Archive > Vol. 21 no. 2

D. Nurkse

Narva

When we came to the ruined wall, old men were sitting by fires warming their hands, and they looked silly — how long could they hold that palms-out pose? Were they warding off the flames?

There was a child too, making the same gesture. Was he mocking them? Showing off to me? Was one of them his father?

The whites of their eyes jumped, but they weren’t looking at me. Their lips were moving and my father explained: they’re telling stories. Why? To pass time, and that rang true. In that street of dusty signs missing their vowels, twilight was hardly advancing. I wished they would invite me to their circle of charred stones.

What are they burning, I asked, and my father answered: railroad ties, or lath from the abandoned buildings.

For a few days I’d had the feeling my father was making everything up. But I wouldn’t call it lying. The past was just another city in which he lived, with its own broad empty avenues, its statues of saints pierced by stone arrows and pockmarked with bullet holes, its tenement windows flashing twilight as if to stave it off, laundry trembling on roofs, a breath moving there like a ferret, and the high clouds, that cannot suffer, concerned only with their own vanishing.   

Is this the whole city, I asked: when does it start?

It starts wherever you are, he said, and yes: at sunset I saw a little girl marching like a sentinel with a red balloon, as if it could protect her, and just before dark a child so young I couldn’t tell — boy, girl —pranced with a shard of brick, cradling it, ordering it sleep.