ing it into war shit and peace shit, because then army asses would be different from civilian ones.” Wise words, no doubt, and they even coaxed a smile from the commander when someone reported them to him, though later when asked, he’d forgotten them. Forgetting is a marvelous defense, one widely known for years, but not everybody knows how to utilize it well. First of all the mind should be in passive, not active mode, in a mode known as standby, like a printer awaiting the print command. Power usage is at a minimum while the device is forever poised for action, something that is especially key if considered from a military vantage point. And does any other vantage point exist for us? From the checkpoint we watched as the refugee column snaked farther and farther away and then pivoted and disappeared into the forest, but unlike the scout squads that had followed the same path and had circled back to us, the refugees never again appeared, a fact that vindicated those who’d been claiming from the start that the forest was enchanted. Those who did not believe in miracles, and there were plenty of them though the number was dwindling, claimed there were many forked paths in the woods, and whoever knew their destination and knew the woods well, as did the refugees and their leaders, would never stray. Their feet would take them, so to speak, wherever they needed to go. Here Mladen chimed in to say that every forest has a thousand faces and the faces can be easily confused, but the claim that he’d lost his way or taken a wrong turn was highly unlikely. He, at least, knew this, he said, since he was born and had spent most of his life in a forest, on a mountainside, so as far as he was concerned, as with Tarzan long ago, the true wilderness was the city, a claustrophobic urban space. The forest was a different story, and he could go on and on about it, but this time he merely wanted to make the point that there are paths and byways in forests that meander, meaning they take some travelers in one direction and other travelers in the opposite or a different direction. While he was saying this, the other soldiers exchanged glances, shrugged, and tapped their temples. Many might say he was crazy, went on Mladen, but he dared each of us to go off into the forest following the same path the refugees had taken and we’d see whether we caught up with them or whether this seemingly meek path would take us to the shore of a lake, and then slam shut behind us and condemn us to a lifetime by the lake, living off fish and blueberries. Those who spoke up before him suddenly rebelled and said he should stop the gibberish; Mladen dismissed them with a wave, he spat and swore, and this caused a groundswell of protests and threats. Who knows what would have happened in the end if they hadn’t heard the roar of a motor and before their eyes appeared a clanking, old military jeep. The jeep clattered up the hill with effort and reached the checkpoint where it stopped, and from it stepped a portly soldier holding a large cloth sack. He strode over to the commander as if he knew him well, handed him the sack, smiled, and, clear as a bell, said—all of us heard it—“Your mail, sir.” Though we’d all heard it, each of us repeated the words and soon our unit was humming like a beehive. It’s difficult to say what kept us from charging the portly soldier and our commander, ripping the sack from his hands, tearing it open, and dumping the letters on the ground. No, we all stood there quietly and pretended the sack interested us not at all, that we weren’t soldiers but, say, beekeepers at an inter-city competition lasting only a day or two where nobody expects to receive mail. So we waited for the portly soldier to exchange sentences with the commander, at least two of which we couldn’t catch, in three we grasped a word or two, while the others were fully comprehensible. Short exclamations (and one quite innocuous swear) didn’t count, such as: “You don’t say!” “Heavens to Betsy!” and “Screw your granny!” The portly soldier sat in the jeep, beeped his horn in farewell, turned the jeep to go back where he’d come from, honked again, revved the motor, and swiftly vanished. For a time the softer and softer hum of the motor could be heard from the forest, and finally that, too, was gone. The commander breathed deeply, took hold of the sack and opened it gingerly as if thinking he might want to use it again. The soldiers in formation were shivering like drug addicts in crisis; their knives, with which they were poised to slice their packages open, kept dropping from their hands. Hearing the clatter of the knives, the commander offered his apologies and even mentioned the tendrils of arthritis that toyed with his fingers and prevented him from being more spry. While he was saying this he drew out the first letter and read the name of the addressee. No one responded and only after the third call did we realize it was for the sentry who’d been found dead in the latrine. “Idiots,” said the commander. “Again they’re shirking their duties!” He was thinking, of course, of the service that was tasked with informing the families of soldiers who’d been killed, and which clearly was not doing its job. If they had, no one would have been writing to the dead boy; the army did not deliver mail to heaven. Or hell, whichever. For those sorts of messages one needs angels or devils, depending on which variety seems preferable. The commander went on retrieving letters and calling the names, the