Checkpoint

ur eyes, the rain was still tapping rhythmically on the roof, as if Ginger Baker were a distant cousin. We got up, staggered around among the cots, rubbed our eyes, and conspired to crawl back under the covers. The commander refused to allow it and forced us to do pointless tasks such as picking up bits of litter around the checkpoint barrier. The soldiers who did this came back as drenched as mice. Like the rest of us they had no dry uniforms to change into, and when they stripped off their sopping shirts, jackets, and trousers, they sat there among us half-dressed in their olive-drab skivvies. When he saw this, the commander had an attack of spleen: “What now? Is this a public bath? A soldier in his briefs is not a soldier!” He howled at the top of his lungs, flailed his arms, and portrayed himself, all in all, in an extremely unfavorable light. “But what else could I do?” asked the commander. “Young soldiers are like pups,” he went on, “so you must constantly impress upon them who’s in charge. Well, will you look at that: our commander is true blue!” He liked this wording and over and over he said: “A true blue commander.” In the evening while we were all at work scraping the mud off our boots, he gazed up at the ceiling and whispered: “A true blue commander,” and his face went almost translucent with the soft shine of an inner goodness. But according to the quixotic laws governing the world, good works have less currency than bad, and so it was that the commander’s words were drowned out by a sudden hammering on the roof: hail the size of marbles. The thought of marbles stirred a torrent of memories; the wave of nostalgia threatened to paralyze any activity by the soldiers. Had the weather been more agreeable they’d have all been lying on their backs in the meadow and waxing melancholic about the clouds, the shapes and way they were dispersing, how long they last and whether they can be trusted, both for forecasting meteorological events and future events in the lives of human beings. In other words, will the appearance of a pear-shaped cloud affect our life differently from that of a bird-shaped one? And so forth, as one of the soldiers said, with the obligatory stalk of straw in the teeth. The commander, seeing and hearing all this, was devastated. Had he known, he said, what the soldiers in his unit would be like, he’d never have responded to the summons from headquarters. He’d have stayed happily at home and relaxed, calm and serene, in his tracksuit and slippers. Then he wouldn’t be listening to this folderol about clouds, or straws. Had someone predicted he’d be commanding a pack of nostalgia-ridden soldiers, he’d have sued this person for defamation, and if he’d done that, where’d he be now? By rights he’d be apologizing to the person and returning the money the person had been mandated to pay him after being so instructed by the court, to compensate for his mental anguish, compounded with interest. “The world sucks,” said the commander and kicked a small rock. The rock bounced, knocked the door frame, and rolled out into the damp grass. The rain was still pelting outside, even harder, perhaps, than before, and everything was sinking slowly into mud. Then a soldier whose stomach troubles forced him to venture to the latrine despite the dreadful weather, informed the commander that the latrine was no longer standing; the water and mud had swamped it and swept it down the slope, and the graveyard, too, was beginning to slide, which was easy to see with the lean of the wooden crosses and tilting mounds. Then from deep inside the sleeping quarters rang out a shot and everyone dropped to the floor. “Someone’s killed themselves,” said a soldier, and—though the bullet had carried away almost half his face—we easily recognized that someone as Dragan Chicken Little, the youngest of our number. He hadn’t had the nickname Chicken Little before he joined the army and arrived at the checkpoint. It was maybe our second night there (or third?), when he’d crowed like a rooster in his sleep so loudly that he woke half the company. The next morning, of course, he remembered none of this, but he stubbornly protested that he’d never dreamt of hens: “Chicks, oh yes,” he insisted, “but hens—never!” So that’s how he became Dragan Chicken Little and often, when somebody addressed him, he’d answer with a cockcrow, which, without fail, sent us into gales of laughter. Now his body lay there at the end of the room and blood and chunks of his brain and skull were sprayed across several cots. And the near wall. When they saw this, many soldiers ran outside and vomited for a long time into the mud. The commander was the first to collect his wits; he made his way over to where Chicken Little’s body lay, then stopped, in disbelief, knelt beside him, leaned over, and whispered: “Why, Chicken Little, why?” Blood trickled onto the commander’s right knee and when he rose to his feet we could all see the dark-red stain on his pants. “How are we going to bury him in this weather, with all this mud?” wondered one of the soldiers, and only then did we notice the rain had stopped. The rain stopped, but then something else could be heard, a shrill cry, either animal or human. As always in such situations, there were differences of opinion: some believed it was human but they couldn’t agree on what steps to take. Some called for a rescue team to be sent out while others urged caution