Even as the days grew darker, the wind was mild. Miquel watched from the bedroom window as his father and Jordi walked along the lane which ran from the lower fields up to the barn. They were both in shirtsleeves as though it were a summer's day.
"We'll have no winter this year," his father had said over dinner the previous evening. "The priests have announced it as our reward for constant prayer and kindness to our neighbors."
Miquel had managed a laugh to please his father, a role normally played by Jordi. But Jordi and their mother had remained silent. Jordi seldom spoke now and responded with hardly even a gesture if anyone said a word to him. On Saturday he would be taken to La Seu for a special haircut and be gone by Tuesday to do his military service. He would be away for two years.
A week earlier, when the final summons arrived, Jordi had asked Miquel what it was like, traveling by lorry to Lerida, being handed a uniform, spending the night in a barracks like a prisoner, eating their food, and traveling by train to Zaragoza or Madrid or Valladolid, wherever they decided to billet you.
“You’ve just described it,” Miquel said.
“Yes, but what’s it like?” Jordi asked.
Miquel shrugged and held Jordi’s gaze; there was nothing to be said about it. It was not worth remembering or commenting on. Without realizing, he had let his mind wander over certain details from his own two years in uniform, but he stopped himself suddenly when he saw that Jordi had become frightened.
Jordi, who seemed to spend most of his last days at home petting his dog, Clua, or playing with him, had not spoken to Miquel since then but he did not seem angry with him or in a sulk with him; rather, he understood that because they could not speak easily about the ordeal ahead of him, they had better not speak at all. Even in the bedroom they shared, as they undressed or prepared to turn off the light, neither of them said a word. Miquel was deeply aware that the other single bed in the small room would soon be empty. He supposed that his mother would strip the sheets from it and leave the mattress bare during his brother’s absence.
More than with fear or hunger or constant discomfort, he associated his years of military service with dreams of home. In the early months, as he received useless training under the punishing sun, he wondered why he had never viewed his life with his family in the village as precious and fragile. He dreamed of cold dawns, being woken by his father to go with him in the jeep to the uplands where the flocks of sheep were summering. He dreamed about Jordi, who loved his sleep, deciding whether or not he would come with them. He dreamed about his own bed, the familiar room, the sounds of night and morning, the scops owl near the window in summer, the creaking of the floorboards as his mother moved in the night, the bringing of the flocks down to the barns in the winter, the narrow street of the village full of their cries.
Every day he had planned his return, longed for it in detail, lived in the ordinary future where the smallest domestic detail—the sound of a jeep starting up, a chainsaw, a hunter’s gun, or a dog’s bark—would signify that he had returned, that he had survived.