The One Who Looked on the Deeps, Part 3 of 4
I am continuing here the serial publication of my novel called The One Who Looked on the Deeps. This novel retells the story of Gilgamesh in the context of the Iraq War. Part One can be found here and Part Two can be found here. Enjoy!
V.
It was the lamentation of the rampart and the plain; the wail of time, and everything demeaned by time; of what lay strewn about the torrid undulations and the agony of five millennia sifted among their changes; of broken seeds and broken lives; youth immolated on preposterous altars, and the shattered spirits dissipated, like an incense, at their passing; all this, and the weird contention of nature with its own purposes – force stymied by other force – that ends in pain and wastage what might have rooted, sprung heavenward from vital impulse, and so lived. It was a salutation beyond silence, vainly heard and vainly proffered; a feeble donative submitted, granted, consciously put forth with decorous despondency, by creatures fully bewildered with the image of their own fate, who cannot, even in the indisputable presence of that fate, regard the fallen as entirely unmindful of their homage; and so a call to repose for those who can no longer wake or repose; who cannot fight, nor stand for, nor raven glory in, but languish in a particulate state unfathomable, inadmissible, by the striving and the quick, who by this rite ward off all concept of the unthinkable. It was these things, but also a breath, a song, a hymn ineffably willed by a clot of dust aspiring after purposes unencompassed by the laws of dust, and thereby enacting in the midst of the assembly a consolation the gathered remnant may accede to or defy. So the trumpet conferred its sterling melody over the remains of Lieutenant Wild, commemorating, as alone it is in the power of the living to commemorate, the devotion of the mighty soldier now defeated, the slayer slain.
Bodies made the pillars of his sarcophagus – bodies uniform, unaccoutred, solemn in their recession; bodies scarred beneath their ceremonial vestments by the very violence inflicted upon the speechless friend arranged before them; bodies not still nor marble, but quavering separately in their divisions from frightful ponderings over the silence sealed and confined within that enshrouded box, the experience of the eternal stillness that had been their friend’s in the six days since the random bullet found his brain among the rooftops; since the vital elements cased in his flesh revolted from their functions, and went dormant; since the crash and cry of war struck his ungrounded ears as fitfully as the nighttime in the desert. With the strength lent them by decorum, each man of that company stood straight and formal, resisting whatever anxieties riveted his thoughts in order to deliver the corpse, their friend, the proper signs of their unheeded reverence.
Youngman was not there. He had been there, for six days, by the side of the spangled coffin, when the duties of battle, and the preparations for battle, did not consume him; duties that had grown tedious to him now, devoid of point or purpose, since the purpose of their agonies had formerly been concentrated in him, the unwaking, in the vigilance of his preservation; in the joyous, binding satisfaction of their triumphs; and it seemed to him now that the movers of the war – those who had decided, and not been forced, to initiate its chaos - were such men as had never known the elating secret entrusted to him and his friend. But he had been there in the intervals of those six days, a pointless sentinel trying to trace ancient rituals through the sands, continually deviated by the potent and informal cataclysm of his particular grief. He yanked at his hair, smeared filmy tears across his cheeks, paced relentlessly back and forth past the silent box in the way a lioness madly divots ovals in the dirt before a crevice where her cubs have fallen in and screech to her for rescue, when she cannot rescue, nor touch them even in a faint, consoling way, but is forced to listen helplessly, distractedly, with all the agony of weakness, to the foreboding dirges curling upwards through the void. Some senseless stir of reason, some whim and folly of deduction, had convinced him that if his mourning was but violent enough, his outbursts of bereavement but loud and clangorous enough, the limbs that moldered in their quiet room beneath the flag would galvanize for old love, renounce their languor, and embrace him. Bustles of thick wind upstarting, agitations of the stars, enchanted him, for moments, with their likeness to tokens of a sympathetic frame, whispering consolations from the heart of its perdurance, holding his imagination captive with its semblance to finality, until the impression passed, as in no long space it always did, and left him wrathful and resentful of that frame’s material apathy, determined, in the sanctum of his memories, to adulate his friend’s monumental suffering in defiance of a world that would not crumble, as it ought. Despair would summon prayers, or at least the incipience of a prayer - what sprang to mind from need or from primordial remnant – and a broken formula would waver on his lips for a fleeting second, to recommend the spirit of his friend to its repose, until his actual mind would reassume its doubtful dominion, though haunted now with the recollection of how brave his comrade had been, how dutiful and kind, because he, while living, had believed in the sovereignty of those words. Always, his memory stretched urgently through the past, clasping at shadows of his illustrious friend to pull them from oblivion, as though even now, even