Grandfather experienced the war.
I’d always known that. Mother repeated it constantly, sometimes as reason (“Leave grandpa alone. He lived through the war.””); at other times, explanation: “You wouldn’t understand. Grandpa survived the war.”).
But grandfather himself never talked about it.
On the few occasions I asked him questions, he merely turned to look at me, the eerie glow from the television deepening the creases on his aged face, and stared, his eyes filling with fear, pain…
His face, a mask of pale leather.
About other topics he would sometimes speak despite his poor English.
I loved him, but always as if from a distance that I knew could never be bridged. His was a separated life.
In his sixties, grandfather began to have heart trouble—
clutching, pounding his chest one day as mother called 911 and the paramedics came to take him to the hospital.
“He needs surgery or he’ll die,” a doctor told her.
Open-heart.
I clutched her hand in mine.
In a small room, grandfather and mother argued in a language I didn’t understand, the old language. She cried. He paused, out-of-breath but eyes afire:
“No.”
She reasoned with him.
It was no use.
“He wants to die,” she said to me, sobbing. “Why does he want to die?”
I clutched her hand.
Somehow, probably because of the language barrier, she convinced the doctors to perform the procedure. Papers were signed.
They wheeled grandfather into the operating room.
Laid him face-up on the table.
Anaesthetised him.
As the surgeon held the scalpel above grandfather’s limp body—
Distension—
of grandfather’s chest: papery, hairy skin stretching upwards as if prodded from within, by a finger, by a stick…
(“Dear God,” a nurse exclaimed.)
…by a fist!
The flesh ripped open—punched through—
The surgeon, bending, peering—
grabbed by the protruding hand (!) and pulled inside the wound!
Gunfire. Quiet.
Surgical team frozen in terror with their backs against the wall, as the first soldier emerged from grandfather’s chest. Black boots. Fatigues. Wet and bloody as a newborn, holding an assault rifle.
Three shots.
Three slumping bodies leaving smears on the walls.
In total, twelve soldiers emerged. They spoke the old language. The police, summoned frantically to the hospital, could not contain them. By the time the soldiers exited the hospital, twenty-four officers and a dozen hospital staff lay dead.
Outside, the soldiers basked in the sunlight. For long they had been contained.
Passers-by stared as the soldiers laughed, tearing away their leathery faces and leaving them in a pile at the hospital doors. The world was different, but the differences were superficial. I watched with mother as the faceless soldiers scattered, each going his separate way, their intermittent gunfire—punctuated by piercing screams—receded, and receded…
Yet still I hear.
Still they inflict their irrepressible damage upon us.
Acts of timeless violence.
Mother’s dead. I shall never forget when in frail voice she dying said: “Grandpa’s gone, but the war lives.” She clutched my hand. “You will understand. You will all understand.”