e. Several soldiers came over to plead with him to take them along. Mladen urged them to go to the commander but they refused. One said he’d go with Mladen no matter what. “They’ll shoot you between the eyes,” said Mladen, pointing at the soldier’s forehead and pulling an imaginary trigger. “I am, too, going,” said the soldier, who raced off to pack, and no one ever saw him again. His disappearance was only noticed when Mladen came back to the checkpoint and asked what had happened to that pushy soldier who’d wanted to go with him no matter what. He’d thought of the man, said Mladen, when he sank into quicksand and tried to squirm free without losing his boots and weapons. He’d have given anything just then to have the young man along so he could reach out with a branch, but since the soldier wasn’t there, Mladen struggled on his own. Luckily, he was mired in quicksand shallows, or whatever they’re called, and bit by bit, inch by inch, he wriggled out onto solid, grassy turf. He lifted first one foot and then the other so we could see the mud caked to his boots. It took him only one night to reach the spot the two soldiers described, but he stayed there till daybreak to corroborate their story. Aha, said the commander, what did he see? He saw the house, like the soldiers said, but no smoke puffing from the chimney and the front door was not even open a crack. A window was open and curtains swayed in gusts of wind. He waited, said Mladen, till the sun climbed high in the sky but nobody appeared, not a soul stepped out of the house, not a farm animal left the barn; just when he thought it was time to return, he noticed a duck followed by an orderly trail of ducklings. The duck waddled over to the front door and Mladen could see it lift its beak; it was probably summoning someone, the person who, he assumed, regularly came out to feed them. “But the water?” asked the commander. “The water and the lake?” “No water, no lake,” said Mladen. “Just carnage.” The duck was quacking to someone and that persuaded him to venture out to see. No road led there, or he hadn’t yet found it, so Mladen scrambled down a steep slope from the meadow, stepped across a gulch over a little brook, probably a seething torrent in the spring and summer rains, spilling over its narrow streambed. Hence the quicksand into which he’d so haplessly plunged. That’s when he mentioned the soldier who’d wanted to tag along and only then did we realize the soldier was missing. The commander wrung his hands and sobbed with the breathy gasps of a woman, and then he pulled himself together and said he’d organize a rescue team and comb the terrain. “Absolutely not,” said Mladen. “too late now, anyway. If he’s alive, he’s too far off to hear us, and if he’s dead, all we can do is raise him a monument.” “Forget it,” called one of the soldiers. “Tell us what happened at the house!” First he came across a dog that had been gutted, Mladen told us, then he saw a cat with its spine broken, and in the barn he found two dead cows and a crazed horse. If animals were treated this way, wondered Mladen, what happened to the people? He thought it was time to go back, his assignment was only to see whether the houses did, in fact, exist, and not to find out what happened to the people who’d been living there. Then he heard moaning and forgot everything else. He hopped over a twisted fence, slowly approached the side of a building, and looked into the backyard. There he saw a ghastly scene: on a large wooden table lay two bodies: an older man, already dead, and an older woman, still alive and groaning in pain. Their bellies were slashed from side to side, partly disemboweled, their intestines dangling off the table. Mladen turned, he said, and when he went into the house he found the rest of the family: two young men, a woman, and a little girl. They had all, apparently, been raped and strangled or shot dead with a bullet to the head. Nothing in the house was touched, as if the marauders had taken care to be tidy. Judging by the few flies and no stench, Mladen figured the massacre must have happened the night before, and this made him especially cautious; he gave up looking further at other houses. And besides, he said, he didn’t know whose side the victims were on, and who the murderers were fighting for. He’d called them murderers, he said, because if he were to call the people who’d perpetrated the atrocities by any other name, or referred to them as soldiers, he’d be insulting all those who’d respected treaties and conventions in wars. And nothing he’d seen hinted at who the perpetrators might be? asked the commander. The soldiers howled, saying they didn’t even know whom they were up against. Maybe, said the soldiers, they were a buffer force sent to a conflict near their country’s border, though maybe, said others, this is actually a civil war and they, as an official armed force, were dispassionately helping to subdue the conflicts. The commander stood, waited for the soldiers to quiet down, and then said he wished he could explain things to them, but he, too, was in the dark. “In the old days,” he said, “this happened often; the kingdoms were vast and heralds had to travel for days to bring news to distant provinces of the end of a war. In the Second World War, on the little islands scattered across the Pacific, there were Japanese fighters who thought the war was still on for decades, and they’d shoot at every American who came near. Our situation is not