m 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 could be of interest to no one, though the poem ended well. Oh muse, it said in closing, instead of giving words, give of yourself, and fear not, heaven will not forget you. Thoughts of poetry amid a raging war can serve as a haven for those who long for a respite, but not for those who rise up in defense of their homeland, can they? Ah, here he had to stop, for none of us could be certain that we were, indeed, still in our homeland. Since we’ve joined a continental union, the question of defense of the fatherland is, at the very least, questionable; any person from around here could be dispatched to anywhere within the continental union, always hoping to find ways to hear about the only place within the union that feels right. Perhaps this sounds artificial and complicated, but it is what it is. In this effort to unite everyone, many see a nostalgic call to revive the old European empires. Europe can only be great as an allied empire, they say, and the commander goes along with this cheerfully. Outside awaits a different reality, but he now, somehow, feels better. So when a soldier comes up, grenade in hand, at first he smiles and only later reacts to the shouts of warning, wrestles the grenade away, and, in the same motion, heaves it far into a field. After this he’s instantly drenched in sweat and he doesn’t immediately register the muffled pistol shot with which, right behind him, the soldier-bomber takes his own life. How could this happen, wondered the commander, how could someone who was an ordinary, regular soldier, summoned to pay his debt to his country, turn into a machine primed to destroy others because he cannot muster the strength to destroy himself? Amid applause from the soldiers he leaned over and brought his ear to the soldier’s blood-smeared lips. “Sorry,” moaned the soldier, barely audible, “sorry.” The commander smoothed the soldier’s hair, felt his eyes fill with tears, and knew this was the very last moment he could straighten up, display a disapproving scowl as criticism of a suicidal practice that turns the helplessness of an individual or organization into a massacre of innocent civilians, among whom, this being the greatest paradox of all, there were sure to be those who believed in the same things as did the crazed suicide bomber. The commander straightened up and the applause grew to frenzied chants; the commander began to cry, but fine, now they all perceived his sobs as tears of joy, which, thought the commander, was preposterous. Sobs are sobs, there is no great variation here, especially if his was a case of depression. The commander believed that over the last few years he’d been suffering from serious depression, and the fact that many of the symptoms were identical to symptoms for Parkinson’s made him all the more depressed. But now was not the time for tales of medical woes, a war was on and health was hardly their primary concern, though it’s silly to ignore the fact that such a time did have merit as far as reducing the physical mass of population, which over the last decades had been trending toward continual growth. The lofty language of politics and statistics was bone-chilling, the soldiers were right to rebel. Command language should be simple, accessible, so that everyone can understand it equally, yet always still a little mysterious. A language with no mystery is not much of a language. Language conquers by speaking to our longing to be conquered, which the language they heard over our radio station had no hand in, or better said, mouth in, for one’s language relies on the mouth, and some nose, a little throat. And belly, too, one must admit, especially in the case of Japanese, though that may simply be how it sounds for those of us who speak no Japanese. Watch any film by Akira Kurosawa, and you’ll see all the actors pulling their words up from somewhere deep inside, especially if they need to voice dark thoughts; they sound as if they already know they’ll have no energy for much else afterwards. Most often they don’t, like Beckett’s creations, instead they merely dream of a place where they’ll be tranquil and nibble at parsnips while perching on a barrel or a rubbish bin or a little mound where grows (or, perhaps, dies) a scraggly tree. The commander glanced at his watch and thought Mladen and his escort must be so far away by now that the forest around them was arranging its shadows. He wondered whether they’d be able to find anything or whether this war would be remembered as a comedy of errors, for how could their position be described differently: they knew nothing of their location, they hadn’t been assigned a main task, and it all seemed to be designed to pick them off, one by one: none of their communications systems worked, the food supplies were dwindling, and then autumn would come, sooner or later, and winter. But he didn’t dare consider that horror, there were plenty of other horrors demanding his attention as insistently as household pets. The commander, one might readily say, was a war veteran. He’d fought with several armies under several flags, and had even been in the United Nations Blue Helmets. He could no longer remember whether that was in Lebanon or Gaza, or was it Cyprus? But it had been interesting, he’d earned a lot and stowed his earnings in a savings account, purchased beautiful Persian carpets, tried hashish, and picked up one disease after another in whorehouses where they, apparently, were not overly concerned about regulation hygiene. The commander even now was fond of recalling those big doe-shaped eyes of the thirteen-year-old girls who gazed at him, and sometimes—only once, said the commander—boys who were younger still, but his reverie was interrupted by soldiers howling at his door. “What’s this?” roared the commander when he pulled open the door. “What’s the racket? Fuck every one of your mothers! Doesn’t this say as clear as the nose on your face that I’m sleeping, or have you all forgotten how to read?” He pointed to a piece of paper taped to his door, which said: “Sleeping! Do not disturb!” But the soldiers were far too excited so they ignored him, grabbed him by the arm, and dragged him out. And there, by the checkpoint, the commander was finally able to understand what they were shouting. “People,” they barked, “people are coming!” And sure enough, coming up the slope toward the checkpoint were people in a single-file column, long and straggling, so its end, its tail, was still deep in the woods. The commander clutched his head and wracked his brain to recall where he’d left the instructions for the handling of refugees and procedures for asylum petitions. The only thing he could remember was that somewhere toward the beginning it said the host country was obliged to secure unhindered communication for asylum-seekers, which meant, in other words, that they’d need to find an interpreter. But, for which language? worried the commander, and then quickly splashed his face with lotion, combed his hair, donned his black-rimmed glasses, and then settled his cap in such a way that the visor partially shaded his eyes. This was because, like many other men, the commander fancied himself the master of a fatal gaze others could not resist, especially if the gaze came after a long pause, with the slow removal of his glasses. The people in line, meanwhile, trudged up the steep road, and we could soon see that though men were walking out in front, most of those following them were women, children, and the elderly. Nevertheless, the soldiers took up positions around the barrier and trained their weapons on the crowd. You never know when some crazy suicide bomber might burst out with explosives strapped on and pockets full of hand grenades, and it might be a man or a woman, or even a child, or an elderly woman, the appearance of sheer innocence. If this happens the soldier mustn’t hesitate, best to shoot first and later ask questions about the supposedly different intentions of the person you suspect. For instance, it’s summer yet someone’s walking toward you wearing a buttoned-up raincoat or there are bulges on his clothes as he walks toward a car where political leaders are seated—in such situations there’s no waiting, shoot first, ask questions later. If this turns out to be a