uld 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 dream a human being might cherish. He considered saying a word or two to these army brats on the history of Esperanto and, of course, about the man who’d invented it, but he was afraid he might get carried away with the story and lured into an anti-war discourse, which would, he was certain, easily persuade the soldiers to accuse him of spreading pacifism and a negative attitude toward the armed forces, not only in our country but in general. At a moment when every chance for resistance should be glorified and patriotic ideas fundamentally encouraged, he, the commander, might be seen as a subversive, obliquely suggesting surrender. An anti-war discourse? I think not, concluded the commander, who would’ve been happiest sending this crew packing, but then he’d have found himself standing alone before a kangaroo court that would probably have no compassion for pacifists. But none of this helped with understanding what the person on the radio was saying; she continued, tirelessly, to prattle on in her wretched language. “Switch that off,” said the commander, finally, and then, when silence reigned, he announced it was not Esperanto. Actually, what he said was: “This, sadly, is not Esperanto.” They could think of him what they liked. He resisted the impulse to say something about a language meant to advance understanding among peoples, that the desire of the man who created this super-language had never waned, that today, maybe more than ever, there was a need for a language belonging to no one, meaning no ill will would be provoked just because this person or those people or the manager of some international concern was using the language. “Soldiers, sirs,” he said finally, “we’ll wait a little longer, a few more hours won’t change a thing, and then we’ll see what’s what, especially if we haven’t made contact with headquarters by then. In any case, we won’t sit here wasting time, counting sheep.” He’d only mentioned sheep symbolically, but he was astonished to see how many of the men turned to look for the sheep. They’re inside you, thought the commander, inside you. For a moment he felt relief, but he knew this wouldn’t last long so he strode off to his little room; two soldiers were already waiting there, one was Mladen, and the other, in fatigues, was someone the commander had never seen before. Later it transpired that he had seen the man but hadn’t paid attention, just as he hadn’t examined most of the soldiers carefully. They are, after all, thought the commander, merely consumer goods, cannon and tank fodder, and it is no good getting close to them; that plays havoc with the emotions, and if there is something a soldier, especially a professional soldier such as he, must never allow himself to foster and cultivate, that is emotions. Tearful eyes, a pounding heart, dry lips, and a swelling of the chest that is so difficult to describe, all these are things a soldier should respect but never indulge in. If your eyes tear up you’ll see double, and if you take aim just then, who knows what you’ll hit, and if your heart pounds at that very moment, your hand will tremble, and you won’t be much use if the enemy attacks. The commander said all this without notes; he took pride in his way with words. He should’ve been a poet, thought the commander, and, resting his forehead on the windowpane, he gazed out at flowers in the meadow. Then he heard Mladen’s discreet cough and his hand flew to his brow: how could he have forgotten the two soldiers. “Yes, Mladen,” said the commander, and, turning to face them, found himself looking straight down the barrel of the other man’s gun. “Bang,” said the man, “bang-bang,” and the commander could picture the bullet, spinning like a steel gyre, about to lodge itself in his heart. “We’ve come to negotiate,” said Mladen. He started speaking and didn’t stop for a long time, though two or three times he asked the other soldier to confirm or deny his words, which the soldier did with grace. All in all, the commander thought well enough of the soldier, mainly as a model for what all soldiers should be like, though he was none too thrilled by the ease with which the man kept him in his crosshairs. Even if by chance, thought the commander, especially if by chance. In short, Mladen said he’d been keeping a close eye on things since he arrived at the checkpoint, the mood among the soldiers was at its lowest ebb, unrest was on the rise, and at any moment he was expecting a revolt; a rebellion would have erupted already if the soldiers had had a clear sense of which road they could take and where to find “home.” So, said Mladen, they’d sent a delegation to offer him, Mladen, a fee if he knew of or could find for them a path to follow—through the forest, of course—to another road, a road that would really take them “home.” The commander was about to ask Mladen why he kept saying the word “home” as if it were in quotation marks? Was he suggesting the “home” they longed to go back to was only a symbolic “home” that did not, in fact, exist? But before he had the chance to ask, Mladen said the soldiers were asking him to train another soldier who’d escort him, lend a hand in tricky situations, and return alone to the checkpoint with the information. Mladen, in other words, could go off in whatever direction he chose and the soldiers would rebel here and follow him. But, said Mladen, then hesitated and glanced at the other, who coughed and explained that though most of the soldiers were for a rebellion, there were still a few willing to follow the commander, and he, said the soldier, was one, though the other soldiers had no idea. While Mladen was training him in the martial arts and showing him how to survive in the wild, it turned out the two of them were of a like mind and would never support such treason. “Oh, thank you, thank you,” stuttered the commander, hoping he wouldn’t go overboard and sob. “So what do you propose?” He mustered the courage to ask. “We’ll leave on this ‘expedition,’” said Mladen, using the quotation marks again, “but then we’ll tell the soldiers what they don’t want to hear, that we found no way through and we must stay where we are.” “But to you we’ll report,” said the other soldier, “on the real state of affairs.” “After that,” snickered Mladen, “we’ll put this to rights.” The commander knew what Mladen meant: instead of the pile of dead in the wake of a rebellion, he was suggesting we produce the same number of dead by gunning them down. “We’ll discuss that later,” said the commander. “And now all you need to tell me is when you’ll be leaving.” “Tonight,” said the other soldier, and Mladen nodded. Only then did the commander remember where he knew the other soldier from: soon after they’d arrived, the second or third day, the soldier had come down with something after lunch, and since a sick bay hadn’t yet been set up, the commander allowed him to lie down that afternoon in his, the commander’s, room. Soon the soldier was moved into the hastily furnished sick bay, but when the commander went to lie down that evening, the fragrance of the soldier’s aftershave was so pervasive that the commander couldn’t fall asleep till nearly first light. In the morning he changed the pillowcase, but even then the smell of the aftershave slowly penetrated his nostrils and tugged him from sleep. “Fine,” said the commander to the pillowcase, “have it your way, I’ll manage on no sleep.” He’d have told the pillowcase another thing or two but feared its wrath, yet another furious attack, the chilling fear that it might encase his head while he slept. The commander stroked the pillowcase, it sighed tenderly and curled up under his chair. The commander was staring all the while out the window; he knew people might think all sorts of things if they caught him chatting with his pillowcase, and, worst of all, if they saw how it listened! His favorite poet, Margareta Greenwald, wrote “Crazy, here they’re all crazy” in a poem as if she’d read the commander’s mind. Her next line, meanwhile, was: “And I, I am craziest of all.” After this the poem becomes a cheerless recounting of her dismay over recently delivered furniture that cou