after his blood and brain had forsaken him, there was still something to save, still something to be made good out of his quiescence, and the friction of this struggle against forgetting made death seem inessential for a time, like a horrid blunder that was never supposed to happen, and that had nothing to do with the glorious presence of the young man, when for a season, he walked and flourished over the earth. He would place his hand upon the coffin, seeming to bypass the solid structure of its wood, seeming in all earnestness to feel for the least gesture of response beneath its framework, and when it did not come, when not even the echoes of a heartbeat would tap on his desperate fingertips, he would grow angry – in all earnestness – and frustrated and bewildered. He could not understand how any of this could be meant. That a child could spring to light; that his soul, enfleshed on the day’s bright multiplicity, might learn honor and courage and sacrifice, and that the engendered man, preferring these, would face any wound or woe for the sake of his dear ones – these things might be meant; but that such an edified spirit, so raised to virtue, and so potent to enact it, by the flight of an arbitrary bullet should be squandered, and rendered useless to the cause of justice - this defied all possibility of intention. It was a mystery, the intractable stillness of which reverberated through his thoughts at those moments his eyes happened to wander from their vigilance and scan the miles and miles of desert undulating out from the edge of the city, where kingdoms and wealthy settlements had thrived since forever. He thought of all that men had come to know since those days – how at the start, convulsions in the abyss wrought light; how galaxies yearned across unthinkable spans, and the planets walked ellipses; how continents divorced; how over their meandering crust teemed life, and how the imperatives of blood gave shape and substance to that life; how this formed man, how contention honed his hand, how his spirit labors to this day beneath its legacy; how the body of this violence functions, and how the default of those functions are both remedied and augmented; how his prowess supplies the deficits of nature, crowns him master of its forces, endows him with the strength to raise or annihilate at will - but what sort of thing was the sleep of his friend, no man could yet say. The enigma wearied him – its thickness, its perpetuity – bowing him by the side of the silent coffin, where sometimes, pitifully, against the strength of reason, because he could not reconcile himself wholly to the nullity of his friend’s mind, he whispered futile questions to its image, saying, “what is this quiet that has taken hold of you,” and “what is this coldness that has frozen your heart,” and later, when the arid zephyrs were all he had for an answer, and the impossibility of his friend’s extinction still possessed him, he grew frantic for song and ceremony, that they would come and tend in an instant to the tangible privations of the ghost repining there, lest his friend grow sick at heart. Yet now that the military honors had actually commenced, Youngman found it all too great to bear, and a kind of betrayal too, which seemed to confess that in the economy of suffering and convention, the loss of his friend was a thing to accommodate; that the infinite grief owed to his parting – a grief that ought to persist, and wildly to persist, until the last limit of duration – could be bounded and satisfied within the sorry rites of an afternoon.
So he found himself staggering carelessly and aloof about the desert that skirted the base, impressing the sands, in his turn, with the weight of his mournful spirit, descending and ascending dunes that progressively buried the sight of the base behind him, while different agonies swelled in him, terrible for their candor, because he was not only sorrowful over the death of his friend, he was scared. He had been hardly altered from a boy before, a boy elated with the mindlessness of his own mortality, a boy who heard by the way a story of death, and wondered with only faint curiosity what was this fate that predated upon other persons, this fabled nighttime that concluded the narrative of all other lives not his own. A lesson was in his friend’s demise, a tutelage in ending, training him in its hard facticity. He contemplated the path his own steps limned across the desert, and strained to imagine a time when his feet would no longer press the earth so efficaciously. He held his hand before his face, and vainly wondered what it would be like when that miniscule crux of flesh turned rigid and useless and irresponsive. The inconceivability of that future belied its certainty. Over the vacuous, sand-streaked breezes, always and again recurred the parting admonition of his friend, croaking, “as I am, you shall be.” Then his innards stopped for horror, and the stone of dread filled his core, because for once he thought the thought, “I too shall die.” It was not the pain or the prospect of putrefaction that confounded him, not death the physical monster, but the inanity of it, the wastage; the rabid gullet ravening over life and time, devouring everything of value in the flesh; the universal canker, infesting every last mortal purpose and infructifying it with the insidious poison of its knowledge. The ancestral specter, fabled only in the appearances of severed limbs and emptied faces dispersed around the battlefield, now grew incarnate in the moldering body of his friend, who was so ardent for justice while he lived, so forward against tyranny and oppression. How could any of this be meant?
