Mahala

Today is the first Sunday of the month, and for my dad and me it’s movie day. Ever since the war finished, we watch an old videotape once a month after breakfast. We found it in the rubble of the top story of our house. We’ve seen it together thirty-six times. The last few times it almost didn’t happen. Dad was busy on the day. He asked me to watch it alone. Maybe my dad is ready to move on, but I still need to see my mother.

My dad is in the bathroom panting and muttering. He goes quiet for a bit and then starts again, cursing over the racket of his tools. When I peer in I see he’s lying in the bathtub. There’s an old towel under his head and he’s on his back like a car mechanic, trying to fix the hot water tank. The tank is mounted on the wall. The bottom nearly reaches the tub-edge where all the pipes, dials, and handles are. We lost our hot water this morning and he’s been at it all day.

I’m studying in my room. Tomorrow I’ve got an oral exam in biology. Last week, our teacher reached the letter O in the class roll. My surname starts with P. Tomorrow, I will stand in front of the class and draw a piece of paper with a question on it from the teacher’s jar.

It used to be a lolly jar that belonged to her son. He died on the line. She told us he was twenty. They buried his body on the school’s soccer pitch. I can see the pitch through the classroom’s windows.

We’re learning about human anatomy, and the exam questions will be about that. Last week one of the students drew a question about the intestines, and our teacher began crying. While she sobbed she told us her son was hit in the stomach. Small shrapnel, no bigger than a walnut, ripped through him.

My wish is not to get a question about the stomach. I also wish I could see my mother’s grave from my window and that my dad stops working on the tank so we can watch the tape.

We only watch the first two minutes. In the tape, a choir of young girls is getting ready to sing. You can see the back of a woman, her long, strawberry blonde hair curling halfway down her back. The woman clears her throat. She says, “ready,” her voice clear and resolute like a school bell.

The girls straighten their backs and lift their heads slightly upward. They look at the woman and wait for her signal. The woman counts three, two, one, but it’s really quiet and you have to strain your ears to hear it. She lifts her graceful hands in the air and the room explodes in one voice that is high pitched and booming at the same time.

The girls are singing their school’s hymn. It’s an upbeat, fast song that talks about hard working students who walk to school through sun, rain, and snow with their heavy schoolbags on their young shoulders. But the bags aren’t heavy, the song says, because they’re full of knowledge and the children’s brains are thirsty for it. The children are carrying their schoolbags full of schoolbooks, and those books will carry them into the bright future where any and all possibilities can be overcome, even a war. But the song doesn’t say anything about what the war is.

It’s a regular school hymn, and now I know it’s full of hogwash. I know the text by heart but I don’t listen to it anymore. Nor do I watch the girl’s faces. I don’t know what my dad sees, but I imagine it’s the same as me. I watch those hands, the strawberry blonde hair, and the bracelet dancing around the woman’s wrist as her hands glide through the air. It’s all I see...