Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

This warehouse was where the NGOs for the northern half of the country stored secondhand clothing donated from America. The tightly wrapped plastic glistened in the dark, catching the dim light from the opened bay as Araz walked down the rows. The best pallets had many T-shirts of bright colors or thick clothes good for the winter or anything that had a prominent logo, and the three had been instructed to try to discern the contents of the pallets and pick one that looked to have the most of these. Though Araz knew the pallets were basically all the same anyway; he had watched the children employed by his father in the market hawking the T-shirts with large seals of American sports teams, the endless Christian youth group fund-raising slogans, the button-up shirts with armpits yellowed by years of sweat. The warehouse was endlessly refilled, and the watchman insisted that the NGO in charge of distribution didn’t even keep records of what it received.

This night, the trip had been quiet so far. Twice before, on previous runs, they’d been stopped by local security of the towns they guided the truck through (Bajh had been instructed to stay off the main roads on the way back), but each time they’d gotten by with only the loss of a few shirts and a blazer. They’d only had to go through an American checkpoint once, very late at night, with Araz whispering translations of the soldiers’ orders through the back window of the truck’s cab, where Bajh, fingers white around the wheel, carefully obeyed them.

Now Araz and Asti lay as they always did on the return trip, squeezed on either side of the mound of clothing (once the pallet was loaded, the plastic had to be cut away and discarded so as to avoid suspicion), pressed against the low containing rails of the truck’s flatbed. On the more bumpy roads, they were to keep the clothes from flying off.

Araz sighed and put his hands behind his head, looking up into the litter of stars that shifted slightly with each jounce of the truck. In the cab, Bajh turned off the radio he’d been listening to and a silence surrounded the exertions of the engine. After a while there were the sounds of other cars, and distant voices, and the truck eased to a stop.

Araz sat up and looked around. The small side road they’d taken, which ran parallel to the highway, was full of headlights and the sounds of motors stopping and starting. There was a traffic jam, stretching as far down as Araz could see. Maybe a breakdown, or a convoy moving through.

“What’s going on?” Araz said through the back window.

Bajh pointed to the slim, false horizon of the actual highway dimly glowing in the distance to their right. “It’s stopped there too,” he said. He opened the door and leaned out to look behind the truck. There was no one there. They were the last car.

“No problem,” he said. “I guess.”

Bajh got back in and reversed, using the shoulder to turn around. They traced back to the nearest turnoff and followed it, the tires making a dull thump as they went from the paved road to the dirt one. They traveled like this for a while, the roughness of the road causing Araz and Asti to sit up. The commotion of the late-night traffic jam eventually receded until its luminescence only barely troubled the dark of the sky behind them.

Araz watched Asti, who was sitting with her legs pulled up beside and under her. He thought again of her body, the form that her simple long-sleeved shirts and jeans under dresses both embraced and obscured, of the quality of her skin, the way it held light, its grace over her naked hollows and rises as he had seen her the afternoon two weeks before, laid along Bajh’s body on the cot in the abandoned guard hut outside town. The afternoon light had been warm and came tripping down through the gentle movement of a tree’s lower limbs outside, finally falling through the glassless window, making of their pose a shifting chiaroscuro, revealing then hiding Bajh’s huddled nakedness behind her. They were asleep, pressed together in the slight chill of the hut’s shadows, even though it was a balmy day. Bajh’s face was turned down, nestled between the stiff material of the cot and Asti’s shoulder blades. Asti’s hair was folded under and hung over the metal brace of the cot, where the long sun of the afternoon alighted on it in bits and pieces, leaving the rest to sit darkly in the shadow of her body. Araz had stood for a second, stilled at the doorway, and carefully taken in the fact of her nakedness, letting his eyes run down to the dip of her stomach and the rise of her hip, Bajh’s own hip behind hers, the slim line of his body, mostly hidden behind hers, grayed and blued by the foregrounding distance, even in that small room. There was the pocket of dark hair, surprisingly silky and flat, where her legs met, and the easy curve of her calf, her delicate ankles. They did not wake as he turned away and left.

•

The truck gave a wrenching creak and came to an abrupt stop. Bajh jumped out, cursing. A thin tree of smoke assembled itself out of the air above the cab. Araz got down and watched Bajh kick the front wheel, cough a little from the smoke and pace away, mashing down a button on the cell phone they carried for emergencies and waiting for its small square of light to come on. Asti stayed up in the truck.

The truck’s interior lights then quit and Araz found himself in a deep darkness, able to see almost nothing at all. He strained to look around. They were on a farming road, and he thought he could make out the dull metal of an irrigation well-marker glinting flatly a little way off, though he couldn’t be sure.

Araz turned to look back toward Bajh and the night came alive, breaking itself around Araz’s head.

A skirling came out of the sky, a mechanical screaming, directionless, as if out of the molecules of air itself, its howling barely even a discrete sound. By the time Araz was able to process it at all, the sound was alive in his chest, his hands, his skull, his mouth — percussive, felt more than heard, as was his own voice; if his scream even existed, he couldn’t tell. Araz only heard the blast once; the night was blown to a lucid muteness afterward, though he could not yet feel the wetness of the blood trickling from his ears and coating the sides of his jaw and neck.

Later, Araz would find himself unable to divorce his actual memory of what happened from the strange, otherworldly vision of the Internet video he would be shown by a roommate at his boarding school in London. Araz’s memory of that night was thus perpetually recast in the shaky, falsely illuminated field of a helicopter’s night-vision recording, the only omniscience able to sort the physical chaos. Though the particular video he saw was certainly not of his own night (and though no such video record of his own experience even existed, as far as he knew), Araz would forever afterward bear the acute feeling that he’d witnessed what happened to himself only through the real-time eye of the gun-sighted screen.

In Araz’s mind: the glowing white shape of his own prone body beside the truck; of Bajh, statant, in the field’s furrows; of Asti, limbs held close, a jumbled blob of the white that signaled body heat to the helicopter’s lens. The trio had not been aimed at, so none of them were hit. Instead, the rounds meant to disable the already-disabled truck (a hundred? a thousand?) found something (a half-full oil can forgotten under the truck’s seat? a spare gasoline container wedged without thought under the hay in the back?) to alight on, and the viewfinder was quickly awash with a riot of heat-shapes, an amorphous monster mounting the vehicle — fire.

From the sky came more screaming of metal, though Araz did not hear it. Here, the false implantation in Araz’s memory of the concussion of air made by the helicopter’s blades. The truth, of course, was that he heard nothing.