Two mounds of transient sand loomed over his path, crests molded in the uncanny resemblance of church towers, and these, for their strange outline, interspersed their presence into his attention as he meditated; now, as he stumbled closer, an eerie melody emanating from under one of these barrows arrested him, and drew his undirected steps into their shadows. There, a portal through some ancient structure, carven for the appeasement of a lost and arcane god, opened to his vision and beckoned him onwards to learn the origins of that chant. Yet no sooner did his boot cross the eroded threshold than a movement that he spotted upon the stones flung him backwards in terror. Two fractious scorpions, scuttled by his footfall, menaced on the threshold, interposing their unnatural physiology between his sadness and the peace that sang within. He stiffened there in dread, unable to proceed because of his horror at the loathsomeness of their shape – the malice barbed at every appendage, the segmented crust that seemed to confound its apprehension as one creature, and the hovering toxin, that was the act of its resentment against a world it could not but revolt. No good mind, from no complex of benevolence, could have wanted such a creature, yet there it was, impeding his ingress to the blessed chorus. An instant’s panic almost drove him back upon his way, but the hymn was too enticing, and his need for succor too extreme, so he clambered past those gruesome wardens with his back against the wall, and went on.
Darkness in the vestibule, darkness that unresolved the very stones, occluded his eyesight for a dozen steps or so, so that he was compelled for a span to venture onward not by vision, nor by the assurance of its palpable ghosts, but only by the lure of a music foreign and venerable, until at last, the pixilation of a hundred separate flames frolicking atop a hundred separate candles began to disclose the contours of the chamber up ahead, and the derelict congregation that made their rites in its black bowels, with the grimed yet golden crucifixes catching the slight splendor around the necks of some of those earthy congregants. He could discern, from the instant the murkiness rendered their haggard outlines, their garments of three-weeks wear - so inharmonious with their expressions of otherworldly purity - that these were refugees from a church in the north, assailed by the corollary brutality of the war, and forced to follow their own rites far out of the malignant sight of purported neighbors. They too, from the instant they apprehended his martial figure at their doorway, surmised correctly that he belonged to the fabled army of which they had heard so much, and seen so much of the consequences of their coming, so they had no fear of bloodshed at his hand, nor flinched in the least at his approaching steps, but because they knew his army to be indifferent to their plight, and because his appearance there was so incongruous anyway in that place, and because the agonized stupor pasted on his features was so blatant, so wildly palpable, they still marveled in silence and wonder at his entrance, and their billowing anthem paused. Like one shipwrecked yearning for a distant promontory, born by currents sometimes tending towards it, sometimes away, Youngman floated over the tide of bewildered gazes towards the far end of the chamber, where a small boulder, in the place of an altar, had been shoved, and on its top, the crumbling remnant of a loaf of bread, nearly consumed. Something like the lure of that interrupted hymn, something like its affinity to his heartache, drew him towards the vestige of that humble sacrifice, quavering with a hunger more than hunger, and when the deacon serving there, marked by his blemished vestments, caught the embers of faith panting in the soldier’s dim eyes, he gestured towards the table with an inviting hand, stammering, “take, see,” as best this alien tongue allowed him, and when the soldier still held back, still hesitated out of doubts delved deeper than that holy man had ever plunged, he gestured more sincerely, grinning toothlessly and strange, saying over and over again, “take, see; take, see.” And Youngman would have taken up that sacrifice, would have reverently pressed the crumbs of it to his lips, but that something in the act seemed to absolve the power it manifested of the terrible fact of death, which was not separable from the order it ordained, and something in the reconciliation it promised between heaven and earth seemed too leniently to forgive the crimes of God, not man. So feeling, he withdrew; he stumbled backwards; his longing paled at thought. His anxious eyes searched over every glimmering face, desperate to find among that derelict assembly the one soul that knew of his agony and yet could assure him, in words of grace, why he should approach; why eat; why go in scorn of death. Then he opened his mouth, and cried out to them:
“Is there anyone here who can understand me? Is there anyone who can answer for your god? I have lost my friend in battle, who was the kindest and the bravest soul I ever knew, and now the terror of my own death gnaws upon my innards. I know you gather here to commemorate the victory over sin and death, but for myself, I find it difficult to believe in that victory anymore. Is there anyone here who can help my unbelief? Is there anyone who can teach me to live in spite of the knowledge of death?”
