[T] he war is in the kitchen. ~ Elmaz Abinader
A child is dragged from collapsed rebar and rubble. Bloody, and his mother screams, her hand shakes her face blown open by disbelief. The translation, an echo: God, God, God. The barehanded men dig and dig and scramble toward the moans, filling reused white buckets with rocks. The men shuttle from one scream to the next. The camera, the reporter and the interpreted ticker at the foot of the screen follow the commander, the target of the bomb. He's survived, miraculously. The interview.
My eyes want the camera to turn back to the child, to his mother too. Where have they run?
This impulse, to turn from the forced subject, the man in charge, the commander who participates (heroically, righteously, no doubt) in extending the carnage, says he fights for the child and the mother and the land. Yet all three will have to grieve forever, the sloppy aim of this particular bomb.
Men can forget. Wipe away what they've seen with another blast, another penetration. What they've done. They'll smoke cigarettes and drink tea and congratulate each other over the victory and make more decisions about bombs and sacrifice.
The women, the children and the land, who've never ruminated much on metal and projectiles, will carry it forward.
The attraction to this story, the story of the child and the mother crushed by the collapsed concrete, I finally understand as well-earned, my own.
Like a tiny shard of glass in my finger, it remained half-pronounced, yet insistent, this question. For years, I tried to work through the similar strands I heard from friends or from people I'd just met or from a new book.
And then it all came to make sense after several stuttering attempts at speaking it out when repeatedly confronted with the commander and his men with their cigarettes and tea and plans for their next right offensive.