as bad as all that,” said the commander, “though our ignorance is appalling.” But what could he do, he asked, when he was woken that night, as we were? He’d barely had time to pull on his uniform and rush downstairs to the jeep waiting for him out front. At the assembly point they’d said everything would be explained over the radio; the trucks were ready and required the cover of darkness. Well, sure, recalled the commander, he’d been handed an envelope with a map, the rosters of fighters, and lists of issued weapons and equipment. The lists were full of errors, said the commander, so he’d already made his own list of the things missing from the lists. The map was no good or out of date as we could see from Mladen’s report and the stories of the soldiers who’d seen the house, where, according to the commander’s map, there was supposed to be a reservoir. The commander looked like someone always on the verge of tears, but though we found this disturbing we didn’t know how to help. Is the forest enchanted? mused someone. Is what we think to be happening nothing but an illusion? Who believes in magic? asked others, though no one could gainsay the possibility that hallucinogens had been used, but narcotics can’t replace a magic wand, this we knew. Ever since our arrival, said the commander, he’d been doing nothing but juggling lists and making new ones. “It’s all rife with errors,” said the commander. “Not just the lists, the world. Wherever we go we’ll find errors, most of all when they insist there aren’t any.” What he’d like, said the commander, was that there be no errors in the new roster he started yesterday, and he’d like that roster to stay brief, he sincerely hoped it would though he knew that no one, except just maybe He who was on high—here he stopped and raised his eyes to the heavens, and all of us looked upward after him—knows in advance just how long that roster will be. All of us, of course, understood what roster he had in mind, just as we all knew it held, so far, four names: the sentry killed in the latrine, the two men shot by arrows while patrolling the forest, and, finally, the soldier who set out on his own after Mladen. A hush. We were prepared to honor the victims of a war that, like every war, is pointless, but each of us was also hoping the next name wouldn’t be his own. We said nothing and darted dirty looks at one another as if we were sworn enemies, but what else can you think of someone who hopes to see you dead? “I don’t want to die,” blurted one of us and we all burst out laughing, not that we were laughing at death, but with relief at the thought that all of us felt the same way. No one wanted to die. Even for such a noble cause as defending the homeland. What could possibly be noble about a violent death? And the stupidest part of all was that afterwards this would become fodder for people who’d had no experience at all with it, with death. How can a living person understand someone who’s dead, understand what a gunshot victim thinks as the bullet rips through his flesh, understand the fever by which the organism races to close in and preserve its capacity to complete a last few actions that are built into the instinctual function of the human organism, especially regarding the proper dispatch of the soul into the cosmic stratosphere? Yes, the soul launches like a rocket, but only those who are dispatched in a timely manner will arrive at their destination, while others, especially those rising from bodies that have fallen in the depravity of a war, will continue to travel aimlessly through the transparent, gelid recesses of the cosmos, to throw themselves at the mercy of dissonant comets, crackpot satellites, meteors large and small, and other cosmic debris. Swathed in silken, diaphanous robes, the souls shiver softly, though during a war, whether global or local, a liberation or a conquest, long-standing observation has registered an upsurge in the number of such souls, therefore rendering their shivering louder and more audible in the astronomical observatories where the sound is referred to as an astral hum. Science, of course, does not admit to the existence of souls, especially those shivering in the cosmic wastelands, but that doesn’t mean these souls aren’t there and we shouldn’t be doing all we can to protect them, just as we protect endangered animal species. Souls are in jeopardy, they’re clobbered without mercy like baby seals, the difference being that the clobbering of baby seals is protested worldwide, while no one, nobody at all, stands up for those defenseless souls. But, enough, whoever’s understood this gets it, and if they don’t they probably never will. War, after all, is a godsend for nobody, don’t forget this, because these words matter more than Heraclitus’s stab at giving us war as the father of everything. And the mother? one asks. Where’s she? Heraclitus has nothing to say about her, or maybe that particular fragment hasn’t survived, or we’ve been misreading him. Whatever. There’ll be no more repeating, and the commander will, regardless, keep a roster of the dead, murdered, or disappeared, and whoever wants to will be able to independently confirm the upside of having an efficient air-raid warning and broadcast system, then run to the nearest shelter, pull something over their head, and wait for all sounds to subside. The only thing still to be heard will be the shivering of the souls, like those harmonious sound curtains in performances of, say, Mike