Seven against the Moon

Can anything they do to you be more humiliating than that which has already happened to your money and cigarette packets? You do not ask yourself such a question because you think only of one thing .This thing you dare not speak aloud, because you fear… You do not know what not to fear exactly.

While you are lying on your back in this way, stretching your body on the fine clay without any coverings, you fear that they will spoil your surrender to the chilliness of January. You are filled by an outrageous power and insistent desire. The power is the arrogance of fatigue and sound sleep, whereas your desire is to stare at the face of the mourner moon. The suffering and mist of January have not succeeded in completely dispersing the light suffusing the universe this very night. It steals even into your soul, which is dying from longing for an unknown freedom and the moon.

First the desire to mourn the moon you lost gains its temporary and disastrous victory and so you remember the present day from its early and chilling morning, the hours of drill in the uncertain dimness and the cold water bucket which was poured onto your head .Yes, you had experienced sleeping in the drain tunnels, but you never before knew such intense horror.

Somebody beat you with a tough black water pipe to teach you how to stand to your feet 'at ease' in the dawn, the ease of which has fled without return since the doors of hell were opened in your distant village.

This disaster occurred on a day that began beautifully and ended in a long exodus and flight, horrifying and impossible, in a direction you did not know because you did not have enough time to ask or simply because you are too young and know only the village, the forest, your young darling and your immature dreams. Perhaps there is no one left to answer the rest of your blind questions.

There is only one certain thing left in your life after the money, the cigarettes and the bicycle with the musical horn were taken away. That is the sad peaceful moon. You wait for that night of his in every month to recall your celebrating him a prophet of brightness and amazement. The moon reminds you of your trysts with your beloved, a memorial to the incinerating catastrophe.

After giving birth to the cigarettes, the virgin money gave birth to more money which in turn gave birth to a bicycle. The bicycle which had become your trademark at the far end of the famous avenue and in its neighborhood. How sweet you found it to ride wearing a red cap, which made you look trendy and protected you from the burning sun. From your shoulder swung your black bag, its viscera crowded with cigarettes and a brocade shirt. The money was inside your trouser pockets. You believed the moon, which you had been taught is your great ancestor, had given you all this so you could face the hardship of living in the capital. Even the choosing of the street corner, you thought, was the choice of the moon. From it you watched the pedestrians, the gloomy evenings and the possibility of a new love passing nearby.

It was also in this place that the bus came hurrying against the direction of traffic and outside the black asphalt road .You were busy giving a cigarette to a customer. That’s why you didn’t even notice the lawless approach, typical of the darkness carried onboard. When the bus stopped they had already rushed upon the cigarettes spread out in front of you on an empty carton that served as your table. You began running, evoking all your depleted forces. They ran after you as though it were the Grand Prix competition and you were the competitor and the prize itself. Covertly you called for the help of the ancestors and, in particular, your great ancestor the moon- but it seemed the ancestors had plugged their ears. At some turn you stumbled and your dreams were scattered and covered in the red dust of the wild ground. They made you rise, then returned you to the cigarette stall. Every one of them lit a cigarette and they took all money from the pockets of your bright-colored trousers. Many people inside the bus laughed at you, since they saw you try to escape and fail. And on the avenue some people shook their heads in surprise but without sympathy.
After your arrival in the place you had heard much about and feared, they began questioning you and writing on a dirty pad,

"What is your name?" "Gabriele Maschar!"
"How old are you?"
"One hundred sixty eight moons!"
"Yet nineteen years!"

You know that what they have written is not your real age, but you have met younger ones who were marked down as twenty-year-olds.
Then the tyranny of the drill began. Immediately they started with the handling of arms. How happy you would have been to carry that automatic rifle under different circumstances.
Enthusiastic anthems in your tribal dialect followed. You were not enthusiastic at all. You remembered only the cigarettes, the stolen money and the bicycle that might be lost. For the sake of caution you had recently taken to parking it on a corner favored by a hawker who used to sell cigarettes and perhaps marihuana. It was as if you had known that they would be coming to take you that day, so you had ordered the hawker to hand the bicycle over to the ice seller, who sold this winter nothing but swearwords and obscene jokes.

Eventually the arrogance of fatigue and sound sleep begin to smash the forts of memory. The narcosis of sleep creeps to your brain for no reason other than that your brain is the only free part left of you. You do not try to struggle against sleep because a winter cloud has started to veil your ancestor the moon. It might be the eclipse which you have not heard foretold by meteorologists.

Between sleep and wakefulness you dream that you have returned to your corner of the famous avenue. You do not dare dream of returning to your village because you do not waste your dreams at random. Therefore you return to the dream of the corner. There, many people will ask you, perhaps caustically or with curiosity, about what had happened.

You shall not tell them about the filthinesses of the room in which you were detained all the day together with the ones who had spent a couple of days in there prior to your arrival. You shall not tell them also about the terrible mosquito stings in the midst of winter and the sharp pains on your leg due to the beatings you received. Most importantly, you shall not tell them of other things that are uglier, or what you heard about your release if your people paid what you call a ransom. Yes, a half ounce of gold or, say, a hundred US dollars. How strange this homeland is! Yesterday you left your peaceful village escaping from a destiny of war to the destiny of the forced preparation for war!
The dreams race to fill your sleep because your ancestor the moon dominates the dome of the sky. You dream of your young beloved one and of the day you learned to count in order to count without assistance the cows you would pay as her dower. You remember how a stout thorn stabbed you and lodged itself for a whole day in the sole of your foot. You remember how your old grandfather whispered to your ancestor the moon to grant you long life and keep away from you the cunning thorns, starting with that one. The same evening the thorn emerged from your foot while the moon became a circle like tonight. Your people the villagers told stories of that incident till the war swept them and the village away.

The sudden darkness veils the dreams from you now. Something has made the moon angry so that it has hid itself. You wake up and open your eyes. You find them standing between you and the moon. They are the seven who smoked your cigarettes at no cost.