The Rose-Cheeked Girl

by Roberto Lalli delle Malebranche, www.robertolalli.biz

The road looked safe enough. The local brigades had blocked the main street of course, but he made a wide turn around the city, or better, around of what was left of the city, looking out of the car window of his old Toyota for mines or improvised bomb traps. There was no good reason to mine this particular road, but there had been no particular reason to blow up the market in the neighbour city the week before either or to attack the school in his hometown with a rocket launcher only the day before. Everything was war now, rubble, stink, dead bodies, blood and dust, and looking back he couldn’t really remember a time when it had been different. He was seventeen now, and all he had ever seen was a world that didn’t look like a world but felt like hell. His heart, like the hearts of everybody else he knew, had become stone rubble, it was broken in a way that couldn’t be mend, or maybe it could, but only in a thousand years, just like all those cities sunk into rubble, and he wouldn’t live that long. Nobody here would live that long, probably not even for another year, for that matter. His cousin was dead, his elder brother had lost both legs, the two daughters of their neighbours had been killed when the roof had collapsed after a grenade attack, together with their little dog, and his father was dead, too, though he seemed somehow still alive.
          He stopped the car, shut down the engine and listened. He never drove with the radio on because that was the surest way to get you killed. Your only chance was to hear them before they fired their rockets, to hear them change altitude and speed when they closed in for the kill. He listened. He could hear them, high above. More than one; two or three probably. He took a good look around, but there was nothing. It would be dark in an hour or two, and there was nothing worth hitting as far as he could see: fields, a low stonewall spiralling from the road towards hazy hills to the left and the bombed out city to the right. There was nothing here, nothing to attack, to incinerate, to control, to conquer. “This country is like a dead man. You can kill a man only once, but they continue to kill us, nonetheless”, his father had told him once when he had been a little kid. His father had been an engineer before the world had stopped to be a world, then someone had beaten him, beaten him almost to death, that is, and now all he did was staying put under a tree in the small garden of his old friend Jawid and dream with his eyes closed but without sleeping. He never prayed, he never talked, he never read or wrote anything. His mother had to do all the work, to look after his two little sisters and his injured brother, and he helped her as much as he could because she had no husband anymore, just like he had never really had a father.
          Then something happened: he could feel that the sound high above had changed. He opened the door of the car and stepped out. He ducked down behind the door, trying to discover movements in the perfect blue sky above him. Then he saw it: There was a very small, grey cross flying high above, following slowly an imaginary but perfectly straight line that seemed to mirror the perfectly straight line of the very real and very dusty road ahead of him. His head turned smoothly but inexorably in the same direction, without him really doing it, like a magnetic mechanism taking control of his eyes and neck. He knew what would happen even before it happened, just like he knew when it would be going to rain in the evening or when the first birds would start to cry out in the morning even if it was still dark. The small grey cross spit out a small white line and wove it into the sky ahead, and the white line soon started to descend towards the horizon, and he ducked behind the door of the car and waited for the explosion, but all he heard seconds later was a muffled sound, like the tubby thunder of a rainstorm far, far away. Then he saw the smoke at the far end of the horizon, like a trembling black finger pointing at the sky.
            He got back into the car, started the engine and followed the road in the direction of the black smoke. “I must be crazy”, he thought while the old engine rumbled and coughed and the car took up speed, but strangely enough, he was not afraid. On the contrary, something inside him longed ardently to lo look danger right into the eyes, longed passionately to finally confront that unknown entity, death, that had killed so many people he had known but had spared him once and again throughout the years. “They will launch a rocket at me, too, and kill me”, and he wondered if he would feel a great pain and if he would have enough time to think of his mother, his little sister, his brother and his father. How long did it take to die when they blew you to pieces? And would there be something after that? Would there be light? That would be wonderful. Light. And maybe something else. Something better than this.
          When he got there, the fire had burned already down. There was only smoke, the smell of burned tires, of gasoline and of human flesh. He went around the remains of the car, keeping the wind in his back in order to avoid the fumes and the worst of the smell, and he at once saw the carbonised remains of the driver and the bent-forward body on the passenger seat. It was impossible for him to determine who of the two had been a man and who a woman. They both had shrunk to two logs of black, burned wood, like wooden marionettes in a toy car carelessly thrown into a bonfire. Behind them, even smaller, he could see something that looked like a small burned animal. It had become one with the melted rear bench of the car, and he had to look away because he could see that the small animal still seemed to hold something that had once worn a pink dress. “Father, mother and daughter”, he thought, but he couldn’t look at them again. Then, turning to his left, towards the low stonewall and the fields and the hazy hills by the horizon, he suddenly noticed her: She was looking at him, her eyes wide open, her face white and frozen in a stare beyond comprehension. She had to be almost his age, fifteen or sixteen.
          “Stay where you are!”, he tried to shout, but his voice failed him. He couldn’t speak, only cough and gasp for air. The girl didn’t move an inch, she just kept staring at him. She kept looking at him with her big, frozen eyes, and with that expression on her face that said: “What …?”. He saw that there was blood on her face and blood on her arms, and just when he thought that he would be able to speak to her, he realised that the sound high above them had changed again. He started to run into her direction, unbearably slow, like in the bad dreams he sometimes dreamt, but she still didn’t move or say anything or change the expression on her face. Still running, though his legs trembled now, he ducked and managed to reach out for her, he lifted her from the ground, and she seemed to be made out of air because he didn’t feel her weight at all, and then he reached the stone wall and somehow managed to get over it, but doing so he hurt his right knee, lost his balance and fell to the ground. That was the moment when the first rocket hit the ground ten meters behind his car. He felt the heatwave and the blinding light coming over the stonewall and rolling over them without touching them, he knew, even without seeing it, that his car was being raised into the air and dashed upside down onto the road again, and then the sound wave of the first rocket melted into the sound wave of the second, and everything around them became strangely silent, and his knee stopped hurting, and everything suddenly became nameless and dreamy and easy.
          When he opened his eyes again, she was still in his arms. Her eyes were closed now, and he needed a moment to realise who she was. Then, she opened her eyes again, and they were green, and she looked at him, but her face was still very white and the expression on her face still as empty as that of a mask. Her body was cold, and her heartbeat only a whisper, he could feel that while holding her.

