halted abruptly, possibly hearing the wind rattling the wheels of her bicycle propped against a tree, as he quickly rose and left with soil clinging to his trousers.

Torn between the instinct to flee or to uncover his secret, she reached the spot he had just stood over moments earlier, brushing her fingers against the cool earth, dreading the moment when she opened the box. At first glance she recoiled with shock seeing a newborn girl, lying at the bottom of the box, miraculously showing faint signs of life. After my grandmother wrapped the baby carefully in her scarf, she carried the baby in her arms to the hospital, raising an alarm, and calling for the doctors.

The baby survived its ordeal and was put up for adoption. While some would argue that it was a sure sign of evil prevailing in this world, my grandmother held a different belief. She saw the man with the box not as the devil, but an older farmer disguising himself in sackcloth.

It was perhaps her destiny to deviate from her usual route that day and follow him, a miracle that she happened to be in the right place at the right time. She chose not to denounce the gravedigger, thinking it was in the child’s best interest to remain unaware of its origins, buried under a tree.

A few years later when they brought into my grandmother’s hospital an older patient with a burst appendix, she stared at the patient’s lined face resembling furrowed fields where nothing was growing in his empty eyes. He suddenly grabbed her wrist, pulling her to his mouth, whispering what she had already known was his dark secret. How could she ever forget about a creature digging a hole with his claws, whose face she glimpsed, bringing nightmares to her sleep?

“I did a terrible thing, nurse,” he confessed in a voice as colourless as rain, “I buried my daughter’s baby without a proper burial in the woods.”

My grandmother remained silent, letting him speak as sharp pain gripped him.

“I swear on my grave that the baby is the devil’s daughter,” he said.

“There’s no such thing,” she replied. “People invent the devil to justify their sins.”

“You don’t understand! The baby’s father was the devil who, on the outside, looked like a farmer toiling in the field. It is better that the baby died. If it lived, it would find out that its father and grandfather had the same skeleton wearing different skins.”

As he closed his eyes, my grandmother opened hers widely as she understood the weight of his confession. Keeping the secret buried in the shadows of her memory, she only spoke about it when her unhearing ears no longer detected her words.

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