and even spoke of a trap. The ones who believed an animal was making the sound showed no great compulsion to go outside, yet there were some among them who said there’s no serious difference between animal and human suffering, and if they’d go outside for a person, they should do it for an animal. Just as a brawl was starting to erupt with shouts of “C’mon! C’mon!” someone out-shouted the ruckus with the question: “And what if the dead are rising from their graves?” In the sudden hush that followed, no one dared even lift their head to look others in the eye. The shrill cry continued, but now there were brief still spells, respites perhaps, as the wounded animal or mutilated woman gasped for breath and stared into the dark, and every rustle signaled the nearing end, the touch of a cold knife or a bullet’s hot steel. That was certainly better than lying there not alive or dead, in the dark, on the wet grass and oozing mud. And who knows what would have happened next had the petrifying cry not fallen silent, followed only by the rustling of leaves in the dark, which always lulls one to sleep, perhaps not as readily as the touch of a beloved hand, but very well indeed, never better, and this may be what the commander was thinking as the soldiers, fully clothed, slumped onto cots and drifted off to sleep. In the end the commander was standing there alone, surrounded by a company of sleepers, and only then did he remember that there was no one manning the sentry post. He tried to jostle one of the corporals awake but the man turned over onto his other side and went right on sleeping. Another corporal, asleep on the next cot over, didn’t move at all. The commander rose to his feet, pulled on his boots, grabbed the first gun he could lay his hands on, and sat down outside by the barrier. Aside from the moon in the sky, nothing was moving as far as he could see. Something rustled at his back, then to his left, then to his right. Had he been in Australia, the commander might have imagined a kangaroo seeking its way in the dark, but here at the checkpoint barrier this could only be a grasshopper. Or a jumping mouse, thought the commander, if there are jumping mice around here. All manner of things are in these parts, but there’s no one at hand to inform us about them; the number of people who have the gift of the gab, let alone storytelling, has shrunk to next to nothing, and this is not only because of the war. The commander, who’d never been compelled by linguistic subjects and dilemmas, dozed off, but then he felt a touch on his back and, lightning fast, clutching his gun, he turned and peered behind him. No one. The last wisps of scattering clouds were drifting off, and, in no time, under the light of the vast moon, the night was nearly as bright as at daybreak. Soon the commander could see the soldier was right: the latrine sheds lay in pieces on the ground. The graves, however, were not in such bad shape, though some of the signs and one of the crosses were indeed listing. The commander saw all this from a safe distance, from the paved road, because on all other surfaces the mud prevented any sort of movement. Then to the east, the sky began to redden and erase the gray nuances of the remaining, thinned darkness. The commander waited a moment longer, just enough for the top of the sun’s orb to appear out of the nest of dawn, and off he strode to the sleeping quarters, banged the iron bars on the soldiers’ cots and woke them up with barking shouts. The soldiers, rolled in blankets like huge worms, opened their eyes reluctantly, some even swore while others flung bits of papers with comments written on them, but soon the commander’s voice soothed them, and in the end the only noise was the gasps of those who still hadn’t finished getting dressed and fumbled at buttoning up their tight trousers or tugging at the elastic band around their neck as they adjusted their tie. The commander ordered them to line up in the narrow passage between the cots, because once they stepped outside the mud wouldn’t allow them back in. Then he clambered up onto a cot, coughed, and said: “Soldiers, I’ll be brief. The moment nears when our stay here will be threatened by a lack of food, and we aren’t much better off with water supplies. All our means of communication have been dead for some time now. We don’t know whether the war is still on, or whether one war might have ended and another begun, just as we don’t know the main thing—who our enemy is—and this places us in a remarkably awkward situation. Because of all this, I’ve decided that as of tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, depending on how long it takes for the mud to dry and form a crust, we pack our things and make our way slowly back. Is that clear?” barked the commander, and from all the soldiers’ throats rang, “Yessir!” “And now,” said the commander in a gentler tone, “let’s each of us see to our tasks.” He climbed clumsily down from the cot and probably would have fallen if the soldiers hadn’t propped him up. He jerked away from them, however, almost angrily, as if his graceless leap was all their doing; he was the first to venture out. The soldiers surged after him though none of them were sure what their tasks were, and they weren’t asking anyone to figure out what they should be doing, but they had nothing to worry about: we are usually assigned tasks by others anyway. While the soldiers were streaming