Kim Farleigh

The Final Saga of War

The camp sat on a slope that rose over a valley that separated two vast uprisings of granite. Saw-toothed peaks made a jagged line against the sky on both sides of the valley. Rumbling chatter cracked and grumbled, like simmering air, within the city of tents where smoke rose from cooking pots and children wandered, and peppers hung from cords, and drying clothes’ hues were vibrating against bone-coloured canvas, like brushstrokes of impressionistic paint.

A man dashed down the slope, avoiding tent ropes, his right arm raised. His aged, pot-marked face was punctured with small, black eyes that looked like electrified dots of mica.

“Hey,” he kept saying. “Hey!!”

His right arm flailed. Grey specks sat in his black hair. Broken German came through his broken dentures: “They killed children,” he said, “…unglaublich… kinder!”

Uprising serenity was crowned by the sun’s flaming medallion.

“All directions they came. No escape.”

He slapped his forehead. Black, memory men were plunging into ruffled-water recollection in his mind.

“Boys, like him,” he said, pointing at a teenager, “dead! My nephew, same age, tot. Dogs eating dead!... My aunt and uncle, their son, all dead!”

The facing slope’s ambivalence had the depth of perfect slumber.

“And they killed Kiiidddzzz!” he hissed. “Kiddzzzz…”

People on tarpaulin sheets were sitting beneath the crepitating golds and the hot greens and the fuming reds of their drying clothes. The blues in this hanging apparel hinted at the anguish within.

“Kiddizzzz!” he said again. “Every village between Radovec and Pristina, flattened!” He slashed his right arm. “Flattened! Eyes torn out! Chickens with heads cut off! Dogs, cats, cows – all dead. Alles tot,” he went on, thrusting and thrusting, as if he was holding a long rod made of sharp steel. “A face punctured, cheek to cheek. Blood – exploding!”

Bemusement, not hatred, enriched his pain, giving it a heroic perspective, as he gazed at the facing mountains that looked back with the unperturbed grandeur of longevity’s grace.

“Phosphate,” he said, his arm sweeping with emphatic disbelief, “with pistols to burn houses. Bodies,” pinching his nose, “what stink! Radovec to Pristina, everything flattened, flattened, hundreds dead! And they killed kiiiidddzzz!”

His voice disappeared into the immense quiet, as if it had been an illusion.

***

The visibility of the sources of the insects’ music was inversely proportional to the volume of the sounds that those creatures were producing to flood the valleys with euphonious peace. Cow lips kissed green. Bees buzzed in hamlets of colour. Fences were draped with the voluptuousness of greening nature.

They followed a hushing river whose swishing formed a counterpoint to June’s crescendo.

The clip-clopping of a horse’s hooves accompanied the summer choirs. The rider’s son was so fascinated by the foreigners that he stared as if he was beholding an inexplicable mystery.

“I wish,” Bill said, “I’d got that guy’s name.”

“Someone up there,” Jan replied, “might recognise his handwriting from the map he drew.”

“I hope so. They might not even know that he’s alive.”

Bill’s sense of drama demanded a positive outcome to this sojourn through the landscape of someone else’s despair.

He looked at the river. The horse disappeared around a bend. The son looked and looked until he couldn’t look anymore.

***

The heat hadn’t had enough time yet to burn off the greening effects of the recent rains so undulating emerald lay under sapphire blue.

The crimson plastic patches they saw on a hill resembled precious stones in jade. Awe filled the canals criss-crossing their minds. The crimson patches stood out like revelations.

Framed photographs were next to flowers at the bases of crosses that sat before mounds that were covered by the crimson. A feeling of solemnity gave that plastic the aura of a natural object.

They strode up towards the graves. A wrecked farmhouse looked like a Roman ruin. Scattered limestone blocks looked like they had been bitten in half by dinosaurs.

The quietude felt as if the world had breathed in and had forgotten to exhale.

Photographed faces were nailed to the white symbols of crucifixion. Photography bestows a glow of remembrance upon this indifferent earth. The wind’s hushing was so nostalgic that it seemed to be a chorus caused by the remorseless swallowing up of time by inevitable death.

Bill and Jan moved, like fascinated children, in intrigued solitude, around the graves.

Emotions are subdued by daily life’s turgidity: Their emotions swelled like magma.

Fresh soil’s aroma scented the slope.

