Page 47 of Nights Without Night
They’re here, but they can breathe now. And so can we.
CHAPTER EIGHT
We stay a few days at our next stop.
The town is beautiful, with white houses that remind me of old movies set in France or Italy. Open balconies with hanging plants dot the façades with colour. The roads are thin and winding, rising sharply on steep hills devoid of people. There are cats everywhere, lounging in the shadows, following us with their uninterested eyes. Isadoro tries to make friends with them, and a few rub against us, following us for a little while before disappearing again.
We take the boat out and anchor it at one of the bays. We get the goggles and fins out, running the flame of a lighter briefly over the glass of the goggles and then spitting inside them to avoid smudging.
We throw ourselves into the sea and explore the rock and sand at the cheeks of the bay, swimming alongside it and to the curve of the headland. We breathe through our snorkels, eyes on the underwater landscape. We follow small schools of fish that glitter away from us when we get too close. We graze tentatively at the black spikes of the sea urchins camouflaged against the dark rocks. Isadoro spots a flatfish and we watch it burrow in the sand and settle, hidden from sight. We swim, and swim, and swim, becoming part of the wildlife until our muscles and lungs burn.
When we exhaust ourselves, we return to our floating home and haul ourselves out. Everything is salt and the sting of the sun. We eat our pack lunches and then swim to the shore of the bay where we nap in the sand, getting up periodically to cool ourselves in the water.
When we steer the boat back to the harbour, our skin is stretched tight across our bodies. The shower that follows is one of the best experiences of my life. The water is even sweeter than that first shower. I feel like a layer of myself has been shed and left in the waves where it’s always belonged. My body and soul has been made light.
After the sun has set, we go to dinner. We hold hands as if we’re on our honeymoon. It feels like the start of something. I don’t think about our inland home, miles away now in another world.
I ask Isadoro about his fellow soldiers. He smiles as he talks about them, the memories a buoy instead of a drowning anchor.
“He was like a sniffer dog,” he says of one of the members of his battalion. “Every time we thought we’d find nothing at the raid, he’d find the stash. One time, he noticed a screw just a bit too loose on a pipe, and a minute later we had our hands on a bunch of loaded magazines stuffed inside,” he recounts. “That’s how he got the nickname Hound.”
“What’syournickname?” I laugh.
“Ah-ah.”
“I’m gonna find out when we meet up with them anyway!” I say. He just shrugs, smiling at me.
“Fine. Just you wait,” I say. He laughs, and it rings out like a bell.
We walk along restaurants with their tables spilling out, the sound of the waves hitting the rocks around us. Everybody seems to be out, and I see couples holding hands, young and old and everything in between.
“When you said you’d fucked guys when you were, you know, out there…didn’t you ever find someone you wanted to stay with?” I ask, not letting the thought linger long in my head before it's out. Isadoro turns his head to look at me.
“No.”
“But the relationships you made out there must have been intense.”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t sleep with people in my battalion. That would have been a massively bad idea for so many reasons.”
“How was it like, being Team Sergeant? You never talked much about it,” I ask. Isadoro pauses for a moment, thinking.
“I wasn’t the Captain, so I didn’t have much influence on mission structure, but I could influence enough to make sure my team was safe and that the people we were there to help were a priority. It was why I joined the Ops in the first place, so…”
“Sounds like a lot of responsibility.”
“Yes. But being a soldier is a responsibility. You feel responsible for everybody in your team, no matter your rank. In my first year of deployment…remember the kid that had the accident with the tank?”
I remember exactly who he’s referring to. It had been a new recruit who liked to help with mechanical maintenance. By that time, the tanks had already been upgraded, but there were still some old ones in operation which had to be ‘pimped up’ on the fly so they could survive IEDs. Tanks were crucial but could quickly become a liability when hit, because soldiers weren’t allowed to leave them in the field, even when disabled, to avoid the opposition getting their hands on them and taking advantage of the machinery. They had to be tweaked so they were not only resistant to that kind of attack but could be moved easily when disabled.
This particular tank had been altered so many times it had fucked with its integrity. The kid had been doing some work on it when a piece blew up a few inches from him. It hadn’t killed him, but it had injured him severely—an injury that would last a lifetime.
“Yeah, I remember.”
“We all felt responsible for that. We all thought we should have done something, as stupid as that sounds. War—they say nothing is fair in war, but that’s what you’re out there to do, in your head. To do something fair. To help the regaining of balance. We know we’re risking our lives, and that so are the people around you, but it’s with a purpose. But that…that was just so fucked up. So…”
“Unfair.”
“Yeah. So, yeah, it was a responsibility. But there comes a point when you feel something so much, you can’t tell the difference when there’s more of it.”
