He threw the instrument down on the cement floor. All the music had been wrung out of it, the guitar’s neck and body split and splintered. The broken strings curled like the fingers of a corpse.
A bomb had shattered this building. The wind came fiercely through the great holes and made strange sounds from a different world.
How could they live like this? What was this — a schoolhouse? Apartments? In one blank corner was a stack of filthy cooking pots and plastic bottles. Rags and bits of plastic littered the floors. He looked out the glassless windows toward the lawn, a sheet of snow that concealed every part of a cement fountain but the tip, all of it enclosed by white iron fencing that wept rust. In war people seem to lose their sense. Suddenly everything comes before comfort, and in time they live like animals in caves, sleepless with the knowledge that they will have to flee again.
One jagged finger of glass remained in the window like the front post of a rifle sight. It was so cold and sharp that if he pressed his finger against it, the man thought it would cut his finger right in half and he would never feel it. Or perhaps the glass would melt away at his touch to become steam and vanish in a cloud of his breath.
When he pressed his finger against the glass, it yielded where the bottom edge was held by two brittle rubber strips. The shard tumbled like a diver and landed silent in the snow.
The man stared out at the burning white horizon and he wished he could tear it away like a piece of tape and reveal something else beneath. He wanted to see the clean line where the war hadn’t touched.
Bomb-pocked fields, mutilated towns, the people uprooted and scared — everything was different now. The man wandered back to the spot where a wall had once been and looked up through to the second story. That part of the building, too, had been touched by the war. There was no hidden perfection waiting to be uncovered. It was all ruined down to the bones.
Two soldiers following an officer down the road caught sight of the man. The building was peeled away around him, as if the destruction had spread up and out of him; thin pillars of the walls held the second floor above him daintily.
The officer left the two other soldiers behind and he marched toward the man in the building. His fury seemed to grow with each step. “What are you doing here?” he shouted. His face was red from the cold and white breath spilled from of his thick beard.
The man held his hands up. “Looking.”
“I thought you were the enemy. You could have been shot,” the officer said, jabbing with the snout of his gun. “Where is your helmet? Where is your rifle?”
“I lost them,” the man said. The truth was that he had left them somewhere in the snow. They were not important.
“Why are you not with the rest of your company?” the officer said. He had sharp teeth like a dog and almost looked willing to bite. “Why are you not following your orders?”
“I do not want to.”
The officer grabbed the man by the arm and began to lead him off. “That’s your job, idiot! You have to do your job!”
The man — the soldier — joined the others waiting by the road. The officer marched them miles through the deep snow until the yawning building was nearly out of sight in the hills. By night, when the snow became the sky and all became the cold and the soldiers were trembling in their boots, a low, dim town appeared up the road. The officer dismissed the three soldiers with orders and went off toward a house with a glowing fireplace.
The soldier without a gun did not go into town with the others.
He had his thick wool coat and there was still some feeling in his toes; he thought that he could push into the cold, heavy night and it would crush him. He walked into the trees where the shadows jutted sharply away from the fire-glow house. He cut straight through the night and felt nothing. His name melted away and his job evaporated like glass; he became a man again. He would walk until he could see the hard, bright line of sunrise. He hoped to see it curl at the ends so he could peel it away to strip the ash and the craters from the land and all the people would come pouring out. They would return to play their music and live beneath the walls of the building that balanced on slender arms and it would never topple as long as he watched it, and it would never topple for as long as the world spun.
