The Window

(retold 1994 for my English pupils, from a story remembered from my childhood,
origin unknown to me)

“What do you see, boy, what do you see out there this morning?“ Every day in the primitive military hospital ward, far from home, and far from the world of battlefields, the hopelessly wounded who were brought there to live out their remaining days would ask this of the young man who lay beside the only window in the room. All were legless or just bedridden, and from their positions they could only receive some indirect light across the room through that window.

At any given hour during the day, on any given day, their miserable lives were brightened but by one little comfort. The boy who lay wounded by the window would raise himself a just a bit and and turn his head toward the glass pane and tell what he alone saw from his special vantage point. The soldier who had occupied the bed before had lain in coma. All came here to die, and no one stayed longer than a few weeks.

The boy opened his eyes, and then his mouth, and spoke; and from the grateful hearts throughout that room came a long, deep sigh of remembrance, from every eye a drop of bitter-sweet affirmation.

“The green meadow is especially wild this morning,“ he would say, this boy with half his body gone. “It may have rained last night, because the river is higher and faster, and the tall grasses very colorful, very new and proud – the sky is clear and blue like sapphire, and the tallest of the blue-green trees are like a forest of spears piercing it.

“The swallows are dashing back and forth by the window here, but the hawk that lives in the forest is climbing skyward on its way to a distant lake. The sun warms everything alive except me. I feel cold in my bed. ...“

Surely one can imagine what food this provided the dozen other men in the ward, what hope and what stretch of life it gave to them. Many weeks passed in this manner, and for all their suffering and medication, all of them still lived; not one died, as weeks turned to months in that dim hospital ward. The lonely, pain-wracked and forgotten soldiers began to think only of the boy's descriptions; they no longer had to ask him, he volunteered these reports of the wonders outside his window. And their wounds and their pain mattered less, and they struggled for one more hour, and for one more day, if at least to hear the boy's calming voice and to relive through it their most basic longings for something that is still beautiful.

At any time of day he could arouse their attention with a few well-placed words, whether it was to mention the first shafts of sunrise stroking the nearby hills in changing shades of color, or the variations of mood throughout the day, or the sinking of the last light behind those nearby hills.

He never seemed to grow tired of giving his daily reports, and these were always consistent without being redundant. He just grew tired and colder in body. And at night they slept. And one morning he was dead.

His bed now lay vacant and it remained vacant for some days. The aching soldiers grew restless and thirsty for the hearing of what they could not see out there, what they could not kiss. One of them was then moved into the bed by the lovely, coveted window, the bed of privilege. And he gazed silently out, gazed and said nothing. The men in the ward grumbled nervously, impatiently, and one finally called out, “Hey! So tell us already about the world out there, don't keep it all to yourself! Tell us all that you see, we're waiting – now tell it!“

But he only lay there with an expression of shock and defeat. He mumbled, then with a mixture of confusion and anger he spoke for all to hear, “For the love of Christ, man – why, it's just a wall there, blocking everything … nothing but bricks and bricks on … more bricks … it's all there ever was!“