Oldfield or Soft Machine. Anyway, a soldier must think about death, and while the amateur fighter thinks about death in an amateurish way, the professional approaches it as a professional—death for the professional is no more than a clause in a contract. The amateur soldier, like all amateurs, generally speaks of things with pomposity, using long words and gnarly sentences. He might, for instance, say the “absorption of non-homogeneous phenomena, including the exploitation of the image of death as a universal, is a sufficiently grandiose conspiracy and, indeed, wellspring of alarm, which will most certainly amalgamate the negative charge of our every aspiration.” And while the professional soldier merely shrugs at such platitudes, amateur fighters devote to them their best hours and days. They spew nonsense as if these are the ultimate mantras to elevate them high above the fray where the less fortunate wretches litter their lives like caramel candy wrappers. So much occurs to a person when faced with death, incredible! Of course, there are those who say that a summons to war is not a summons to death, that war is waged not for death but for life. We even heard the commander say, “War is life, not death.” Okay, he whispered the words and never thought somebody might be listening, but so what. Words are words, whispered, shouted, or spat. Only when one is philosophizing do words perhaps cease to be words, though it’s difficult to say just what they become once they aren’t words. Instruments? Well, we’d come to guard the checkpoint and here we were fussing over words and philosophy. And not for a mere hour or two; days were passing in this philosophical haze and we wouldn’t have been surprised, when we stepped outside, if we’d seen a yellow leaf and an apple and pear ripe for the picking. “Impossible,” said the commander, and glanced at his watch, “we’ve only been here a week.” “Longer,” gasped the mob in a single voice, and the commander retreated. “Why provoke them,” he said to himself, “when I can always find a way to outwit them?” A person might think everything was creaking and swaying in the unit like we were aboard a ship at sea, but he’d be so very wrong. We were a well-oiled unit and no one watching from the sidelines would ever think something was out of kilter. Even the next death didn’t shake us, though it was no picnic to see one of the corporals hanging from the branch of a tree at the forest’s edge. The first thought was suicide, but then we saw his hands tied behind his back, and a little later, in the bushes, somebody found the crate onto which the unfortunate corporal had probably been forced to climb only to have it kicked out from under him, and down he swung, his neck snapped, urine splashed down his legs. Meanwhile, for days the radio and telegraph operator had been attempting, in vain, to make contact with headquarters, and then one morning a woman’s pleasant voice was picked up but in a different language. The radio and telegraph operator called the commander, who donned earphones and shut his eyes as if preparing to listen to a beloved opera; he listened for a few moments and then turned to the radio and telegraph operator and asked him if he had dialed a wrong number. The radio and telegraph operator said he hadn’t been contacting headquarters over the phone lines, which anyone could listen in on, but that, at least until now, he’d made contact with headquarters over certain wavelengths that were supposedly secret. “If that’s the case,” said the commander, “headquarters has fallen to the enemy.” But which enemy? was the question. What language was the person who’d answered speaking? asked the other soldiers and the radio and telegraph operator channeled the connection to the loudspeaker system. After crackling and hissing from the small speakers placed strategically around the whole area we were guarding, a voice reached us that was singing out words in a strange language. The commander promised a reward to anyone who could tell us what language this was, and there’d be no end to the rewards if they could translate for us what the person was actually saying. We sobered up and sharpened our ears. It was certainly not German or Russian, nor was it our language; then we eliminated English, Dutch, and French; it also wasn’t Slovenian, Bulgarian, or Czech, nor was it Italian, Spanish, or Romanian, or Arabic, or Hebrew, or Chinese. “If we keep this up,” piped a cheery voice, “we’ll use up all the languages! And then what’ll we do?” The commander warned the owner of this voice to watch his language because he could easily end up in the dock, and summary military courts are infamous for meting out the grimmest of sentences with cheer because any other approach might encourage insubordination. Then a soldier raised his hand, as if in school, waiting for his turn to speak, even holding up two fingers, the index and middle, so the teacher, or rather the commander, would call on him. “If this language sounds like so many others,” said the soldier when the commander nodded in his direction, “might it be Esperanto?” Some applauded, others jeered, but most of them exchanged looks and shrugged. The soldier who’d asked the question couldn’t have known that Esperanto had been the commander’s great love when he was a child. How many days had he spent dreaming about a peaceful world, where everyone spoke the same language, as they had before the Tower of Babel! Esperanto seemed the most noble drea