“Open your eyes. Child, open your eyes.” He wanted to do as she asked — he was so pleased to hear her voice again, so relieved that she’d returned — but his eyes were refusing to obey. “Mama,” he said, and felt a paralyzing sadness because he knew that if he didn’t open his eyes his mother would leave him again, not because she wanted to, but because he hadn’t seen the danger coming and protected her from it. “Open your eyes!” his mother demanded, and Andrej began to cry, because he could not. “Kid!” he heard, and this voice he didn’t recognize. It was not his father’s, not Uncle Marin’s, not Tomas’s or his own. Someone else was near. It could only be a soldier. A soldier who knew he was hiding here, a soldier who, in this soupy blackness, couldn’t be seen. Andrej sat still, hardly breathing, unable to call for help. For a long time there was silence, an oblivion deeper than sleep. When Andrej remembered to think again, he thought he was standing at the bottom of a well.
