No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story.
Normally, getting out of bed in the morning feels like oppression. Sleep beckons, I go and earn wages, and the news is filled with political lies and reports of casualties from bombings. Men make me feel objectified and my clothes don’t fit right, but yesterday, something strange happened.
The lot next to his house looked like a dinosaur dig when Eli got home from school that afternoon. Men in yellow uniforms scoured the strata of ash, pulling out copper ribs and ceramic skulls of toilet bowls. A fire truck was parked on his front lawn, muddy water draining into the street. When he first saw the trucks, he thought they must have caught another gang of teenagers sneaking into the abandoned house. Then he smelled the smoke. He saw the sun glaring chartreuse through the clouds and remembered what firemen were really for.
The rural hospital where her father languished was brand new, a sparkling edifice improbably situated like some medical temple in a cow pasture. It was such a young building to house the old. Dr. Christine Hartford hurried to locate her dad’s room. She’d been given directions in the social worker’s melodious Outer Banks drawl. Finding Joe would be easier for Christine than accepting his condition.
In undergraduate school Carly spent the night before the first day of classes going through textbooks, reading the introductions. She told herself that in order to succeed in business, she needed to experiment. They had been told, hadn’t they, that social relationships would be the most important thing to their success in business school. She would be someone else now.
I knew my whole life I was meant to be alone though I never had been, not ever, with him fifty three years, imagine. I was the oldest of six brothers and sisters. As each one came along, I shrank more and more into the background of the family but where somebody else might have felt bad about it, being left out of things, being last, being an afterthought, I was actually glad of it. We grew up and all lived near each other except the one brother who joined the Navy and stayed out west.
My sisters and I saw each other at least once every week and were in telephone contact daily.
This went on for years and years and years knowing the details of each others lives, what we put on the table, how the children gave us pleasure or worried us, our husbands’ quirky ways.
Then they both died, one demented, out of her mind and puffed up with anger and she had been the smart one, the one who married a little money, who saw the world and let me know it oh did she ever. Wait till you see Canada, she’d say, wait till you’ve seen France. Yet she died first after carrying on one Christmas Eve to my face oh why oh why did her husband die and mine, mean and unloved, live on and on. Who would have dreamed she’d be so cruel to ever say such a thing but I didn’t really mind, had even wondered it myself the unfairness of it but just was surprised she actually came out with it after all this time. My younger sister, the youngest of all of us, the prettiest, the one who kept the peace and funny too, went next, bone cancer, the only cancer in all of our family including in-laws and cousins. That was a surprise and a sad one. Two of my brothers went next, one after the other, from heart disease, both overweight and heavy smokers but with good dispositions, though one had a conceited wife who never stopped bragging about this surgery and that surgery and lives on to this day.
I trusted my sisters. I never had a friend I trusted that way without even thinking about it. I could say anything to them. I didn’t but I could have. And when they went, one right after the other like that, well, I knew I wouldn’t ever be able to, not to them or anyone, and something dropped out of my life. How often do you come across people you feel that way about? It’s inborn. My sons are something else. They’re always going to be my boys but if I were ever to really rely on them I don’t think I’d be in a very good position. I’m not even sure I would know how. One is young and very selfish, he can’t help it and you can’t help noticing it. The other one lives far away. I don’t ask for what I’m not going to get. I’ve got myself. I’ve got my cleaning lady. I’ve got the superintendent of the building. They know my name in the deli downstairs and that I go for the Post and the 2% skim. My doctor is nearly as old as I am, a brilliant man formerly a chiropractor. You’re fine he tells me every time. I am. Oh my hands hurt but I can still make dinner for myself and wear a pair of high heels when there’s a gathering.
My brother moved into an apartment down the hall with his wife. I introduced them originally. I first knew her years ago when we worked in the shipping department of Mallory’s. We’re like sisters, she says and it’s true that she’s my closest friend in the world now that I have no one but it’s not the same. I have always had my suspicions about her. She loves costume jewelry and can’t buy enough, wears pearls big as marshmallows, rubies the size of cherry tomatoes and a face to match, two big circles of rouge on her cheeks and blue eye shadow at her age.
We talk about everything. She insists on being right. My brother never intercedes because he’s a good husband who loves his wife and better be on her side if he knows what’s good for him.