out, crowding around the barrier and stretching in the warm rays of the sun, one of them glanced over at the forest, not the trees nearest to them but the woods on the other side, near where they’d found the tattered scrap of fatigues, and having spotted a flash of something, he saw a sniper in the bushes who was taking aim at them. “Sniper!” shouted the soldier and threw himself to the ground, while at that same moment the soldier standing next to him suddenly sputtered as blood spewed from his gullet in a great gush. Chaos. The soldiers dashed back in and out they flew with weapons, dropping to the ground, into the mud, and firing off their guns in all directions. The commander ran around among them in great agitation, and railed: “Where is he, that little mummyfucker, where’s he hiding?” The sniper wasted not a minute, and, instead, calmly, as if at a firing range, he picked off moving targets. Two more soldiers fell before somebody—no one would ever find out who—hit him. The sniper was, apparently, wired to an explosive device because his stagger and fall set off a thunderous, multiple blast. The earth, leaves, branches, and, probably, bits of the sniper flew through the air. The surrounding underbrush burned where he’d been hiding—well, actually, smoldered. The soldiers rejoiced, they jumped, yelled, and pranced around in a circle like Indians around war drums, but then they heard a rumbling, so they stopped and, bewildered, peered into the facing forest. “Impossible,” said the commander, but the corporal who was standing next to him said: “Oh, of course it’s possible.” Afterwards, once a tank had come crashing through the bushes, no one said another word. In silence they watched the gun barrel shifting on the tank with a slight wobble until it fixed on them. And, as if under a spell, they stood and gawked, and one could almost hear the soundtrack from that science fiction series and the phrase: “Resistance is futile.” “Not so,” whispered the commander, who dropped his weapons, grabbed a helmet, and off he raced into the woods. Meanwhile, without moving its gun barrel, the tank rolled slowly toward the checkpoint. This was one of those light tanks, maybe a British Scorpion, but to the paralyzed soldiers it seemed like the largest armored vehicle they’d ever seen. Then two things happened: first the soldiers caught sight of the commander decked out in green camouflage with twigs on his helmet, slithering through the tall grass, bushes, and mud, making straight for the tank. The soldiers began shouting words of encouragement, which, of course, was all wrong, because the tank crew peered out through various apertures and, apparently, saw the commander; they tried shifting direction but floundered even deeper into the mud. The front part of the tank sank almost to its full height, the gun barrel dangerously close to the ground, and no matter how the caterpillar treads whirred, the tank couldn’t right itself. Nothing could stop the soldiers now, and with boisterous cries they charged the tank. Hearing their shouts, the commander scrambled up, sprinted over to the tank, and then cautiously approached the hatch. The bullet that struck him did not, however, come from there but from the forest where, earlier, the sniper had hidden. The commander reeled but succeeded in twisting so he fell not to the ground but slid by the cupola and remained leaning on the tank. The soldiers who were about to charge abruptly changed the direction they were running in and dropped to the ground. One of them did run up to the tank, shove the barrel of his automatic weapon into an opening, and fire into it in several directions. He withdrew the gun, huffed into it like a cowboy into his pistol, and waited. Nothing moved, no voice was heard, only the commander’s moans reached us like the buzz of a pesky bug. Meanwhile the soldiers who’d flung themselves to the ground squirmed toward the bushes, approaching from all sides and then, simultaneously, like a well-oiled mechanism, strafed them up and down. When they stopped shooting, they crawled slowly, one by one, into the bushes and we held our breath, fearing surprise. Every shrub might be a deadly trap, we learned this in our military training, so we clutched one another’s hands, bit our lips, and shut our eyes. It turned out this wasn’t necessary because the soldiers soon returned with the bodies of the enemy who’d been killed. From the tank we pulled another four, so there were six enemy bodies laid out on the ground by the barrier. The commander, who’d only been grazed by the bullet, rifled through their pockets, bags, and gas masks, but nowhere did he find any indication of their identity, place of residence, marital status, or blood group. One of the corporals said to him that though this might be sheer coincidence, two of the enemy soldiers, the two in the middle, were the spitting image of a neighbor of his and the man’s son: the same chestnut hair, the same scraggly whiskers, the same arched brows. “I cannot believe they could be anybody else,” said the soldier, “but if they are, why are they in cahoots with the enemy? Maybe,” he continued, “they’re actually on our side and thought we were the enemy when they attacked us?” “No,” said the commander, scowling with pain. “Our army has no British tanks.” “Then,” said the soldier, “apparently they joined forces with the enemy.” “They didn’t join forces,” said the commander, “they