01
The wind blows from a great distance, and the salt and cold of the Arctic Ocean are in the air，in just the right way, unlike the smell of soil, which is wet, cold, and hard, so that no green plants or flowers can grow on it, and it barely smells of life.
The greyish-yellow weeds are no more than knee-bones, spreading over every inch of barren soil as far as the eye can see, with no dew and no moonlight, their dried stems and leaves stuck in the earth like the skeletons of ancient creatures standing, lifeless but still sharp.
The old man walks in the wilderness, and he does walk, but he only walks. I prefer to think of him as a puppet infected with the walking virus, walking alone in this meaningless space, rather than as a living thing.
I guess he's an exile, after all, it's a place where no one but the man who wears the sin sets foot.
02
When a war ends with the explosion of a nuclear bomb, it doesn't matter which side wins.
After all, too many people have died. Too many people feel the same emotions of sacrifice, betrayal, and separation, and they are difficult for them to devote much emotion or energy to anything else, or they are too weak to go into detail and add to the grief.
So the best way to deal with war criminals in exile.
From the marshal down to the pawn, stripped of their uniforms, in a land of nothing, they are all the same.
To spend the time of their lives in the company of a long winter and unseen tombs, on their own, is excellent salvation or an unexpected consequence for the war criminal, but in the eyes of the victor, such punishment is also sufficient.
03
Exile is not a punishment at all, time is. The time to torment anyone, and for most war criminals half a century is enough to wear out a life.
Gellert Grindelwald was the last man standing.
He lived for almost fifty years in a land where there was no hope.
Fifty years is half a lifetime for some people or a lifetime for some short-lived ghosts. To exaggerate, it's even the next life of a life lost in that war.
He was not young when he came here, his black hair had lost its white, and from a distance, it was grey, a lighter shade than the exposed rocks, and white when it snowed and particles of snow seeped into his hair.
At that time he was too quiet, like most senior officers who can't accept reality and some choose to commit suicide. He thought he would end his own life instead of being in such a wilderness, self-imprisoned.
But he didn't kill himself, he just killed his own words.
In the years immediately after he arrived in exile, the low ranking soldiers thought he was mute. Most of the time, he sat on the land to be cultivated, his half-used shoes knocking into the dry soil, letting small gravels leave scratches on them.
He likes to look out into the distance, but in this part of the world there is nothing to see, especially as there are seven months of winter in the year, and most of the winter is snowy, and the winter on the moor is nothing more than old snow-covered with new snow, layer upon layer. When the snow falls, one cannot even see oneself.
In the quiet years, he always imagined a white tower in the distance, above all the ruins.
He sometimes tries to draw the tower.
On snowy nights, most exiles choose to curl up on their couch with all the blankets wrapped around them, and occasionally some exiles who has found a way in will pour hard-won vodka into their mouth. Sometimes they get drunk and then speak in a language he doesn't understand, those who aren't drunk join them, they share the drink or the temperature, the foam sticks to their beards and forms tiny droplets, finally, they fall head over heels on the bed, crushing the old iron bed with their voices.
They talk about women, wives, and sex, just as they talk about the style of pistol and the type of bullets, but not every gun comes with only one type of bullet. They begin to reminisce about the dogs and brands of cigarettes, the softness of white bread, and the taste of coffee in their homeland and then sigh with nostalgia or regret.
The sound of snow falling is inaudible, but the wind is clear enough that the fire burns stubbornly, sparks exploding intermittently and making a continuous sound. The air smells of alcohol and ashes, which is warm, but not warm enough on most nights.
Gellert likes to sit by the fire on nights like this and draw the white tower, the unseen white tower, in the dim light of the fire.
He held a pencil that had been turned out of nowhere and was only about three knuckles long. The graphite ink sticks to his fingers, the flat, bald nib rubbing against the old paper, tangled between the textures of the fibers.
He knew there was a white tower like that, but he couldn't draw it. He could only stare quietly, at the things he could not see.
This is how exiles used to describe him as a silent artist.
04
But it had been too long for him to remain completely silent, and around the eighth or perhaps the tenth year of his arrival, he began to ramble on about things that bystanders didn't care to hear.
The nuclear ruins are thirty miles away in what used to be a village, and over the years a succession of daring exiles have ventured out into the forbidden land. They begun to deliberately avoid the question of radiation in comparison to the looming cold.
Ten years were not enough.
Gellert traded his pocket watch for a book of poetry and half a bottle of red ink plucked from the ruins by other exiles.
He has aged far too quickly in the intervening years, his hair, which has not yet had time to turn grey, is falling out a little, and frosty folds of chaparral are spreading across his skin. It's almost impossible to maintain a refined life in a place like this, where even life is a struggle to get by.
He begins to read some poems as he sits on the land looking up at the White Tower.
He doesn't know what the poems are about. They could be about celebrating life, living, or peace, or they could be about some useless love affair. He guessed the pronunciation of the words on the paper, then pieced them together into phrases and spoke them to connect them, even though he didn't know the language.
Without a pocket watch, he can't know exactly how much time has passed, perhaps because his flesh has begun to decay and he is no longer sensitive to time. In his youth, he felt that a moment's communication with fools was a waste of life, but now he chooses to look back quietly on the folly of the past.
He began to feel like Sergeant Scamander's hound, sitting in the same place most of the time, stubbornly nostalgic for the taste of a certain bone. He was always lying in the sunset, letting tiny bits of sunlight stream through his fur, then waiting for the moon to come.
Then the dog died on a rainy morning.
Gellert saw the shadow of a bird hovering by the white tower.
05
Once again, he heard from Albus Dumbledore when the inspectors came.
They still praise the hero for how he broke up the enemy's plots, again and again. Though the great Dumbledore seems to be troubled by a new enemy.
"Of course he'll win, he won't lose to anyone after that summer," Gellert said to himself.
It occurred to him that in the eyes of the inspectors, he was just one of the millions of enemies they spoke of, perhaps once the most threatening, but essentially the same.
A defeated enemy, or Albus Dumbledore's adversary for the first half of his life.
In the summertime on the moor, the grass grows a little taller than usual and occasionally there are scattered flowers in the bushes, but they are the size of fingernails and live and die.
It was a land that could not cling to any long-lived life.
There are less than half a dozen exiles left who came to this land. They became like old wooden stakes set up in a wasteland, puppets with a hollowed-out core.
Or rather, they no longer resemble creatures like a man.
Little by little, gravestones are erected on the moor, where the tundra is hard and extremely difficult to excavate, and people are buried under a foot of earth, and then a stone is placed on the surface.
This completes the 'tomb'.
It was only when the first stone was erected that they spent their seventh night on the moor. Today, Gellert has lost count of the number of stones that have been erected here. The tremor in his steps as he passes by the graveyard can easily be felt underground.
Death is so close to him, a mere distance from the soil, the grass, and the broken stones.
And yet he lived long enough.