In the morning as always, we eat on the balcony above the street. ‘Hamsal, we must get out,’ says my wife, passing a gift of food. Flecks of sunlight luster her hair. Behind her, the city wakes to its freshest wounds, its new deaths. The children play with their toys. My mother guides them, gathers them below her like a tree. ‘It’s too dangerous, this city.’

My father lies back in the shade, his open mouth a trap for flies. Sunlight makes pink flowers of his toes. His softness annoys me.

‘Hamsal,’ her face is small with worry, ‘to protect your family.’

I looked at the way fear has bruised her face, like a fist, cut lines into her soft cheeks. She trembles, even in sleep. Such is her love, a woman’s love, like the flesh beneath her tongue..

‘You mean, run away. Up country.’

‘Chah!’ The dark of her eyes sparkles. ‘”Run away”?!’ Rarely does she dip into her anger. ‘It is wisdom, Hamsal!’ I watch the sunlight blink across the waking city. A bird flies up, vanishes into an orange cloud. My wife came to me as a child, and at times becomes again the weak intruder in my family. I think even the children blush with shame. ‘The leaders will solve it. We have our life here.’

‘Iye!’ She slaps her forehead.

The enemy sends bombs in the night. They hit like blows to my guts. In bed we hear them shelling the sector of town near the border, but soon they grow closer. Sometimes we burst awake, shattered from our sleep by fear, alert to changes in volume, the nearness of our death.

My family sleeps in two rooms. We who are younger, and our children, sleep nearest the street. Should a bomb hit the building, it would still kill my parents. We have seen the endless destruction of buildings, their people split like bloodied intestines. We are always measuring the chances of death, of maiming, injury. The remote abstractions of our deaths. They chatter around our fear like parrots.

At night my mother, rock by day, slides through the house like water, goes to the toilet, makes coffee at 2 a.m., whispering to herself. With each soft thud from the border, her whispering scatters like hungry mice. Her tone pleads, is angry, as if she is arguing wedding plans. She sleeps like the wind at dawn.

‘Father! Thunder!’ cry the children. ‘Rain is coming!’ They burrow into darkness, chanting little songs. Comfort is in the singing. And sometimes we join in, making a spell around the building. Death and magic.

Downstairs in the shop, I carry out the morning meats. They sway above the counter like flags of defiance. The commerce persists. The momentum of our lives carries us into the absurd day.

‘Pirrun has gone,’ says my wife.

‘Where?’

‘To the North. A farm they say.’

I wonder how, Pirrun who is a puny clerk, Pirrun has managed to slip his entire family through the blockades. Where would he find a farm? Who would employ the weedy Pirrun? The cringing worm, Pirrun!’

‘He’ll starve.’

‘Someone will feed him.’

‘A fool will feed him!’

Our loud voices fill the shop like posters for faraway places. Bright, warm places; thin as paper.

‘This war of fools,’ says my wife, sorting figs, ‘has gone on too long.’ She seems sometimes old; the rarity of an old woman. Her voice is dry with shrewdness. She knows the profit has gone out of it. ‘Too many have died.’ Her cool eyes stare down my indignation, my anger. She seems always to speak from some secret knowledge. ‘Now is the time to seek truce.’ I take her opinion, taste it. To stop the guns would be like giving up alcohol. Or heroin.

I examine the face, grey with poor sleep, she brings to the street. In the shop there are no tables and chairs, the furniture of lies; what is spoken is recorded in our eyes. I say, ‘Have you forgotten?! Are you asleep?! They wait for our guns to be laid, before slicing us up for their pigs!’ My voice slaps in the small shop, may crack the walls like a passion too strong for i=one ribcage.

I think of my cousin, Imsah. He is massive as a bear, red with fury. His wife, his children, two of his brothers have died by the enemy. Part of him has been blown away, and what is left has hardened. His blood is fury. ‘The enemy must die as worms!’ he shouts. Bullets cross his chest like medals. From the deep of his chest his voice beats like a battle drum, a call to honour. And death.

‘The killing must end,’ says my wife. She arranges the loaves like stones on a grave. ‘Let the leaders agree to talk.’

‘What do you know?!’ I shout. ‘You don’t care for our border, our land, the soil built from our dried bones and blood!’

‘Hamsal, I care for peace!’ The sweet words. I cannot see if there is truth beneath the fleshy layers of her eyelids. ‘We cannot live as we do.’

My wife is a shrewd woman. Yet I wonder if she covets peace like a mother wearied by her children. She would draw the plans, cease the fire, deal and raise, gamble our lives. In my heart the weapons coil and hiss.

I open the door. The sky is orange as blood. Splashes of blood make bold patterns on the walls and cars. Blood is the art from here. I bang the door behind me; leave her to her soft words.

All day the truce stretches across the city like a piano wire, throat high. I hear the silence hum in it. To touch this truce and feel its sharpness, is to slice the tips from your fingers. All our fear quivers through it.

‘Two have died,’ she says.

‘Only two?’

‘In the market. A secretary and a moneychanger.’

‘I nearly went there today.’

‘Didn’t you notice?’

At dusk we withdraw upstairs, like snails into our rooms. The cool air breathes through the streets, the buildings. Radios sing to each other, recite the news. The silence between us fills the house.

I sit at the window, my rifle sniffing the street like a tiger’s nose. Rarely is it wise now to eat. In a moment the enemy may break the truce, snap it clean, the wire whipping through our sector beheading. I watch the sky for shells, listen for their soft keen. Each thump in my heart may be the first bomb.

Is it foolish to sit and wait? To wait like the virgin bride in the darkness of her bridal chamber, the victim of another’s strange lust. My rifle stirs. I am a man. There is courage in me that should kill the truce. For my people, to be the first to fire. To be second is to be last, is to be dead.

Suddenly the blast strikes sharp in the belly. We spill into the shrieking street. Here in our street! The lowing apart of a building, in the very building I buy my bread! The fire is hot even at our door. We ran in the dark towards the fire as if it is a holy vision.

‘My brother is there!’ I shout. The apartment block is half its height. It has burst open like a massive wound, fallen apart, collapsed like a woman in tears. Its solid squareness is full of molten rubble, torrid to the eyes. ‘And your cousin’s family!’ I call to my wife. She gazes at the fire like someone blind. She has the look of someone before a firing squad.

My eyes run tears of hatred. We watch the soldiers operate, cool as doctors, dousing the flames, picking at the rubble. They cut from the building pieces of flesh. The livid remnants of lives. My brother and his family have gone from me, like the removal of a leg.

‘Hamsal!’ cries my wife, ‘We must go!’ She drags at my arm, to pull me across the border, into the country, to Pirrun!

‘No!’ The dishonour. ‘My brother stayed here. He wasn’t scared!’

She punches my face. It’s a woman’s slap, like a kiss. I clasp her wrists; she pits in my eye. Around us people stare: why are you fighting? here? now? I strike her jaw; she falls like a shirt blown from a line.

In my arms then, I gather and carry her back into the darkness, the empty, fireless hole we inhabit. My mother at the door is frightened. The children cry out. ‘Be quiet; she has fainted!’ I say. I resettle at the window, nurse my rifle. Across the city, the guns throb into the night air; an ecstasy of shooting. The death creatures in our hearts. They call to each other like lovers.

***

(Published in Westerly. Autumn, 1994)