After his return to the island, Manuel decides to dig into the past to recover the details of the murder of the man he adopted. He also tries to get to know more about the wife of Khatha, the mysterious man whom he had only met briefly, but who left a great impression on him. “Khitha,” the absent man, is the most present in the novel, and his presence will change the fate of the lives of its characters, including his wife, who irrevocably left her previous life and went on to rediscover herself after her meeting with him.
In the novel “Soldiers Cry at Night,” Anna Maria Matute attempts to experiment with new narrative methods based on mixing the narrators’ voices so that the speech of all the characters seems, in one way or another, to be one continuous dialogue. The dense, highly sensitive and delicate spectrum of characters in this novel will continue to haunt the reader and motivate him to re-read the book, which ended prematurely, leaving many outstanding questions.
As soon as Pavel, at the head of a geological expedition, arrives at “Devil’s Hill,” the old shepherd living there warns him that he must leave the hill within a month, before he ends up committing suicide on the branch of an oak tree, and the fate of his mission becomes the same as the fate of the previous eight missions. However, the enthusiastic young man insists on making the mission a success, even though the members of his mission are fleeing down the hill one after the other.
Little by little, the two get closer: the young man who studied in the Polish capital, Warsaw, and the old man who knows the hill’s hidden secrets, and their evenings become endless darkness, during which “Pavel” tells the shepherd about his love affairs, while the latter listens in amazement, and his heart burns with love for the nun Maria, the last of the young man’s lovers. .
In “The Women of Warsaw,” Georgi Markov writes about two different worlds that border on contradiction, leaving the oak tree to chart the path to the end...
"أين يُمكِن لرجل وامرأة أن يتصادفا؟ على حدود متراخية، أو في مروج مترامية، مقعد دراسة أو طاولة عمل، ميدان أو زقاق، حفل أو عزاء، في طائرة أو حافلة. أمَّا إن كان أحدهما كاتبًا؛ تتلعثم الأبجدية، وتنفتح أبواب عوالم سحرية، فيلتقيان في أكثر الأماكن غرابةً، وأشدها مهابةً، مثلًا: في البلد الذي يَمنع النُّطق بالحا
