Friday, March 14, 2008

I Was Gently Dancing When Life Boogied In, Part 4

But now those dreamy dawns were themselves distant dreams, lost in the haze of war. The war that had been spawned by humans, conceived of the mating of many individuals’ actions and their consequences, but had at some point assumed an identity of its own, had superseded its creators and now seemed to be more of a cause than a consequence, destroying with oedipal blindness.

In the city hall bullets ricocheted off walls, window glasses shattered with shrill bursts of noise. In short pauses of incoming fire people moved around, came out from behind their covers and fired back and ducked when they heard stronger machine guns presenting stronger arguments.
At first Nikolai was paralyzed, he had his back to a wall segment between two windows and couldn’t move as the red bricks broke into pieces at the edges of the windows where bullets landed. But now he was slowly finding himself, balancing fear with control and realizing the limitedness of his options which, as he knew before on a head level but now felt in his gut, included neither waiting for the storm to pass or fleeing out of its path of destruction, he started firing out the window, uncovering as little as possible of his head, but enough to aim.

One thing that was on his mind, and many others’ trapped there with him, was where the enemy tanks were. Outside, there were infantry with rifles and machine guns but there were no signs of tanks, the decisive heavier fire power of which would no doubt shorten the duration of their struggle, though in the same way as a rushing guillotine blade would have shortened the struggle of fallen royalty.

The reason for the slowness of the enemy tanks to arrive, enemy here being a term that signifies a relation, not intrinsic values like good and evil, was their understandable overestimation of the defense plan. Judging by the minimal resistance they had met in the jungle, and the readiness of the defense to retreat, they had concluded that there must be a ruse and suspected the path of the retreat embedded with anti-tank mines which would allow the defense, consisting of nothing but infantry, a safe retreat as the mines would not go off by their treading, but instead would wait snug and smiling in the darkness under inches of earth … would wait for the heavier cue of tanks to blowup, sending man and machine parts into the air.

And so it took a few hours of inch by inch scanning of the harmless mineless fields for the tanks to make their way to the city. But eventually they did arrive and like guests late to a party make up for the time lost by drinking faster, they started a torrential shelling of the city hall.
In the basement of the city hall where it had been decided women and children should stay during all this, it felt like an unending earthquake. Like a giant was walking through the city whose every step shook the floor and walls. There sat Julie among mothers wrapping their arms around their children, old women gasping and sobbing with every hit and children with eyes widened, too shocked and confused to even cry.

A few feet above, time was lost in flashes of sound and light from guns and tanks. The morning seemed like an eternity away to Nikolai, as if he was falling in an infinite well and the peace of the time where air was not filled with flying pieces of metal intended for your head was the receding brightness of the well’s entrance.

to be coninued ...

No comments: