behind the soldiers, fused to their heels. When the soldiers returned, the shadows were still swinging from their heels, but with none of the earlier joy. In a word, the shadows on that brief journey downhill and uphill aged quickly, perhaps a little too quickly. Anyone would have aged who’d seen what the shadows saw; it’s enough to say they became darker, more somber, more hermetically sealed. Who knows what they might have said if only they’d had skill with words. As it was, wordless, they were as mute as the soldiers were who, when the “punitive expedition” was over, returned to the checkpoint. The soldiers had completed the task as they were ordered to, meaning that when they entered the “refugee camp,” first they shot at whoever they thought might be the suspicious element, but the deeper in they went, the more suspicious elements there seemed to be, because—as one of the soldiers put it—“not a single person, no child, no one smiled at us with either lips or eyes; their eyes flashed only scorn, a horrible feeling for us because we were there, after all, to protect them, we were promoting their well-being.” Was this why the military weaponry was silent only when they were reloading? Or was it tricky for them to choose between several equally attractive and potentially menacing targets, such as, say, a young woman slipping her hand into her bodice to offer a breast to the baby in her lap when she might, after all, have been reaching for a hand grenade, or a young man opening a cardboard box with toiletries while searching for hand lotion, who might have been about to do the same. At such moments they had to react in a fraction of a second and, regrettably, errors were possible. The commander wrote almost these very words in his letter addressed to the organizational committee of refugees, refusing to speak with the lady translator who was howling hysterically, cursing, threatening and repeating, parrot-like: “To kill so many innocent people for just one murdered soldier! Scandalous!” To this the commander said: “Well, maybe so, but still our suffering and pain matter every bit as much as yours. You cannot insist that we respect your tears while you don’t blink at ours. And besides, we aren’t the reason you left your hearth and home, is that much, at least, clear?” Not even the commander had an answer for that, not only because he didn’t know where they’d come from, but because his every mode of communicating with headquarters and his senior officers was down. The war might be over, but then again it might be ratcheting up, which could easily lead to new alliances, with yesterday’s foes becoming, overnight, today’s friends. In other words, maybe we shouldn’t have been doing what we were doing, maybe the barrier should have been dismantled and passage opened to everyone; or was it just as likely that the barrier would be overgrown with ivy and other vines and never raised again? A wiseguy would say that the real barriers are the ones within us, and that the external ones, like the checkpoint, are, in fact, futile.