“Bill!” Jan barked out.

Bill scurried. Jan never exaggerated.

“My God,” Bill gasped.

Their eyes kissed a face whose loveliness had been blessed by a magic capable of unleashing fantastic dreams. Dark, sensitive eyes sat in a triangular face that looked as if it was covered by taffeta. Cascading, silken honey surrounded that jewel of features.

“They’ve slaughtered,” Bill shrieked, “a family – and her! Her!!”

Their shutters swished.

“Everyone,” Jan said, “has got to see this.”

“Real hate must have existed for them to have killed her,” Bill said.

“I wonder,” Jan proposed, “if she knew her killer?”

“No doubt,” Bill replied. “How else could this be possible?”

***

The shell of a burnt-out bus was smeared with conflict’s black signatures. The windows resembled eye sockets in a vast, rectangular skull. The skull was sitting on its bottom, like the rotting head of a cadaver.

“Do you think---?” Bill began.

“God knows,” Jan replied. “Maybe they removed the bodies?”

“There’s probably a grave site around here – somewhere.”

The motivation behind the bus’s incineration was debatable. Its demise may have been due to flippant destruction or something more sinister – whatever: it was now a metal tombstone upon which interpretations could be scrolled by both warring factions to back their causes.

“There are always a lot more questions than answers,” Bill said.

“And this makes it so interesting,” Jan replied.

“And frustrating.”

“Interesting things often are.”

They went up a hill towards another wrecked farmhouse. Black, bullet-hole dots covered the farmhouse’s walls. Yellow flowers dotted green under blue.

They stood in a doorway. The floor was covered by plaster and smashed bricks. Charcoal-fire stains framed a window. The remaining wall tops were unequal in height. Smashed rafters lay upon piled-up rubble. The curving line of the wall tops had the elegance of a woman’s hips, and the sensuality of the land’s crests.

Unconsciously, the perpetrators of wanton destruction had inserted the landscape’s classicism into their work, something not considered creative; but from Jan’s perspective of amoral aestheticism it may as well have been, for he was so absorbed by these rubble shapes that he wondered if his appreciation may have been caused by it being linked to the accumulated anguish of the unconscious – to our visual history – to our warring past?

Bill found a pistol’s revolver. Eight holes encircled a larger one on the face of a metal circle. Indentations were carved onto its side so that the trigger could grip and spin it.

Bill held it up. Rounded steel trapped azure in circles of eternity, precisely where these objects fling people.

“This,” Jan said, “is what the guy in the camp said.”

“I wish I’d got his name.”

Bill fingered the holes.

“If we find phosphate pellets,” he said, “we have to see if they fit.”

Bill put the revolver into his bag. The souvenir had the beauty of a diamond. It added to the unexpected’s aroma that filled the soporific summer air like an unassailable impulse that drove them up and up into the high ground from where the man in the camp had fled.

***

Vegetation swarmed with insect song. A wistful, crying breeze, of pining leaves forlorn, hushed, like a disturbed presence, as if only eddies of unfathomable yearning survive in the human soul.

Voluptuous country fell into wheat fields of swaying stalks. A droning harvester was doing a rendition of languid monotony. The harvester’s drawn-out bleating was engulfed by a silence so profound that the quietude made the droning stand out like a voice in an auditorium.

Clothes lay in foliage. A spider’s web glistened on black shorts. Homework was turning brown. Rust-coloured stains were on a white, plastic bag.

Jan bent down to look at the bag.

“I ain’t no doctor,” he said, “but that ain’t no tomato sauce.”

The harvester’s volume increased as they continued on. Its mechanical consistency, within the docility of lugubrious summer, added to the sterility that the urbane mind experiences in the rustic world.

Wheat-field hues changed in breeze alterations. Black birds rose up against straw – like Van Gogh. Ebony wings, before industrial man, evoked, in Bill’s imagination, an image of the cold madness of the contemporary mind.

He used a stick to lift up shirts whose sleeves were singed to charcoal, looking closely to see that nothing was booby-trapped. Jan picked up a metal-capped bottle containing a brown liquid. Other bottles also fitted into the revolver’s holes.

“No coincidence,” he said.

He had a humane rationality that appealed to Bill’s sensibility.

