War
It is an ordinary afternoon. A bunch of workers in neon vests and corona masks are hammering pieces of timber into the neighbour’s deck. Their tools make teeth-clenching noises. I imagine they have fat wives and chubby kids to come home to. One took his helmet off and called smoko. They are off to a shop down the street to grab a pie from the warmer. I bet they are gonna smoke too. Sitting on haunches, munching pies, stubbies and ciggies between steel-capped boots. They would not know me. It has been too long. Since the last time I wore steel-capped boots to work.
I am trying to focus on the task in front of me. The one that asks me to select a single word with resonance to yourself then free write around the word to loosen up and start finding your associations. It was due last week. Late again.
But I have Bukowski on repeat. His drunken, husky voice spewing the usual shite into my silence. I bet he would laugh his balls off if he knew. A middle-aged woman lusting after his poetry more than twenty years after he rode into the sunset.
The word, think of the bloody word, won’t you! The voice inside my head shouts.
Yeah, ok, I can hear you. Got it.
What is it?
War. It is the word war.
Fine, just get on with it.
War. Can I loosen it up and find my association? Sure. The first one I climbed in via movies and my grandparents’ stories. Germans, and their collaborators, (who, we were taught in school, are properly called quislings), were the bad guys. Tito and his partisans were the good ones. The bad guys became corpses in mass graves, émigrés in the west or prisoners on an island named Goli (bare) for its bareness. The good guys ruled. It was simple.
The second one I hunched over in anti-air strike shelters and under sniper fire. It became complicated. Tito and the good guys were all dead. The bad guys declared they are good and always have been. The lines blurred then smudged. With thick, dark blood, the bad-now-good guys were spilling to save us all. From ourselves. Foreigners were called. They arrived inside blue uniforms, news, TV, and movie-making vans. More than eight thousand civilians got slaughtered under their watch. On the set of a movie they later filmed, a pinstripe-suited Englishman commented to his crew-member girlfriend; … and now they are all dead, happy ending, history of Balkans … By the way - have you noticed that they are not actually acting? They live their movie.
The current one I walk in late at night through corridors of forbidden news portals. A seven-ton drone had fallen inside a student city I once knew. Unobserved. No casualties. No reports. Rivers of Ukrainians flooding the borders. Welcomed by Czechs, Romanians, Hungarians, Italians, Germans, Poles. Ushered into homes, schools, kindergartens. Offered jobs. Iraqis, Syrians, Afghanis, Pakistanis watch behind the barbed-wire fences of their camps. Barefooted and hungry. Tchaikovsky and Dostoyevsky have been banned. Para-Olympians and competing cats too. Students thrown out of universities in Prague, Paris, and Brussels.
A willowy-figured woman with long, flowing hair, clad in fashionably redesigned bohemian chic takes to the stage in front of one of the more progressive universities. Her voice is shaking while she introduces herself and her righteous outrage. Against fellow Europeans. In this day and age!
Pronouncing the name of the key villain – Putin brings her to the verge of tears. Crowd cheers. Someone hands her tissues. She wipes her face, crosses her hands over her heart and blows kisses to the audience, before walking away. An older gentleman in a corduroy jacket leather patched at the elbows takes her place. He taps his pockets in search of glasses.
Putin is a villain. As are those that pushed the barefooted behind the barbed wire fences. Into the leaky boats. Hands of people-traffickers.
Russian people are not. Nor are others living in countries ruled by villains. Get a grip. Google it. It will even translate it for you.
What the hell are you writing? Have you gone completely mad? Don’t you see how it will look? Do you really want to get in trouble again? The dust had hardly settled after your last escapade – objecting to content warnings and alike as nothing but virtue signalling. They will need bloody health and safety protection gear to read this! Not that anyone would. It was the voice.
Oh, shut the fuck up! Fine – here is something I wrote earlier. A tidy piece about the successful life a former refugee was able to build in his new homeland thanks to the country’s liberal democracy, market economy, and friendly inhabitants. Happy now? It was even edited by a native English speaker. All my grammar and spelling mistakes weeded out. There are even some lyricisms. Take your pick. I am off – climbing into my movie.