He’s afraid of her I can tell. Our father was afraid of our mother, so. I never argue with anything she says. It’s not me. I have no one else but her and my brother and I’m lucky they live right down the hall. We meet in front every morning then get in their car and shop. On Friday he takes us to have our hair done. I would never go without that and Rick really knows how to give it body. I come out of that chair and feel like a million. She still colors her hair. Red. Isn’t that the limit? It’s not my business to say anything but how lovely how smart how young. I don’t like to make a fuss or stir things up because what for?
Then of all things the wind knocks me down. Go figure. One minute I’m standing in front of the building waiting for my son, I mean Mickey, Joe, I mean Joe, my brother! to bring the car around. I’m wearing my wool coat with the fur collar because they said it was going to snow and thinking about getting a nice lamb chop for dinner that I could make in the toaster oven and I hear a snap and the trees are swimming and I’m upside down. Hip. Hospital. Rehabit… rehabitate… that’s where the animals are! My sons are very nice about it. One of them is here every day all day the other ones lives somewhere else the south but he comes when he can I think yesterday he was here or, no he called. My sisters also come and….no no that’s a dream, that’s right I know that. They’re both gone, that’s very sad. The nurses are adorable. No fat ones except that Wanda one at night who is and then she’s gone.
In my apartment the girl comes and wakes me up but first there’s no milk or but no, sometimes it’s sour. OK I don’t mind that much but my son gets red in the face and then there’s another girl she kisses me when he’s here but I don’t think he knows. I don’t ask her to do anything. She’s a nice girl but oh the stories about her family. The one child has a mental problem and the daughter dropped out she’s pregnant. Her husband beats her…the one in jail, no not now not in jail now, the one who comes over who I met. He picks her up after work. He has a key. My brother’s wife pays me a visit in the afternoon to check on me. She always has something to say. No apples? No pears? No fruit at all! What does she have to check on me for? We’re strangers. What is it her business?
He can’t talk my brother any more. He can’t make any sense. Oh it’s very sad. He looks at you he listens but he’s shaking his head you can see in his eyes he doesn’t know what you’re talking about, so no more driving, no more shopping. She puts him on a leash so he can’t wander away, then she’s ashamed. And now all of a sudden he’s in a wheelchair. He can’t walk! The man can’t walk! She wheels him around talking as if he can understand. Then she puts him away. My own brother! I go to see him in the home. It’s nice. They’ve redone it, it looks like in Miami. And then the next thing is, what happened is, I’m staying there myself in a room with another girl. My one son insists I would burn down my house. When he comes to see me I put on some lipstick and a string of pearls. I tell him I’m ready to die.
I call out from my room to my brother. I tell him to get out of that wheelchair he’s embarrassing us. He sits at the end of the corridor staring out the glass door. He’s all slumped over. On my way to my room I pass his room I look in then I look away. I can’t stand it he’s all slumped over staring at his shoes. One of these days he’s going to fall over on his face! Who ever thought we would live together like this?
I’m watching TV where you have to know the word and what’s her name…the one with the baseball cap…she has the nerve to tell them I stole her roasted nuts! Can you imagine? They’re on the table in a little jar right between my bed and hers so why is she leaving them out like that? I don’t even like nuts! I like Chiclets. Then she passes me in the hall and under her breath curses me. The nerve of her! Bitch. You heard me. I don’t care.
The peas taste like paste. Oh they’re awful. The peas aren’t even green. They’re like mush. They taste like paste. The chicken has white paste on. Everything needs salt. Why can’t I have 7up? The red haired one sits with me sometimes with some special spoon oh it’s so special to her all right throwing paste wiping my face she never wanted me to do better than her and now she’s glad I can see that.
And all of a sudden it’s warm! How do they do that? He wheels me out into the…plant thing, the…green… What is that….it’s a…it’s a… Don’t tell me it’s…a red… Oh… a breeze. Oh that’s nice. I feel good. My hands don’t hurt. So what do you think? Should we go in?
They say me stop screaming.
… my sisters…
I want 7Up!
…my baby the old man.
Gbye. Done forget me.
Barry Jay Kaplan’s stories have been published in Descant, Kerouac’s Dog, Bryant Literary Review, Upstreet, Talking River, Storyglossia, Apple Valley Review and others.
Down in the hollow – sensing that he had reached the point where the space widened out into a concavity like the bottom of a kettle, the master bedroom of their little hiding place – he lurched his legs around in front of him and sat upright, whispering; “Leo, Leo.”
