They Dragged Them through the Streets: A Novel

V

116 V I consider the genres: Interview. Manifesto. Lede. Love letter. Flower on gravestone. Flowers on gravestones—which somehow never rot in the cemetery I walk through daily, I’ve noticed this, the petals never damp and stinking; someone must come by to neaten up. Lede. The other day I went to a fund-raiser, with speeches, a group that builds schools over there, that brings—really—packets of pencils, notebooks, and prosthetic limbs. Workbooks in two languages, theirs, ours. A had called me and told me to go; a journalist friend of hers was speaking about his two trips to the war, unembedded. He was good-looking, that I acknowledged. He talked passionately about the people. You can’t write a love letter to a whole people, I ought to have said to him. My chair was hard and uncomfortable. I did say something to him afterward: I shook hands with him, his warm soft palms—you shouldn’t be so vague, I said, which was a blow, I could see that in his eyes. 117 But I was right. But he has been places I haven’t. He has seen the streets after the soldiers left, the checkpoints absent and children setting up stands on the corners, handing out juice to passing cars. But this is not the stuff of love letters either; this is what I mean to clarify. Nor when the women in front of the cameras wail—that’s the only word for it—and beat their chests, crying the names of children, husbands, brothers, lost. This is something else. Just as I do not write for Z, or to him or anyone. I clapped politely at the journalist’s speech. The clapping like the click of a shutter. The journalist had clicked through a slideshow of photographs, including a series from a morgue: It was so terrible, he said, I took pictures mechanically . The bodies weren’t whole; limbs piled up. They could no longer assemble them as bodies, but leg, leg, arm, arm. There were, terribly, heads. One watched the photos click by, the clicking not quite as soft as hands clapping, not the same. But how did they know, that this leg, for instance, didn’t belong with this arm? This head this hand? Perhaps no one had looked closely enough, to see how this wrist bone might resemble that ankle. How this sock might match fingers that could have pulled on it, old habit, a child’s thin calves. I should have raised my hand to say: There’s nothing mechanical to it. Only human. What do you know? the journalist should have answered me. And how vague it must feel, and impossible, to try to bring back a whole country. Even the easiest moments, the greetings and muttering the interpreters talked over, the tea one was offered , the aid packages stacked in truck beds and argued through checkpoints. He said people there kept asking the same questions of anyone who talked to them, the most urgent questions. 118 Cameras documented this or that explosion but were absent the hours a family sat by their window watching the sniper watch the street. The dogs and cats in the street. Sometimes the sniper shot the dogs. Out of boredom or dedication or—it could be, there was no way to know otherwise—so that the bodies still on the streets would not be further desecrated (if that’s what dogs did, or one could call it natural) before their families could come for them. It was the journalist who told me about the dogs; I learned this from him. Thank you, I said after the speech, and shook his hand. Thinking as I did that his hand had held A. But he could never claim he knew her better than I did; differently, but never better. • Love letters: this thought isn’t mine, was born in an interview . When I read your novels, the interviewer said, they seem to me to be love letters. She didn’t say to Z, but that’s what she meant, I was sure. I didn’t answer at first; I’m never sure what to say when people say these things. What do they think of him, now that even the war is old news. She and I waited for each other. That’s interesting, I finally said, realizing that it must be more...