Luke McCallin - The Man from Berlin

He knew now he had never lacked for choices; it was decisions that were missing. So often, he had been passive in the face of what needed to be done. Running that confrontation in the forest over and over in his mind, pinned to the certainty in Goran’s eyes, he was afraid he still was. That he had only really decided when faced with the inevitable. It felt right, what he had decided, what he felt, but he could not help but ask himself – his old self-doubt surfacing – how genuine a feeling, a decision, was it?

He tried to imagine Alexandria, a place away from this war, of safety, and could not. All he could think about was Meissner, and Freilinger, and the others like them who fought a war of shadows. He thought of his functions in Sarajevo, the war of cogs and wheels and information and what a man might do within that system that could not be done from outside it.

His watch had stopped, and he wound it up slowly, thinking. It had come to him on his last day as a fighting man in the first war. Was it just chance, then, fortuitous circumstance, that it should come to him again on the last day of this war that he would choose not to keep on the way he had been going? The second hand slid into motion as he wound it, flicking around its little dial as if it, like him, sought a new north. One day, this war would be over, and there would be a reckoning. Every man would have to stand face to face with judgment of some kind, and often the hardest judgment came from the face you saw reflected back at you every day. A face you saw reflected everywhere, in mirrors and windows, in metal and water, sharp-edged or sunken, chopped or blurred. The splintered facets of yourself that stared back at you from a thousand pairs of eyes. A face you saw reflected within you.

The light slid from the sky, stars scattering themselves in its wake. There were no mirrors here, only the weight of mountain and sky and the image one held of oneself within. Somewhere behind him in the trees, a man began to sing. Others joined him in a refrain, soft clapping keeping time. The air smelled of wood smoke, and he breathed it in without flinching, without the image of those two boys grating at him. He paused, reflected on that, and then, face to face with the mountains, he made his decision. He smoothed down the stitching, stood and shrugged back into his jacket, medals and metal clinking dully, and limped back up into the trees.