           “Who … are you? I …”, she whispered.

            “I am Matyn. What is your name?”

          That seemed a difficult question for her to answer.

           “I … I think … Gul-Chehrah.”

          “The rose-cheeked? That is a beautiful name.”

          He tried to smile for her. That was the moment when she softly started to cry. He held her while she cried, and not bearing to watch the tears on her white face, he just hold her and looked at the sky high above them. He watched the sky, and the sky started to change colour and became darker and darker, and when she stopped crying, he looked at her again.

          “Are you hurt?”, he asked her.

          “Where are …?”

          He didn’t know what to reply to this. He waited what seemed to be a long long time.

          “They are dead”, he finally whispered.

          “My … my little sister, too?”

          “Yes.”

          That made her cry again, harder this time, with her entire body trembling in between his arms. He watched the sky again, then closed his eyes, and suddenly something inside him, something buried all those years under the ruins of his stone walled heart, began to move and to reach out for him from deep inside, and a terrible, profound and yet wide, aching and yet sweet hurt passed all over him, covered him and took hold of him, and he, too, began to cry; without a sound and without being able to feel anything else. They both cried, and it seemed that they would never be able to stop crying again, but when the night came, and the world fell softly silent, her hands came searching for his face, and they were warm and caring:

          “Shhhh … It’s all right, it’s going to be all right”, she whispered. He nodded, her hands still caressing his face, and he held her closer, wishing that she would never stop to caress his tears, but then she said:
          “We have to go somewhere, it’s cold and my body hurts.”

          “Yes”, he said. “Do you have … someone nearby, family I mean? I think that my car was hit, but maybe my phone … I left it in the car. If it still works, I can call home.”

          “I still … have my grandparents … they live not far from here. We wanted to go and see them.” He nodded and started to open his arms and to release her, but she wouldn’t let go of him. “No, please, wait, wait a moment, don’t get up yet. I need time.” He nodded. Her green eyes had almost become invisible in the shadow of the stonewall but he still knew that she was looking at him in the dark. “How old are you?”, she asked.

          “Seventeen. And you?”

          “Fifteen, almost sixteen. Are you promised to someone, are you engaged?”

          “No”, he said. “My father … He never cared about these things. You?”

          He could feel how she shook her head in the dark.

          “No. Would you promise me something?”

          “Yes, I will.”

          “Promise me that we will stay together until we get … away from here. I will be good to you, and I know that you will be good to me. I can see your heart. But you don’t have to love me forever, even though I feel that you might. Just let’s go somewhere, anywhere, any place, I don’t care where it is as long as there is some … life, real life for us there. Let’s find a place full of butterflies and cats and all kinds of birds, and maybe you would like to have a dog, too. We won’t need much, just a little house, maybe on a hill where nobody wants to go and nobody will find us, with two windows that open to a little garden. And I want flowers, flowers and bushes and small trees, and I will give them water every day when we both come home from work in the evening.”

          “Yes”, he said. “I think, I like that.”

          “Yes, I know”, she said and he could feel her smiling in the dark. Then she started to cry again, and he waited until she had no more tears to cry, just holding her. “Now”, she said after a while, “I am ready now”, and they released each other softly from their embrace.