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DannyH
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Frogmarched into the shattered hovel, we were assembled as witnesses. Uncomplaining as we were there was plenty of paranoia evident in the guards behaviour. Safety catches off, fingers curled around triggers, one atrocity just waiting to be piled on top of another. We held our breath and tried to look compliant.
The dead looked pretty much like all the other dead we had seen over the last few months. There was no special horror in the scene we had been brought to record. It looked like a hand grenade had ripped through the room. Many of the body parts were jumbled together and unrecognisable. You just count the heads. I counted five, three of them pulped and matted with blood but two still intact and clearly visible, face up, side by side.
I began to understand. These two, a man and a woman could not possibly have died from the same explosion which had torn the other three bodies to pieces. Some attempt had been made at smearing their faces with blood and obscuring their corpses with parts of the others but anyone accustomed to such sights would know that they were not lying where they fell.
“How many dead can you see?”
“Five.” We all nodded.
“Good. You will all testify that five people were found to have died in this room.”
I had kept my mouth shut on countless occasions before. I was a sensible man, with commitments to others which prevented me from playing the hero. The line of least resistance had, until this day, been my guide and officer. I don’t know what made me speak out that day. All men have a limit of tolerance and perhaps mine had finally been filled to the brim. Perhaps it was just curiosity, a desire to see what would happen. Partly, I think, I was impressed by my own cleverness in working out what was going on and wanted to show it off. For whatever reason, I said what I said and a whole insane world fell down around and on top of me. It seems ridiculous now, when it was really such a pedantic little point.
“I see five people dead in a room, not a room where five people died.”
A rifle was swung towards me, instinctively, more a defensive gesture from the jumpy young soldier than a genuine threat on my life. The Captain waved the barrel down calmly and stepped towards me as the rest of the witnesses pulled back a step.
“Tell me exactly what you mean.” Said the Captain evenly.
“Well.” I started confidently, aware that to show weakness and back down at this stage would only make the retribution worse. “If you look at the corpses of the man and the woman over there, they could not have been killed with a grenade. Their bodies are too perfect. This man over here has had one of his legs blown over there and the other over here but these two have their parts pretty much all together. Also, the blood on their faces has not dried brown like the others, there is still some shine to it. All this makes me think…”
“Are you a forensic examiner?” The Captain barked.
“No, sir. I am, or was an undertaker.”
“Have you had any training in ascertaining causes of death, any knowledge of pathology?”
“No.”
“Then what makes you think you can tell what happened here?”
“I know the dead, Captain, and I am here as a witness. I can only tell you honestly what I see.”
“You are clearly a talented man but in this case quite mistaken. We may have other work for you, however, would you be so kind as to go with us?”
I agreed, not having any other options which would keep me alive.
As I was marched away by the captain and one of the guards I heard him whisper to one of his men to dismiss the witness party and find him another without any smartarses in it.
“And be nice to them. They’re going to be talking to the UN for fuck’s sake.”
I suspected that I would not be talking to the UN. I suspected that I was going to be quietly shot. It did not seem real to me so I was not panicking. I did feel, in a strangely dispassionate way, that it was a rather stupid and basic oversight on my part that had got me into such mortal peril. It was not a difficult set of rules to live by in order to survive: Keep your mouth shut. Do as your told. Don’t make trouble. It was surprising to me how easy it was to stumble across that line. Perhaps the point is that living as I was, your life becomes so worthless you end up just throwing it away. As with so many things, it all comes to the same thing in the end.
They put me in a room. I think it was a room they used as a canteen or mess room. There were no locks on the doors and it was big enough to seat ten or twelve people. Escape from the room would be quite a simple matter if left alone. Of course you would be shot if you tried to leave the compound but the room itself was not intimidating. Even the two guards they had stationed to keep me in my seat caused me little anxiety. To have armed men in a room with you was commonplace since the incursion and these two looked like they were more interested in telling dirty jokes and smoking cigarettes than they were in doing me any harm.
So the room and the guards did not frighten me. It was the long absence of the Captain that excited my concern. He had been gone long enough, had he been that way inclined, to rape and kill my wife and daughter and exile my two sons to the work gangs over the border, certainly long enough to collect evidence to show me that this was a credible threat and that he had it in his power to protect me from such evils, provided I helped him with one or two things.
Had his absence been less prolonged I would simply have been able to provoke him into killing me and that would almost certainly have been an end to the matter. As it was, I feared in some way that I had become important to him and that could only mean trouble for anyone around me.
This attitude might seem rather cold to you. Perhaps I appear to be striking up the attitude of a martyr or hero. My intention is far from this and any impression you have of me as a hero in this matter you must quickly strike from your minds. I was simply resigned. It may be hard for you to imagine a situation where it is more cowardly to accept a quick easy death than to go on living under the heel of an occupying force but believe me such conditions can be achieved. Anyone with the will and the resources to do it, provided they are willing to sustain their abuse over a long enough period can erase the idea of a future.
It is the natural course of a life to watch things grow. To build and improve, to move forward and see the people around you get older. Hope for the future gives you a reason to believe that endurance will bring progress. In this place, however, I was living my life in reverse. I saw everything decay, become more primitive. I saw evolution and growth in reverse. The soldiers of our side got younger, not older. My eldest child was a year or two younger with each murder, until twenty five years of fatherhood had left me no child older than fourteen. A life lived backwards is easy to leave. You simply go out the way you came in.
No. Don’t give me your sympathy. I don’t want it. This story is not about the fight to save my life. My life has no weight in this story except where it enables the action. Keep your concern for those I wished to protect, for my wife and children. It was my pride and foolishness, my one moment’s loss of concentration that had put them in peril. I am the villain of this story and the only question of importance is whether this villain could come good and give his worthless life to undo the wrong he had done.
I want to tell this story right. I want you to feel and understand some of what I felt and understood of the events that happened to me. In this I have one major difficulty. You already know that I survived. Clearly, a dead man cannot tell you the tale of his own demise. Some of the bite is, therefore, taken out of my narrative. My survival would seem to render it rather a toothless tale. I can only hope to maintain your feelings of suspense by keeping from you, until its proper place, the truth of the fate of my wife and children. At this stage, their fate is still uncertain to you. My survival, as you already know, is likely to have endangered theirs. This will have to do for replicating some of the uncertainty and fear I felt that day as I sat in the mess room, counting the minutes of the Captain’s absence in terms of how long each imagined act of violence would take to perform. Still, as yet these endangered souls are nameless and faceless. The only sympathy they engender in your imagination is that which you associate from my feelings for them. Please indulge me if I turn the screw a little and do more than relate to you the fact that I loved them. Let me tell you a little of why.
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