There was a man among that congregation, a native of the country, who had aided the American army as an interpreter when they first arrived in his city, and who was forced to flee first from that city among all his confreres when the insurgents established themselves there and began assassinating men from a list of residents they called traitors, the ones who had worked alongside the Americans in the hopes of witnessing normal days. He understood something of Youngman’s appeal – not its precise meaning, but the desolation in it, the unyielding, urgent pain of despair that colored every syllable, let it reference what it might. This one came and spoke with the soldier:
What do you wish to hear from us? What would you have us say?
Do you really believe in the power of that sacrifice to vanquish death?
We believe, and have suffered much for that belief.
Do you really believe that you will live to see the face of God?
With our own eyes; in our own flesh; on the earth at the end of time.
And nothing in the tears of your children dissuades you?
We have endured these things from the hands of men, not God.
And nothing in the millennia since his coming clogged with horror?
It is that horror from which we pray to be redeemed.
Can you wait on the promise of that redemption forever?
If you know of a greater promise to live by, then tell us.
Is there nothing unlikely in that hope? Nothing outrageous?
It is absurd, and that is why we confide in it.
Then what is the secret you know, that allows you to endure so much?
We only eat of this bread, and it calms our heart when the power of death confounds us.
Youngman looked forward, and cast his gaze once more on that impossible sacrifice where it beckoned from its rocky altar, the deacon and his dilapidated expression still gesturing beside it, mumbling “take, see” until the desire to surrender his own rage to the redemption symbolized in it - incarnated in it – drew him forward by two halting steps, and he would have went on, would have taken up the translated substance of that loaf upon his tongue, but that still the burden of his own experience, the mockery of his ever coming clean of it, froze his mind and his limbs and inhibited the stir of that primal gratitude which alone opens the mortal ear to God, leaving him not as those others gathered there, glowing with hope, radiating the chords of a mystical music, but too painfully knowing himself one who dies indeed; one tortured by the inexorable thought that whatever salvation there was in the world, it was not for him; and the bitterness of it maddened him, and the memory of the prayers he said as a boy that did not hold the evil at bay, till the long pummeling of experience shattered his mind across all its violent years, and the hand that could rescue, that could gather his soul together, seemed always aloof, and he learned no longer to entreat for it. It was not doubt – that would have been a boon, a blessing, from the negation of which he could have recruited the strength to disdain the ramifications of his own hands, and the hardened strength to master just as he would - but a persistent sense that the ancient agony dominating him, this sorrow as old as time, that had been tended through all of time by a thousand futile nostrums, could have no other answer outside the formulas and the chants and the hallowed sacrifice of those rites, but that because of time, because of his misuse of time, a sightless, albeit solid boundary barred him from participation in those rites. More enervating than the battle with men was this battle with his own soul, weakening him to his knees, this sinewy, fearsome warrior, as the war never could, unable to move forward or backwards, only tearfully pleading in one place, “I must speak with somebody who can heal my terror of death,” to which that other man, his interlocutor, answered, “our priest is still in Mosul, in the ruins of our church; he can tell you the words of everlasting life.”
So Youngman decided he would go and speak with this man.
VI.
He could only marvel at the intricacies of the stone that was not stone - not wholly stone, its part and particles, but a world alight a world, where jewels and partied phoenix gleamed on the permanent branches, a sign of forever, conjured out of the mute, unwilling earth. It was only the tilework ornamenting the wall of a dusty tavern, opened when the old regime fell over, and promptly jammed by every ruffian, vagabond, con, cutthroat, bandit, layabout, lush, and miscreant lurking for years in the city, because this too was a privilege of escaping the grips of a tyrant, this too a flower of freedom. But the image beckoning out of the tawdry wall was a paradise of color, ravishing his spirit with a weird nostalgia, though he had never ambled in gardens where the boughs hung down with sapphires; where emeralds and pendant pearls encumbered the vines, and flowers of lapis lazuli clustered thick through the grass. He had never strolled in such delectable grottoes, and yet the sense of forfeiting their placid environs saddened him, bewildered him, as one who wanders the earth a refugee or an exile; as one once meant to be there. The passage of years had been abrasive, smudging the vigor of those colors, and swiping whole tiles out their place in the composition. Still, it was fine: a grateful vision to receive after traveling the desert for days on end, desperately shrouding his thoughts in bouts of unrestful slumber, because the sun, its violent glare and the empty world it forced him to see, hung always harsh overhead. He had managed to attach himself to a mechanized regiment thundering north to pacify the city that was the remnants of Nineveh, where in ancient times the sojourner happening upon its mighty walls could read there the devastation wrought upon far-flung peoples by its king, and his indifference to the infliction, and where now insurgents organized mayhem, exploding bombs in the marketplace and the houses of governance and especially in the sanctums of the people who prayed before the cross, because they worshipped otherwise, and were enemy enough for doing so. Here Youngman hoped to speak to the priest, and hoped the priest could speak to his sorrow, disclosing to him the words of everlasting life, which this holy man clung to despite the persecution visited upon him and his flock. And that is why Youngman, standing fixed in the tawdry vestibule to contemplate the fading garden on its wall, felt inexplicable intimations that the language of the priest would fall on his mind in a manner something like that picture.