They stood on the crest of a steep hill. The burnt, severed edge of half a cart was pointing upwards – like an embittered plea towards impartial heavens. A porcelain cup was in the middle of the road. A silver knife, with a carved handle, was next to a jumper whose wool – in the heat – had become rigid, like a fabric corpse deteriorating in the sun.

The cart’s rusting axle was beside a mound of hard plastic. The plastic was as smooth as glass. Enormous heat is required to turn a rubber tyre into this.

“A flame-thrower?” Bill asked.

“What else could produce the heat necessary?” Jan replied.

They stood over a squashed boot whose black laces were smeared with ochre dust.

“A tank must have flattened it,” Bill observed.

He felt he was looking at a symbol of the individual’s helplessness against organised power.

An upturned, burnt-out car – now a lump of rusting metal – had been pushed off the road. Its exposed ugly bottom was ungainly, like undignified death. The smashed glass inside this aluminium corpse glistened with ironic freshness; the ugly underside imbued the vehicle with that feeling of uselessness inherent in a crab being stranded on its back. Clothes and papers were stiffening in the sun.

A cow’s skull, all teeth intact, lay in the back of the car. A round hole on one side of the grimacing face faced a much bigger one on the other.

Bill stuck a finger through the small, round hole.

“One round,” he said, “into bovine oblivion.”

He tossed the skull into the bushes. Justice, he thought, can’t keep up with our avalanching crimes.

***

They headed down a track that led to their destination. Grass gleamed where light fell through branches that swayed with sensuous, but troubled, agitation, as if the covering that blocked out the sky’s indifference was unable to accept the twisted events that had unfolded in the spring. A sensation of the swishing, whistling cries of a disturbed consciousness, returning to its place of despair, pursued them until the trees disappeared at the brick wall that encased Radosev.

Their unexpected appearance caused a dog to bark. They peered down over the wall that curled around to a barn whose roof had been smashed by a tank shell. The dog’s pink jowls quivered with outrage.

A shy, curious woman appeared in the dark doorway of the only place in the village whose roof was undamaged. Black rafters protruded from cracked terra cotta on either side of her abode. Walls were chewed off at the top, as if mauled by an animal bent on crushing history.

The dog seemed mad. Its eyes flashed as if it was recalling demonic visions. An eerie absence of animals existed in a place designed for their habitation. The walls that locked in that suspicious mutt increased the place’s sense of isolation. How uninspiring and predictable, Bill thought, things must be in places like this! And what a change: armed criminals arriving unexpectedly in a place so bereft of excitement!

Bill now understood the man’s disbelief. At peace with his family, and away from materialism’s competitive turpitude, his positive view of humanity consistently being reinforced by family – by love; then: the antithesis of his life flies in on the incomprehensible winds of wickedness.

Teenage boys, emerging from where the woman was standing, walked across the yard towards their arcane visitors. Hands were shaken. Bill showed them the map. No recognition of the handwriting. Bill felt frustrated. He got the boys to write their names down on the map. They smiled; their big, brown eyes were full of trust and amiability. No English or German – however. The dog stopped howling. The thrashing wind was louder in the absence of the barking. The wind’s timbre, of cascading water, was like a reminder of the ever-unfolding plenitude of abundant time, its melancholy emphasising the shortness of our lives.

The boys’ faces were covered by innocent wonder. The younger one stood back, clutching the dog. Bill, in anti-climax, felt arrogant pity: youth shouldn’t be subjected to such disenchanting displacement.

The woman remained in the doorway. Her head was wrapped in a purple scarf. A shadow rose up the wall beside her. It seemed appropriate that she was in the dark section of a split between light and dark, refusing to come forth, subjugated into inquisitive uninvolvement by persistent medievalism.

Hands were shaken again. Bill and Jan then headed back up the road.

“Too bad,” Bill said, “about not being able to give them some news. That would’ve been nice.”

“It would’ve been nice,” Jan replied, “just to have been able to have had a chat.”

They went along a track that they hadn’t walked down. The earth fell into a valley. Rainbow flowers coloured the slopes of a listless world.

Three granite mounds with crosses appeared. Restless branches contained squawking ravens above the graves. Feathery blackness fluttered in fluttering boughs – like souls searching for peace.

One grave was smaller than the others.

Bill’s self-chastising ceased. Awe-struck humility filled his chest; his ambition disappeared – evaporated by discovering the graves of the unknown relatives of an unknown man: The final saga of war.