“I don’t know why you’re whispering,” the strong voice came back from somewhere nearby. “There’s no one here. There’s never anyone here.”
Kurt thought about that for a moment. He listened for the low rustle from deeper in the forest, and for the breath of the breeze skirting the frozen crust of the snow beyond its perimeter, but soon he found even that had gone. He strained his ears into the silence, feeling suddenly panicked, as if the whole thing were a sleight of hand trick pulled by some conjurer, and that when the shroud was removed they would be robbed and naked, stripped of everything that had carried them this far from where they should be, and of the forlorn hope that it could carry them on to safety.
Leo heard the fidgeting as Kurt moved across the cracked, waterless surface beneath the briars. He called out “what the fuck are you doing now?” and Kurt was suitably shamed. He arrested his panic, came to terms in that moment with the perfect blackness that had been pulled across their vision and with the night that seemed somehow more soundless, more bereft of life and mercy, than any that had preceded it.
“Nothing,” Kurt whispered, “just thinking, that’s all.”
Leo sighed.
“You might as well share it.”
“How long have we known Gabriel? Four months or so?”
“It’s not so much how long, it’s what has happened. That’s what makes up the time.”
If what Leo said was true, than all of time could be compressed into those four months since Gabriel had appeared in the regiment, transferred in as part of a raft of reinforcements ready for another push eastwards. He’d stood silently in line on the parade ground, looking as benign and placid as the angel that bore his name, but from deep beneath all that, from some piece of ephemera swaddled in the hastily-stitched brown uniform and buckled tight in leather, was something that told the others he had seen action.
What action he had seen, he never spoke about. In those early weeks, he barely spoke at all, responding to orders handed to him down the chain of command in a voice a little softer than those that barked complicitly back at the drill sergeants from his left and right. It was a rare voice, quiet and fragile but still retaining some hidden depth in its timbre that neither Kurt nor Leo could fathom. At first Kurt thought that only he had been unsettled, had had emotions shaken within him that he long presumed deadened by the monotonous terror that reigned all around them, and so he kept his thoughts to himself until, reclining at ease on the firing step of the main trench one evening, Leo made his feelings known.
“Something not right about Gabriel, something I don’t like.”
Kurt acted as if he thought nothing of it, nonchalantly drawing information from his comrade, refusing to let anything slip until he knew more about what his friend was thinking.
“Just a feeling, puts me on edge.”
From then on it was as if Gabriel knew. He opened up after that, as if moving into the next phase of some mystical game, the rules of which only he was privy to, moving chess pieces into advance positions and releasing only the information he knew to be necessary. Leo and Kurt learned about Gabriel’s life before the war, his work as a farmhand on a patch of land near Ingolstadt, in a place so obscure and inconsequential that it bore no name on any map, and was referred to locally only by its position behind the village of Kaifeck.
“Imagine living in a nowhere place, just the backend of some other place,” he told them one night, gazing into the fire which licked over the last shards of dry wood salvaged from the back of the storage bunker, “what’s a place without a name?”
They learned too about the family that occupied the land; the old woman and her son, her son’s wife and her granddaughters, his long and painful courtship of one such granddaughter – she the latest in a long line of Bavarian land owners, disgraced and ejected from the feudal chain some four generations before her own birth, but still possessed of the pretensions of grandeur and aristocracy; he the son of no-one, a vagrant, heir only to the stack of cowshit he was granted for fuel each winter and the pittance he drew for each month of labour – and their eventual marriage in the old Lutheran chapel at Kaifeck. In between these tales, Gabriel spoke of the way the sun shone low between two ancient oaks on April mornings, the way the crisp light shattered infinitely in the meadow, each drop of dew on each blade of glass its own jewel in the crown of the dawn, and of the way the mare lay sleepily in the hay after she’d foaled, and the way the newborn had taken its first ginger steps into the world.
These were idyllic words, words full of the colour and vigour of life in the countryside, but they were delivered in such a way that they were stained. They became heavy and sombre, drifting out of Gabriel and settling somewhere in the dark beneath the three as sparks from the fire rose above and disappeared in the black. The unsettling nature of this delivery, the icy shiver with which each word was imbued, disturbed Kurt and Leo, but it also compelled them, and both men found themselves drawn closer and closer to the strange fellow with the shock of blonde hair and with the eyes that spoke more than could ever be said.