The other soldiers who had disembarked with him at this disreputable hovel on the far side of the river had slid down a dark staircase yawning under the floor, out of the depths of which the brazen entreaties of young women’s voices betrayed the darker purposes of their descent. That is why Youngman stepped slowly into the bar, alone, and why he encountered the veiled woman attending there, alone, and why, when his silent, fearsome figure darkened the doorway of that empty room, she took fright and scrambled behind the bar, which movement Youngman, from his time in that country, had learned to construe as a threat. Thus does the general and bloody record of the past interpose itself between all specific souls. He leapt over the bar and tackled her before she could harm him in whatever way she intended to harm him, but when he had her pinned to the ground, her wrists safely constricted in his hands, the look of terror on her face, and her repeated, panicked utterance of “no gun, no bomb” instantly assured him that this was no enemy, and the shame, the endless remorse of prevailing upon the weakness of this solitary girl took hold of him, and he helped her to her feet. “Why run?” he asked sternly as he did so, to which she replied by pointing to the flag emblazoned on his chest, explaining, as best she could in the compelled tongue of the foreigner, “Americans kill my brother – I thought you come kill me,” which bewildered him, as it should not have, and softened the tone he spoke in when he said to her, “I am no enemy of yours,” and waited for a response, because she struggled to piece the meaning of these words together and could not answer at once, but when she did, her voice was now the one laden with confusion, for she heard the words “no enemy” and she stared again at the flag and she muttered to him, “but don’t you kill my family?” and she waited for his reply. There was no reply he could give to her, no words at least she could comprehend, which could clarify to her or to himself how he could ride forward with an army visiting ruin on her country and not be held, or hold himself, an enemy. So he held his tongue, but wonderfully, his forlorn demeanor spoke for him, moving her heart, and drawing forth her hand against all conscious inhibition of the gesture to the place on his face where she lay it with commiserating softness, whispering, “your cheek so hollow…your eyes so weary…why such sorrow in your heart?” It was an invitation to confession; an invitation to the simple yet absolving gesture of making himself known to another mind, just as he imagined his friend once used to listen to him; just as he imagined God once used to listen. He swelled with the urgent need to dare that other gaze and find it speaking unspeakingly back to him, “I take you just as you are;” a promise he knew in his bowels, for the strangeness of the woman and of her tongue, to be chimerical, but all too alluring anyway, all too impossible to forego. A clamor of suppressed agony split his larynx, tumbling out in sobs:
“Shouldn’t I be as desolate as the desert, as desolate as the ravaged city, over the death of my friend? Shouldn’t my heart fall down in me as low as his grave? I have mourned him for six weeks, imagining the whole time that if my grief was only violent enough, my lamentations only strident enough, the powers that lie behind it all would take pity and restore breath to that invincible chest, where the heart of the finest man I ever knew throbbed, and where lavish decorations once hung over the core of the one man who ought not to have died, but who died. The bullet that might have crumbled brick or chipped the pavement pierced his brain instead, and every instant since that calamity unharried by clangorous mourning seems an offense to his memory. I saw it when they were laying his enameled body in its coffin and a maggot that had burrowed there fell from his nostrils and I knew in a visceral way at last that he was only dust and silence and there was no thought in him. Then my limbs and my torso deadened with terror, because I instantly intuited that I would lie silent likewise, and maggots roam through the space of my head likewise. I cannot bear the thought of my friend rotting away under ground like any other matter, testifying out of sight to the futility of the duties I still shoulder over the face of the earth.”
