by Stephen Dau
More explosions burst forth from other parts of the village, each preceded by the same nameless sound, and it seemed as though nothing existed in the world except explosions. Younis found himself wondering whether every one of them meant the same thing.
He briefly thought he might be asleep still, in his bed and dreaming it all. The explosions stopped, replaced now by shouts and wails. A diffuse firelight rose and fell all around him, rose and fell, illuminating towering columns of thick black smoke hulking above all the world, fading into the darkness, returning again, massive and dangerous, like monsters disappearing and reappearing from the corners of his bedroom.
Younis moved through it all in a state of hyperawareness, not thinking in the rational sense, but rapidly processing pieces of information, noticing, slowing everything down. He noticed how a small part of the house’s back wall, the part farthest away from the outhouse, looked normal, completely unaffected by the carnage around it. He smelled the acrid smell of burning plastic and hair and the sulfur smell of explosives. He noticed that the water well in the courtyard appeared to be untouched, the circular retaining wall pristine, but that something sat on it in flames, as though someone had balanced a burning leg of mutton on the well’s lip. Tiny craters pocked the outhouse’s mud-brick outer walls, and the courtyard wall buckled in upon itself.
He still held his arm curled up at his stomach, and he looked down to see that blood dripped off the tips of his fingers and into the dewy grass. He wrapped his forearm in a loose piece of his shalwar, keeping his elbow bent, the fabric wound tightly.
He felt himself go weak, and fought to maintain consciousness. For a moment, he thought he might be able to fly, lift himself off the ground and swoop away toward the hills, where he knew his family awaited him, willing his speedy journey.
The first gunshots came from the south side of the village, sharp, small reports, one or two at a time, like the sound of kindling under an ax. Then a machine gun opened up and the pops came as rapidly as the chain links through the pulley over the well when the bucket was dropped in, the whole chaos of reports moving gradually closer.
Younis ran toward the front gate, which led out onto the street, noticing when he got there that the entire wall beside the gate was now one long pile of bricks that he could have easily stepped over. Despite this, he popped open the latch and let the heavy door swing wide, closing it firmly after he exited.
The street itself was deserted, but he heard the mass of gunfire and shouts moving toward him like a living thing, faster and faster, louder by the second. He turned to go in the opposite direction, and took a single step when suddenly the world opened up all around, the gate and remnants of the wall behind him bursting into chips and splinters and showering him with dust.
The shouts came from everywhere at once, up the street and down, the air around him filling with cracks and whistles. He wanted to lie down, become the earth. He wanted to wake himself up, surround himself with iron and stone, drift away like dust before a windstorm. Instead, he spotted the narrow alleyway between two houses opposite the pile of rubble that used to be his home. He ran across the street and down the alley, the walls barely wide enough for his shoulders to pass through, and into another alley, and then another, all of them familiar and yet completely foreign. And then he was on the road beside the river, the broad expanse of water dark against the growing dawn.
Gunfire echoed again somewhere behind him, but he stopped despite it, suddenly stunned by the river. He probably looked at it for no more than a second or two, but the moment stretches on in his memory, expanding and becoming an event all its own. He was taken in by the beauty of it, by its cold rapids still roiling away, unconcerned by the horror unfolding behind him. For a moment he took in the sound of it, the gentle gurgle closer to shore, a top note underpinned by the deeper, more powerful roar out toward the rushing center. It will never stop, he thought, flowing on and building as it headed south, emptying, finally, into the vast sea, taking with it the water at which he now gazed, as much that night’s witness as himself, and yet fallow by comparison, unplanted with its brutality.
He considered jumping into it, letting the rushing water carry him along, whether to safety or not, where he would be silent and invisible in the churning current. He recalled swimming in it during the heat of summer, at the deep pool upstream, the icicles that shot through him when he jumped in from the rocky bank, numbing his legs and arms, bringing his life to the top of his skin, and he realized that in that water, those rapids, he would never survive the journey. And then he wondered whether he wanted to survive, and thought that maybe jumping in would be the best thing after all.
This happened much faster than it takes to describe, only seconds, and later Younis will express his amazement at this, at how quickly everything changes, whether because of a decision you make or the decisions made by others, or just because of chance, and in a moment the entire path of your life, everything you knew and everything you will ever know, is altered. But in those few seconds all he recognized was the need to make a decision and, somewhere deep inside, the importance of his choice.
The gunfire grew louder until it was nearly upon him, and he discovered he was running, only distantly aware of having decided to run, more conscious of the cool morning air blowing his hair, the rush of wind that he was puzzled to find he could hear only in his left ear, and he ran without knowing it, north out of the village, along the river, his legs churning without thought, like the river itself, and he ran down the path toward the hills, toward the mountains, running under the beautiful clear moon, toward the pass, and he ran, unconnected to the world, understanding nothing save the need to run, and he ran, and he was distantly surprised to find, almost offhandedly, that he did not cry, not even a tear.