soldiers came up and took them, some with hands trembling, some with lips contorted, two or three sniffling, and one soldier dropping a proper tear on the commander’s hand, the hand that was giving him the letter. For a moment the tear lingered there, then it began to slide, and finally it rolled off and dropped to the ground. The commander had tried to catch it midair but failed. “No point in wasting tears,” he whispered, which might have sounded to somebody like a transmission of secret messages and ancient lore. Then the commander took out two letters and crowed: “This is for me! And this, too!” It was obvious he’d be happiest racing off and settling into a cozy corner and there, in peace and quiet, read both letters. But the army is the army, duty is duty, so all he could do was fold them and tuck them into his pocket. On he went reading out the names and, after the letters, he gave out the larger and smaller parcels, as well as a postal form on which was a message that a parcel that was to be delivered to such and such a soldier had been discarded as it contained forbidden substances. In parentheses there was a handwritten note: “roast lamb, brandy, onions.” We all turned to look at the soldier, each of us with a mournful expression. We’d never recover from the loss, this was clear, but first we needed to discover where the mail sack had come from. No one knew where we were, all lines of communication were down, the equipment wasn’t working, morale was at a record low, and yet our mail was delivered. How could that be? We asked the commander to explain this to us, it was his job, after all, to inform us regularly on the state of affairs in the theater of war and elaborate on things that baffled us. The commander, however, was hopping around impatiently and could barely wait to retreat to his room and read his three letters in seclusion—the third was the last he took out when everybody already thought there were none left in the sack. “Why this mail?” wondered the commander and, bemused, scratched his head. He, of course, had no idea why, but still he tried valiantly to cobble together some sort of explanation. What he came up with held water so poorly, with the water seeping and dribbling out on all sides, that even the most reticent among us began speaking of a flood. Though not yet a flood, the situation completely changed that night when a downpour began that went on for hours, days perhaps, and showed no likelihood of letting up. At first, while thunder rumbled and fat drops of rain splattered on the roof, we all said how the drumming of rain is such a pleasant sound, how nature breathes better afterwards, how much easier we sleep, and how the windows should be opened and fresh air let in. The next morning when we opened our eyes, the rain was still tapping rhythmically on the roof, as if Ginger Baker were a distant cousin. We got up, staggered around among the cots, rubbed our eyes, and conspired to crawl back under the covers. The commander refused to allow it and forced us to do pointless tasks such as picking up bits of litter around the checkpoint barrier. The soldiers who did this came back as drenched as mice. Like the rest of us they had no dry uniforms to change into, and when they stripped off their sopping shirts, jackets, and trousers, they sat there among us half-dressed in their olive-drab skivvies. When he saw this, the commander had an attack of spleen: “What now? Is this a public bath? A soldier in his briefs is not a soldier!” He howled at the top of his lungs, flailed his arms, and portrayed himself, all in all, in an extremely unfavorable light. “But what else could I do?” asked the commander. “Young soldiers are like pups,” he went on, “so you must constantly impress upon them who’s in charge. Well, will you look at that: our commander is true blue!” He liked this wording and over and over he said: “A true blue commander.” In the evening while we were all at work scraping the mud off our boots, he gazed up at the ceiling and whispered: “A true blue commander,” and his face went almost translucent with the soft shine of an inner goodness. But according to the quixotic laws governing the world, good works have less currency than bad, and so it was that the commander’s words were drowned out by a sudden hammering on the roof: hail the size of marbles. The thought of marbles stirred a torrent of memories; the wave of nostalgia threatened to paralyze any activity by the soldiers. Had the weather been more agreeable they’d have all been lying on their backs in the meadow and waxing melancholic about the clouds, the shapes and way they were dispersing, how long they last and whether they can be trusted, both for forecasting meteorological events and future events in the lives of human beings. In other words, will the appearance of a pear-shaped cloud affect our life differently from that of a bird-shaped one? And so forth, as one of the soldiers said, with the obligatory stalk of straw in the teeth. The commander, seeing and hearing all this, was devastated. Had he known, he said, what the soldiers in his unit would be like, he’d never have responded to the summons from headquarters. He’d have stayed happily at home and relaxed, calm and serene, in his tracksuit and slippers. Then he wouldn’t be listening to this folderol about clouds, or straws. Had someone predicted he’d be commanding a pack of nostalgia-ridden soldiers, he’d have sued this person for defamation, and if he’d done that, where’d he be