As misdirected as seeds sowed on a sandstorm were his words to her alienated ear, though enough was in their passion, in their two or three recognizable terms, for her to discern that this was a man in mourning, so that the memory of her own bereavement, the repeated rituals of departing she had performed for her own kin, stirred in her and for the first time elicited compassion for one of these invading men, along with the nebulous suspicion, which she could not articulate even to her own mind, that she and he were of one race, and that a perpetually defeated one. Endless sadness clouded her eyes, a pallor of resignation, as she made what use she could of the stronger man’s tongue to comfort both his and her own heart:
“God made man, God made death, only God has no death. Man breaths, he breaths, he dies. So God made it. No complaint changes it. While living, live in joy. Go singing, bathed in pleasure, filled with dancing. Embrace your woman, embrace the child she bears you. Take no thought of ending. So, is the best way for man.”
Thus she spoke, as best she could, but he was not placated or consoled. He sprung back from her and roared, in hysteria:
“What are you saying? What can these words mean to me? My friend is crumbling into the ground, where I soon will join him, and I cannot free myself of the thought of it, not in battle, not in my bed. How can you say to me, take no thought of my ending, when I can think of nothing else?”
The words, released from the formless potencies of his mind and made sound - made actual constructions of the air - assumed a veritable influence over their speaker, hauling before his mind the image of the action that was their inescapable entailment, and which was the purpose of his traveling to that city.
“I must find the church,” he blurted, seizing her by her narrow shoulders, “I must speak with the priest who presides there,” and she, picking out the word “church” from his flurry of syllables, which for some reason made her ashamed, gestured wanly towards the window and whispered, “across the river,” which did not aid the soldier – he knew that much already – but because he felt the need to travel there that night, and because the impediments to leaving his base on his own were so many, he implored her to help him, saying, “will you go with me and show me the way,” but she wouldn’t consider it – she shook her head vehemently when she comprehended him – replying only, “not me, but Abraham.”
So that night, Youngman dragged the translator who was posted to the base out of bed, and together the two of them skulked to an unlovely concrete house erected at the end of a side-street, not many yards away from the riverbank, to find and enlist the services of this man Abraham, who was a boatman. The bartender had spoken ineptly of his tremendous suffering, and seemed to suggest by her awed expression when articulating his name that there was something to be feared in his encounter. Nonetheless, it was the only means into the city she had mentioned, and the soldier was intent to interrogate the priest that very night, so he came thumping on the brittle door of this home, and waited as his translator exchanged some tense and arcane greeting with a female voice concealed behind it, then barged in unwelcome past the veiled woman who pried it ajar, and who cringed in the shadow of its opening. What he saw when his eyes finally resolved the darkness into which he intruded was a dank living room in which a single lamp barely illuminated the ornamental green trim vinously encroaching upon the pale yellow walls from every direction. He saw a carpet, he saw a faded couch, and he saw seated there two young men with eyes the pallor of stone, with faces edged like stone, who sat there like stone, without any vigor in them at all. Diagonal to them, and cased in an obscurity almost palpable, sat a deeply creased old armchair, and the remnant of a man sunk into it: from the looks of him, a corpse above the earth. Whatever was in the translator’s greeting made no mention of the soldier accompanying him, so when Youngman appeared in the midst of their living space the two stone men on the couch were deeply startled, and leapt up out of the embittered rage that was the last emotion to which they were subject. One rushed him, swinging his fist towards the soldier’s unarmored head, realizing not even halfway through the motion the magnitude of the man he was thus challenging, his invulnerability, which he felt all the more grievously when, dodging, and flinging his own fist against the stone man’s cheek, Youngman made his own prowess known to him. The man crumbled to his knees, while the other one, his brother, thinking an opportunity for attack was thus opened to him, inched forward, more warily, primed to leap upon his enemy, but Youngman, before this one could spring forward, turned and clasped his thick hands upon the back of his neck and held down his head firmly while bashing his knee repeatedly against his ribcage, then flinging him down on the floor alongside the other stone man, his brother.