3
Jonas pauses occasionally, to take a breath, or a sip from his glass of juice, or to gather his thoughts, and when he does, a little gap opens up in the space of the living room. Within these gaps live perceptions rendered undetectable by the telling of the story: the steady ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner, the creak of Rose’s wooden chair as she shifts her weight, the echoed shout of a child playing out in the neighborhood, the lengthening shadows in the front yard.
Rose has heard stories like this before. Not this story, of course. This story is different. Each story is different. But all of them share a need to be told, to be heard, and Rose knows how to hear them. She knows that these gaps are important, that they mean something. She knows that often the gaps are nearly as important as the story itself.
And so, despite her growing apprehension, she does not try to fill them. She does not express astonishment, or make meaningless, encouraging sounds. She does not ask questions, does not request clarification. She listens. She gives him her attention, the space to find his words, allows his story to breathe, offers him this measure of grace.
4
The cave his father had described came to mean more in Younis’s mind than it actually was. He searched for hours, trying to match his father’s instructions to the unfamiliar terrain before him, increasingly tired, weakened by the loss of blood, exhausted, and, finally, desperate. He longed for the cave, longed for all it represented. Its capacity for solace, its ability to shelter grew larger and more mythical with each step he took. He wandered across the empty hills.
Near the rock his father had shown him, balanced unnaturally in the shallow water close to the bank, the path ran away from the river and wove past a low, rocky outcrop before ascending steeply. Into the hills, it leveled out as often as the terrain allowed, but mostly it climbed steeply. The route was clear close to the river, a visible footpath that he easily followed up into the low pastures. But farther into the hills, it traversed stone and gravel, so that he had to search every twenty or thirty steps to be sure he was still walking in the right direction.
Periodically, the route appeared to end abruptly, run straight into a rock wall or stand of brush. He scrambled up the
stone face or around the brush, searching above it until he found the barest trace on which to continue, until the trail disappeared again, this time into a deep gully, or a stretch of impenetrable thorns, and he repeated the process, each time hoping that the path on which he resumed his trek was the correct one.
His route trended steeply upward, switching back and forth as it encountered obstacles and sheer faces, sometimes leading right back toward the beginning, twisting around like a noodle dropped on a pile of rocks. And then the trail ended again, in the middle of a vast boulder field, and Younis couldn’t find it, no matter how hard he looked.
He slumped to the ground in despair, feeling exposed sitting among the rocks, open to both the sky and the valley far below. He hoped his dark clothes did not stand out against the lighter granite. The ringing in his ear was pronounced, new, and he tried to get rid of it by screwing up his eyes. When that didn’t work, he opened them and searched the slope below for any signs of movement, any hint that he might have been discovered. His arm throbbed with an immobilizing pain. Distant, booming thuds echoed from the rocks and seemed to suck away the air. He longed for the cave, to simply be there, to be anywhere that would get him out from under the open sky and off the slope. His head rang as though hit with a mallet. He needed the cave, which he imagined had been custom-built for him, for his shelter, perhaps by his father or his grandfather. His imagination made it a living thing, a rescuer, an active participant in his struggle.
Perhaps he passed out. He lost track of time. Eventually, because he had no choice, he stood. His arm did not seem to be bleeding as much, but he did not dare to look underneath the cloth he kept wrapped around it. He walked around a subtle bend in the hill that did not look like anything at all when viewed from below, but which stretched farther back into a seam in the hillside, its depth becoming apparent only as he entered it. He climbed up what turned out to be a shallow gorge in the rock, mostly hidden from view when seen from below. He surveyed the landscape again. Up the hill, on the other side of this crevice, he saw a flat, shelflike protrusion balanced on the steep slope, and some outcroppings of vegetation, scrub brush and dwarf pine, and farther down the rock were tiny groves of elm and birch, tucked into a hidden part of the mountain.
The sun was descending in the western sky when he stepped around a corner, up over the shallow ledge, and onto a rocky flat, which had a clear view of a large section of the valley. A ledge, but no cave, only the mountainside covered by a heavy layer of dead coarse brush and sage. But as he looked closer, prodded around in the tangle of branches and thorns, he was unable to find the rock wall which the brush appeared to cover. Instead he found that the stone curved inward, and that the vegetation was not well attached, as he first thought, but that it came off in his hand when he grabbed it, revealing a dark recess behind.
Little by little, the branches fell away, revealing a shallow opening about the same depth as the ledge, the ledge itself serving as a kind of threshold. His imagination had turned the cave into a kind of temple, but reality was rougher. He was not disappointed, desperate as he was for any kind of shelter before the approaching night, but at the same time, the shallow depression in the rock wall did not live up to the image he had created in his mind. Judging by the dark burn marks on the ceiling and the packed earth that made up the floor, he concluded that it had been used as a shelter in the past, perhaps during an earlier war.
The sun was sinking quickly, and the temperature began to drop with it. Younis set about as best he could making the cave marginally more habitable, clearing out what brush and stone he could with his good left arm. He was no stranger to sleeping outside, although he usually had a fire during all but the warmest parts of summer. But he carried nothing with him to make a fire, no matches, no flint, and the prospect of spending the night exposed and alone without warmth terrified him.
