She offers her hand to the soldier to shake. Her face is dirty and bruised, a trickle of blood running down her left cheek. Even now, we know she is a rat, an underperson, a modified animal, a nothing. And yet we, even we across the centuries, feel that she has somehow become more of a person than we are—that she dies human and fulfilled. We know that she has triumphed over death: we have not. We see the soldier looking straight at her with eerie horror, as though her simple love were some unfathomable device from an alien source. We hear her next words on the tape: “Soldier, I love all of
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