There they stared shame-facedly at one another, and there they exchanged vengeful glances, and they would have renewed the fight as they rose except that the old man, their father, had pried himself out of his chair and stepped forward wanly to separate them and usher the strangers towards the empty places on the couch, gesturing the whole time with slow, sad lethargy; with the enervation of one devoid of purposes in this world, but not entirely devoid of the memory of purposefulness. An ancient tinge of hospitality, surviving somewhere in the nether regions of his mind, prompted the man to seat Youngman and his translator across from him and whisper for some tea, while the two resentful brothers knelt on the floor and reassumed their looks of perfect apathy. The tea was served, consumed, cleared away, with hardly a word interspersed, before the translator dared to broach the purpose of their coming, and ask for transport across the dark tide. The words occasioned no change in the old man’s vapid expression, so that it seemed for a moment as if the request had not registered, until at last, with what seemed like an enormity of exertion, he muttered a few brief words that the translator deciphered as, “Sabah used to steer the boat for me at night – Sabah could see when I could not see,” and when no further explanation seemed forthcoming, Youngman prodded the translator to inquire of this Sabah, whom the old man simply identified as, “my son, who was murdered.” Then Youngman blazed with rage, and wanted to rush out right at that moment to find the insurgents who had offended this pitiable man, and punish them, which he urged the translator to convey to him, and to demand as well the names of the murderers so he could bring them to justice. And Abraham, not raising his eyes, not raising his voice, stared at the carpet and muttered, “it was I.”
There had been moments like this since landing in country, moments when the strangeness of the evils Youngman encountered seemed so prodigious, so nightmare-fashioned, that he swore he could sense the molten fires roiling underneath his feet, and the earth’s stressed table rocking up and down upon them, till nature seemed less an altar from which to aspire after the heavens than a barely withheld abyss, which every moment threatened to tear open underneath his feet. Yet never had the sense of disorientation sprung upon him so suddenly, so unexpectedly, to the extent that he felt himself growing dizzy and had to reach his hand out to the armrest to allay his moral imbalance. As ever when the power of circumstance seemed ready to overwhelm his will, he felt impelled to assert his will against circumstance, ordering the translator in the same stentorian tones with which he flung his commands around the battlefield to tell the old man to explain himself, and when the other demurred from shame, or from weariness, or sorrow, he barked the instructions again, swearing that otherwise he would haul the man that very night to the foulest, bloodiest prison in the country.
So Abraham took up a shoddily wound cigarette lying on the tray there, and fumbled a flame out of a nearby lighter, a flame that wavered for an instant before his eyes like some axial age oblation, burned to perpetuate the wholesome processes of rain and nurturance, but which mirrored in the spirals of his vacated gaze appeared pale, and languid, and void of warmth. A long, succoring draw on the smoke served as prologue to Abraham’s story, which at last, he began - softly, reluctantly, the shocked translator serving as intermediary between the two unrealities married in his words:
“There was a boy named Hashim, a bashful child, who loved to sit alone along the riverside, and listen to the canaries carol to each other in the orange groves. He was there, relishing the birds’ music without a culpable thought upon his soul on the day the Americans crossed the river. They took him for one of the insurgents they had come to apprehend - I could never understand why – and shot him twice through the belly when he startled them in the grove.
“Later, after the Americans departed, having killed two more men and dragging away dozens to imprisonment, rumors started percolating that my son had served as their informer, guiding the soldiers through the village to the houses of the men they seized. ‘Sabah has done this,’ my neighbors would say, ‘Sabah is the one responsible for Hashim’s death.’ At first they only muttered these words under their breath, when our family passed through the marketplace or on our way to prayers, but then they grew bolder, accosting me on the street, and demanding, ‘Why is Sabah doing these things to us?’ It was the men of the Jabbouri tribe who were most clamorous in these accusations, because the family of Hashim belonged to them.”
Here he paused to tap some of the ashes onto the tray, and pull again on the diminishing cigarette, its tip flaring with sudden fire, then fading again as he drew breath to renew his account:
“At last, unable to endure the resentful glances any longer, and imbibing some of the suspicion I heard on the tongues of others, I confronted my son and asked him if any of this were true. He said nothing; he only turned his face aside. To this day, I do not know if that was an admission of his guilt, because he hated the Jabbouri to his bones, on account of some slight they had done him many years ago, and he would have been happy to be thought their persecutor whether he had any role in the crime or not. Then he was so proud, too, and would have defied the people for any reason whatsoever. Either way, I knew he was no longer safe here, so I snuck him out of the house at night and sent him away to live with his uncle in the west, along the Euphrates, telling my neighbors the following morning that some American soldiers had kidnapped him, hoping to allay their suspicions of him by such a tale.