Like glowing metal in a foundry, like the residues of dead wood petrified deep in the heat and pressure of the ground, the connections they formed were subjected to such unnatural conditions as to galvanise them, reinforcing and strengthening them in the midst of unmitigated destruction. Patrol after patrol chipped away at the men in the platoon, the body of which was whittled sharp and keen by sniper bullets, ambushes and friendly fire which picked off the unwary and the foolhardy and the tired, until what remained was bonded stronger than ever, shining hot and bright and compacted by forces stronger than love and brotherhood, forces which were unspeakably primal.
And so during the fall back from that patrol, the patrol which exacted such a heavy cost that each had subsequently sought to erase it from the narratives of their existences, the remnants of the platoon – four, five, six of them, it didn’t seem to matter – breathed and moved as one as they fell pell-mell across the Ukrainian soil. Leo was just ahead, the grey fabric of his great coat becoming one with the vertebrae beneath his starved flesh, one with the clods of dirt that clung to his boots as they pounded the earth, one with Kurt himself, and one with the heavy breathing of Gabriel just behind; a whistling, seething train of any number of men, all still – seemingly – residing on the correct side of the black curtain that had been drawn across the platoon, trapping so many of their comrades irrevocably beyond it.
Kurt had never thought it would be like this. The chaos he’d expected – hoped for, even – never came. The abandonment of everything in favour of a frantic lurch in the direction of survival; that would have been easier to deal with. Then he would have been free and unencumbered, having transcended all bounds of responsibility or concern. Instead, as the platoon collapsed even further in upon itself and the rattle of gunfire and the hot teeth of shellburst laid itself upon the nucleus of men that remained, everything had suddenly drawn much closer, not falling away at all but binding itself inextricably to them, closer than the fibres of the clothes that clung to their limbs. And this was why such things as numbers didn’t matter now. There were no names in that fall back – no division where one human ended and another began – just the mad scramble of a unified body of men, each now carrying the entirety of their history – all they had ever owned, felt, or experienced – in a neat, communal bundle. And it was then that they become truly aware of one another, each sharing an equal portion of the load, each borne by the same frenzy of panic, each blessed with clarity and level-headedness in this community of escape, each component of the train sensing that they were henceforth bonded until the end, however soon or late that end might come.
Finally, appearing from out of the darkness, the rotted planks of the gangway that led down into the maw of the bunker, and the two banks of earth that rose on both side to provide cover to those entering and exiting. Between these two banks of earth that reached up to embrace the returning soldiers Kurt had felt the breathing behind him recede and disappear into the blackness. Or perhaps the breathing that receded was his own? Perhaps the curtain had been drawn around him, right there in the mouth of the bunker, and he had never even noticed?
Kurt had turned then and seen Gabriel, alone now, caught and momentarily blackened in the yellow of the shellburst, appearing nailed fast like Christ to the bedlam of colour that lay beyond his shoulders, then cut loose once again like a spent marionette, bones strewn loosely across the rotted wood of the gangplanks. Then arms clasped around Kurt’s shoulders and he became a part of that community once more, assimilating into the organism as he travelled backward through the aperture and the steel shutters swung closed with a yawning, aching sound. Breathing in the darkness, listening to the bolts screaming in their rivet-holes as the shutters absorbed the worst of the worst of what the Tsar’s guns could throw at them – blasts that would have ended each and every one of them, broken up that little parliament of souls for once and for all – Kurt had suddenly thought of Gabriel, thought of that silhouette tacked up to a wall of horror, arms spread wide ready to embrace whatever it was coming his way, and he spoke his name in a whisper.
“Gabriel, he got it.”
Then, between the breathing, a low voice;
“Got what? I’m here.”
Gabriel.
And so the six or seven or eight men stood in silent contemplation as shells reached down to shake the artificial hill of steel and concrete they had wrapped themselves beneath. Trickles of dust fell onto helmets after every roar from beyond the shutters, and each man worked noiselessly backwards through the recording of what they had just witnessed, like marauders occupying a trench, stalking resistance and quickly, brutally, nullifying it, erasing it from the tablet of existence like they had trained themselves to do.
But not everything can be erased. Putrid memories leave their residue, residue that has the habit of bleeding back through the walls of our consciousness from time to time. And so, slowly, it bled into the thoughts of each of the men, colouring each utterance until every word spoken became as dark and heavy as the words which had emanated from Gabriel on those nights around the campfire.
Except, it seemed, for Gabriel himself.
