Page 39 of Nights Without Night
You just watch it for a while and think of nothing.
**********
I expect it to be a one-off thing, but it keeps happening. Not every time I ask him, but often enough to give me hope.
He’ll sit on his stool and describe a scene, and I’ll draw. A dog with its nose pressed against one of the soldier’s hands. A group of children gathered around, eager to see the treats the soldiers have in store. A half-broken door, smoke all around, obscuring what’s on the other side. The lights of a village on a mountainside, the sparks of gunfire shattering the night.
Sometimes, it’s obvious he’s been thinking about the memory all day. Others, we won’t even get to the memory. He will just sit there, lost in his head, closed off from me completely. I watch the cursive writing of his intrusive thoughts across his face, one word dragging another, and another, and another. On those occasions, I’ll just draw him, the grey and blue colours of his curved form, the distance between us.
And, rarely, are the moments when he talks.Reallytalks. The chosen memory will take him somewhere else and he’ll drift along, lost in it.
He describes a meeting inside a hut. A circle of people; one half composed of local men, the other of foreign soldiers, with the hinge of the translator between them. Slowly, the scene expands. He talks about how, by the time Isadoro got there, there was no way to win the hearts of the Afghans. Too much harm had been done. The only in they had was through material change. Employment, money, goods. It equalled to a sense of purpose.
Stability.
Some of the soldiers would grouse about how greedy these people were. Obsessed with money. Always wanting more. It curdled Isadoro’s stomach. To the wealthy, the desire for money, the desperation to get it, is seen as greed. Those who know better see that true avarice lives in the obsession withkeepingmoney, not getting it. To those who know hunger—true hunger, the kind that doesn’t live encapsulated in the now but stretches forward, a shadow reaching into the foreseeable future—money is the light that will once and for all banish darkness. It’s why Democracy and Capitalism go hand-in-hand, Isadoro says. People seek freedom in the ball and chain of money.
Isadoro would have done anything for the men and women fighting with him. Followed every command from above without hesitating in behaviour, but his head kept asking—why?
“That’s why I joined the Ops, I guess,” he says. To help through strategy instead of simply force. To command and enact change from above. The dedication to his service shines through, almost solidified by his ability to be critical of the system he was in.
He talks at me, and I listen. At me, because he seems to simply be sorting it out in his head, and I am just a witness to his testimony.
No matter if he talks about a memory, or his service, or not at all, the experience is always exhausting. Sometimes, he’ll disappear straight into his room. Others, though, he’ll stay in the living room and eat with me.
Progress, I think, taking it one step at a time.
**********
Some days are worse than others.
One Tuesday I go into his room with an armful of clean sheets.
“Hey. I know you don’t wanna sit for me today, but let’s change your sheets?” I say to the figure in the bed. Isadoro doesn’t move. “I’ll be a second. You can even take a shower and you’ll have a clean bed waiting for you,” I wheedle. He makes a huffing noise but doesn’t react otherwise.
I set the sheets down on his desk and turn back to the bed.
“Come on, Isadoro,” I say, impatient, head full of the end-of-year projects and studying I have to get back to. I don’t have time for this.
When he doesn’t even turn to look at me, I pull at the sheet. He holds fast. I pull again. He yanks back. I pull harder. Finally, he sits up in a flurry, glaring.
“Stop!” he growls.
“Youstop!”
“I’m not a fucking child!”
I bite back my immediate response. “I know you’re not. I’m trying to help.”
“I don’t need your fucking help! I can change my own fucking sheets!”
“Obviously you-” I clench my teeth. My breath whistles between them. “Isadoro, it’ll just be a moment, and then you’ll have clean sheets,” I try to reason.
“I don’t want clean sheets.”
“Everybody wants clean sheets!”
“Idon’t! Don’t you get it? I. Don’t. Want. Clean. Sheets.”