now? By rights he’d be apologizing to the person and returning the money the person had been mandated to pay him after being so instructed by the court, to compensate for his mental anguish, compounded with interest. “The world sucks,” said the commander and kicked a small rock. The rock bounced, knocked the door frame, and rolled out into the damp grass. The rain was still pelting outside, even harder, perhaps, than before, and everything was sinking slowly into mud. Then a soldier whose stomach troubles forced him to venture to the latrine despite the dreadful weather, informed the commander that the latrine was no longer standing; the water and mud had swamped it and swept it down the slope, and the graveyard, too, was beginning to slide, which was easy to see with the lean of the wooden crosses and tilting mounds. Then from deep inside the sleeping quarters rang out a shot and everyone dropped to the floor. “Someone’s killed themselves,” said a soldier, and—though the bullet had carried away almost half his face—we easily recognized that someone as Dragan Chicken Little, the youngest of our number. He hadn’t had the nickname Chicken Little before he joined the army and arrived at the checkpoint. It was maybe our second night there (or third?), when he’d crowed like a rooster in his sleep so loudly that he woke half the company. The next morning, of course, he remembered none of this, but he stubbornly protested that he’d never dreamt of hens: “Chicks, oh yes,” he insisted, “but hens—never!” So that’s how he became Dragan Chicken Little and often, when somebody addressed him, he’d answer with a cockcrow, which, without fail, sent us into gales of laughter. Now his body lay there at the end of the room and blood and chunks of his brain and skull were sprayed across several cots. And the near wall. When they saw this, many soldiers ran outside and vomited for a long time into the mud. The commander was the first to collect his wits; he made his way over to where Chicken Little’s body lay, then stopped, in disbelief, knelt beside him, leaned over, and whispered: “Why, Chicken Little, why?” Blood trickled onto the commander’s right knee and when he rose to his feet we could all see the dark-red stain on his pants. “How are we going to bury him in this weather, with all this mud?” wondered one of the soldiers, and only then did we notice the rain had stopped. The rain stopped, but then something else could be heard, a shrill cry, either animal or human. As always in such situations, there were differences of opinion: some believed it was human but they couldn’t agree on what steps to take. Some called for a rescue team to be sent out while others urged caution and even spoke of a trap. The ones who believed an animal was making the sound showed no great compulsion to go outside, yet there were some among them who said there’s no serious difference between animal and human suffering, and if they’d go outside for a person, they should do it for an animal. Just as a brawl was starting to erupt with shouts of “C’mon! C’mon!” someone out-shouted the ruckus with the question: “And what if the dead are rising from their graves?” In the sudden hush that followed, no one dared even lift their head to look others in the eye. The shrill cry continued, but now there were brief still spells, respites perhaps, as the wounded animal or mutilated woman gasped for breath and stared into the dark, and every rustle signaled the nearing end, the touch of a cold knife or a bullet’s hot steel. That was certainly better than lying there not alive or dead, in the dark, on the wet grass and oozing mud. And who knows what would have happened next had the petrifying cry not fallen silent, followed only by the rustling of leaves in the dark, which always lulls one to sleep, perhaps not as readily as the touch of a beloved hand, but very well indeed, never better, and this may be what the commander was thinking as the soldiers, fully clothed, slumped onto cots and drifted off to sleep. In the end the commander was standing there alone, surrounded by a company of sleepers, and only then did he remember that there was no one manning the sentry post. He tried to jostle one of the corporals awake but the man turned over onto his other side and went right on sleeping. Another corporal, asleep on the next cot over, didn’t move at all. The commander rose to his feet, pulled on his boots, grabbed the first gun he could lay his hands on, and sat down outside by the barrier. Aside from the moon in the sky, nothing was moving as far as he could see. Something rustled at his back, then to his left, then to his right. Had he been in Australia, the commander might have imagined a kangaroo seeking its way in the dark, but here at the checkpoint barrier this could only be a grasshopper. Or a jumping mouse, thought the commander, if there are jumping mice around here. All manner of things are in these parts, but there’s no one at hand to inform us about them; the number of people who have the gift of the gab, let alone storytelling, has shrunk to next to nothing, and this is not only because of the war. The commander, who’d never been compelled by linguistic subjects and dilemmas, dozed off, but then he felt a touch on his back and, lightning fast, clutching his gun, he turned and peered behind him. No one. The last wisps of scattering clouds were drifting off, and, in no time, under the light of the vast moon, the night was nearly as bright as at daybreak. Soon the commander co