While the remnants of the platoon sank into the new life that the fallback from the patrol had prepared for them, Gabriel seemed suddenly unfettered by whatever it had been that had dogged him before. He was untroubled; fresh and clean and new. He never spoke about the patrol – just as none of them did – but it was evident that those moments that stretched out like hours and that frantic singular movement back to the bunker in which each man had seen more than could possibly be processed in a lifetime, did not weigh upon him as it did the others. They would see him crouched by a frozen boot print, admiring the fractals that spread across the virgin ice in the dawn, or simply smiling despite himself at his sentry post, watching the crows arc among the handful of shattered, leafless trees in no-man’s land or wheel above the Russian line. But it was the levity in his voice which disgusted the others the most, and quickly Gabriel became ostracised from the platoon as the men exercised the only power that remained. They couldn’t hurt him physically, they couldn’t rob him, or chisel away at the kernel of hope each had long since dispensed with, so they took away the only thing that kept them all alive; human contact.
All turned their backs apart from Kurt and Leo. To them, the lightness with which Gabriel spoke was a relief rather than an affront, a respite from the unremitting darkness that lay around them. His words were messianic, leading them onwards towards a shared destiny, and they craved his company, listening to him talk about nothing as they watched the embers of a fire burn away and savouring every morsel from his angel’s lips.
It was out of these meetings – in which Gabriel would hold court, his face losing all trace of humanity as the light and shadow of the fire played across it – that the plan was born. From then on, the die was cast, the wheels set in motion for the beginnings of an existence beyond this one, at some indeterminate point in the future that neither Kurt nor Leo had even dared to imagine for many years now. When the Russians came – and all agreed it was a ‘when’ rather than an ‘if’ – and when this fire-forged composite of men was scattered across the hills to the west, they would move from the midst of chaos and begin their long trek back to Bavaria, to Ingolstadt, and then to Kaifeck, and, finally, to the no-name place that lay beyond it.
It was here, in the place without a name of its own, that the plan would be enacted. Now the magic of Gabriel’s words wove itself profoundly around the two listeners, as the strange blue eyes flickered and the tongue spoke of wealth, of robbery, of making a clean break. “They may have been spat from the feudal chain, but they’re not hard up,” he said as Kurt and Leo watched, rapt by Gabriel’s oration. “They don’t want for anything. Why should we?”
Then there was revision, a dark undercurrent snaking its way into the idyllic narrative they’d both heard over and over again, a river of darkness and deceit that stretched all the way from the bloody soil of Eastern Ukraine and plunged deep into the heart of their bucolic Fatherland.
The stories they’d consumed seemed to play out in reverse, no longer cleansed and pure but now putrefied like the residual memories of the fallback from ambush and of the brutality of that shroud that snatched so many of their brothers away. It will come, he told them, riches, comfort and a new life, all they need do was wait. And so they did.
Down there in the pitch dark of the hollow kettle-bottom, Kurt couldn’t help but think about the momentary disconnect that occurred between the two banks of earth that rose up like arms in the darkness, as what felt like all the guns in Russia spat their fire on top of them. He’d seen it, clear as day; Gabriel, nailed to his invisible cross like a martyr, arms splayed, rifle loosed from open hands and tumbling away from a body torn from behind by shrapnel and fire and death.
He’d seen it, there was no question; the shroud pulled quickly and tightly around Gabriel, drawing its fabric over him and spiriting the breath from his frame. And he’d heard the voice and he’d recognised it, they all had, just as they’d all seen Gabriel in the hours that followed, each man wrapped in his own cocoon of forgetting apart from the strange figure with the shock of blonde hair who nonchalantly smoked a cigarette and then slept like a baby. But what had happened between those moments? What had happened to facilitate such a profound change? What Gabriel had lost, the others had gained.
How could he articulate this to Leo? Leo, who lay on his back beneath the briars and looked up into nothing with open eyes.
“We’ve come this far, Kurt,” Leo said, “it’s a funny time to lose faith now. What do you suggest…”
But Leo’s voice fell silent as both men heard it: the whip crack of footfalls puncturing the snow that covered the meadow, each louder than the one preceding it as the figure moved towards them across the space.
John Burns is a writer and teacher originally from Nottingham in the UK. As a child, he fostered a love of reading, writing and language, something which led him to a career in journalism and subsequently teaching English literature. He is the author of Homesong, a self-published novel, and has had short fiction published by Ink, Sweat & Tears and Jungleland amongst others.