“But they were more cunning than me, and more ruthless. About a week later, some of the sheiks who are the biggest voices among the Jabbouri came knocking on my door, hardly responding to my greeting when I opened up and invited them to sit in the very places you are sitting now. They stared at me with their harsh, pitiless eyes, and told me Sabah, my son, must die, so that Hashim’s blood could be appeased at last. ‘But no one even saw him speak to the Americans with their own eyes,’ I protested, but they made nothing of my words. ‘We know he is guilty,’ they countered, ‘and we expect him to pay.’ ‘But if the Americans find out we have punished one of theirs,’ I pleaded, ‘they may return and exact retribution on his punisher.’ ‘No business of ours,’ they answered. I grew more desperate, and entreated them, as though they were men of conscience, to consider the impossibility of what they were asking of me. ‘No business of ours,’ they answered again, adding, ‘you must bear the effects of the deed as best you can, but we swear to God if you do not go through with it, we will kill him ourselves, and your other two sons with him, to placate the blood of Hashim.’
Another deposit of ashes followed these words, the pile on the tray now growing substantial and the embers remaining on the cigarette itself growing fainter and fainter.
“I sent word to my brother-in-law that Sabah must return. When my son entered the house, he spoke only a few words to us, then quickly disappeared into that room (gesturing towards a doorway down the hall) where he had slept since he was a boy. In the morning, before the sun was up to reveal our purposes, I woke him to help me prune some trees in the orchard, where I and my sons (gesturing towards the two stone men) had stashed our rifles. He said nothing, but got dressed and followed at once, as though resigned to the sacrifice to be made of him.”
Here he paused, and stared, a bitter tangent having crept into his thoughts:
“Sabah was my first born. The summer he came into the world, I planted those fig trees and I planted those almond trees, so they could grow right alongside him. I said to myself, by the time he is a young man, he will be able to walk in the orchard and smell the sweet breeze and pluck the sweet fruit that swells on those branches. But I never could have imagined what other deeds could be performed under an almond tree.”
For the first time, some trace of the passions he had managed to suppress crept into his voice, so he pulled several times on his cigarette - slowly, deliberately breathing in its last smoke – before squelching the butt in the middle of the ash-pile that was the remnant of its burning. Then he ended:
“I picked up my rifle from under the tarp where I hid it. These two boys did the same. When Sabah saw us standing there armed – his nearest in blood, armed, against him – he did not try to run. He did not even say a word. I still cannot understand, to this day, how he could just stand there and not say a word. Had he spoken even a single word for mercy, I might have relented. But he did not say a word. I raised my rifle, and with the best aim my trembling hands could muster, fired a shot that struck him in the forearm. The blood I saw come spurting from the wound dizzied me, so that when I fired again, the bullet flew far away from his body. I could do no more. I fainted away, and when I came around again, I saw my son lying dead beneath the almond tree. These two (gesturing towards the stone men) finished him. They had no choice. None of us had a choice.”
Ponderous, tangible, hard as birth and the grave - the old man’s story pressed itself against the air, choking the room, and all who dwelled within it, to silence. Youngman strained his imagination to construe even the least semblance of the emotions the old man must have felt at the slaughter of his own child, but the whole experience seemed to have unfolded so far beyond the boundaries of ordinary life that he could only sense in it the same perplexity roused in him recurrently throughout the war, of the extremities of violence seeming at once to render the world utterly known to him, and utterly unknown. Meanwhile the other man, Abraham, sat oppressed with the weight of a separate dilemma, a question he had desperately wished to put to these invaders since suffering his outlandish fate. Now that the chance to remonstrate was before him, he summoned up the faint will remaining to him, muttering a low question to the interpreter, who relayed it to the pensive soldier this way:
“Why did you people come here to this country? What was it you expected to happen when you came with tanks and with bombs?”
It was, of course, the very question lurking between every single thought and every single experience Youngman had endured over the last nine months in that country; the very question that, like a self-conscious phantom, hindered his hand on the trigger in battle and harried his dreams in the bunk while he slept, and yet, thus bluntly posed – thus brazen and pointed – staggered his reason to the impotence of a child. He stared, he wondered, he searched futilely for an adequate word, then, because something needed to be said, he answered the father this way, filled with disgust at the poverty of his own language: “We hoped to establish goodness and justice in the land,” and when he heard this – when the meaning of those alien syllables was at last conveyed to him – Abraham raised his eyes to the soldier for the first time, bold with astonishment and reproach, and asked him: “You would bring goodness out of this?” and because he could not answer – because truly there was no answer to be made – Youngman turned his eyes away from the father and his reproving gaze. Then, filled with impatience at all he could not fathom, he rose, reassumed his posture of sovereignty, and barked orders to the interpreter:
“Tell him to ready his boat to leave right away. Tell him I will guide him across the black waters.”