He pushed away some stones from the cave floor, enough to create a flat area on which to lie, and dragged a fir bough to cover it as a kind of rough pallet. Then he took the dry brush he had pulled from the cave mouth and stacked it up around the rim of the ledge, to prevent the opening from being seen from below. This done, the sun dipping below the horizon, he crawled inside the cave, exhausted, and blacked out.
5
He woke shivering in the dark, the cave mouth edged by the crescent moon’s silvery light. His teeth rattled together and his fingers and toes had gone numb. With tremendous effort, he stood up and walked to the entrance of the cave, moving his limbs in an effort to regain some feeling. As he left the cave and walked onto the rocky ledge, he was bathed by the moon, the same wan light that anointed the great valley laid out before him. A thousand visible stars beamed tiny versions of the same pale cast, making everything appear to glow from within. Gradually his limbs, though still cold, regained most of their feeling, and his forearm throbbed. He could clearly see his breath, which seemed to be painted with the same silver sheen. Despite his cold and hunger, he found comfort in the sight of it, precious as the unknowable future, as though the concentrated energy of everything he saw were being focused upon him, standing high up on the mountain, looking out over all the world.
6
Jonas allows this image to linger. He has always liked this detail, this thought: the moonlight, himself looking out on the valley. He is not lying about it, either. At least, no more so than anyone who tells a story. He was there. If anything, it was more dramatic than he describes. But he can’t help thinking that maybe he is overdoing it. Perhaps he describes the moonlight once too often. As he watches Rose’s face, Jonas becomes concerned that he has gone too far.
The difficulty, he realizes, is inherent in the use of both words and memory. Their imprecision combines to make it nearly impossible for him to tell a true story. Even as he speaks, he is conscious of the fact that it wasn’t exactly as he describes. Had he really stopped beside the river that night, looked out into it and thought those things, or had he done that on a previous evening, and then, once again, superimposed one memory on top of another? Does he describe the river accurately, his frantic journey along it, or does he use a sort of verbal shorthand to convey to Rose the general picture, and allow her imagination to fill in the details? Is there any other way to tell her what happened?
Because what Jonas wants, after all, is not simply to describe for Rose a mountain or a cave or his desperation. What he wants is for Rose to feel something, fear or pain or anger or heartache, even if only as a semblance of the emotion he detects within himself, even as he sits in her living room and tells this version of the story. He wants her to know, needs her to know, needs to place it all into context, needs to explain himself, wants her to understand.
So he continues to talk, continues to describe for her how it was, or how he remembers it, or at least how he has convinced himself he remembers it. How scared he was, how angry, how desperate, how alone. And if it comes across as stilted or overwrought, if in his effort to commune with her, conjure for her his reality, he uses commonly held devices, if he describes once too often the strange crescent moon that lit up the world, or his shivering, or the accursed cave in which he was forced to spend the days of his youth, it is in the service of a greater purpose, and he can easily be forgiven.
7
At some point, Younis was woken by convulsions. He lay on his side at the mouth of the cave, legs drawn up and wrapped by his arms. He shivered a little more and closed his eyes, tensing his muscles in an effort to keep away the cold. He shivered again, and moved to stand up, recover some warmth through the motion of doing so. But as he put his hands to the cold earth and began to push himself up, he found that he could not do it, that he lacked the strength to lift his body. He tried again, and again, but found that he could not make himself rise. He tried to open his eyes, but found that he could not, or perhaps, he thought, with a panic suppressed by fatigue, his eyes were open but he could not see anything, or perhaps the world had simply disappeared.
The shivering stopped s
uddenly, replaced by a distant warmth, and Younis smiled weakly to himself. He drifted in a void, a blackness so complete that a moonless night was like broad daytime in comparison. Images confronted him and then disappeared before he could focus on them, made compelling by his inability to resolve them. He chased after them, trying desperately to focus on something, anything, and a gentle, spinning sensation took hold, rocking him back and forth, lulling him, but simultaneously making it impossible to focus on any one thing, impossible to think, impossible to move. Helpless and exposed, vague visions approaching him from all directions, he gave up trying to focus on them, let them go, and allowed himself to drift.
And then he was back in his village, where everything was as it was supposed to be, his mother walking out to the pasture at the end of the dusty road, carrying naan wrapped in cloth and hot tea, which he took, steaming, in the bright cool air. The sheep surrounded him, and he protected them with devotion, for their wool, for the warmth and the food they provided. He sipped from the earthen bowl his mother handed him, the tea sweetened and faintly spiced, and he looked up into green eyes that so readily mirrored his own. As he looked, her face changed, growing gradually lighter and lighter, as though the sun overhead were drawing itself closer to the earth. He looked around to see that everything grew brighter, less resolute: the pasture, the stone wall, the earth itself fading away, losing contrast in the light. Soon he could see only her most obvious features, her eyes and nose and mouth, her dark hair, and everything else, her skin and wrinkled brow, her arms and hands, grew brighter with each passing moment, until all he could see was light, and nothing else existed. She disappeared into it, disappeared along with everything else, everything he knew, the pasture and the sheep and the hills and the village and even the river itself, the source of all of it, everything he knew, all of it blending into a golden light that was suddenly his entire existence.
