Night as It Falls by Jakuta Alikavazovic

Author:Jakuta Alikavazovic [Jakuta Alikavazovic]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571342280
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2020-02-14T22:00:00+00:00

Reconstruction was bewilderingly swift, practically overnight, so to speak. Shrapnel vanished from the walls, bullet holes were plastered over and repainted, and the entire city – from the centre, the historical areas that were also commercial areas, to the periphery – smelled like fresh paint, hot tar, a huge film set. Looking for her mother, Amelia realised that she had come too late, that life’s relentless forward march had erased not only the traces of the siege but also the memories of it inscribed in bullet-riddled, gouged-out surfaces that no longer existed. The more the city became what it had formerly been – and more – the less the people she met seemed to remember Nadia Dehr, who grew less believable, less consistent, who vanished into thin air. Became a myth, a ghost, a hazy memory not of a person, of a flesh-and-blood being, but of a legend, recalled with more or less certainty. Amelia found herself fleeing the reconstruction, taking refuge in the outskirts, in the neighbourhoods where the city still bore the scars of the conflict; but her endeavour was, like fleeing a massive wave or even time itself, doomed to failure. She wasn’t alone, however. Others also had their reasons for not wanting the war to disappear from the city. They had lived through it, grown up within it. The city was their mother. The war was their mother. And this was how she met him. We can call him Paul, if you want, she said to Paul who didn’t want to, not at all, but didn’t say anything. He was young, but not younger than her. He had grown up in the besieged city, he knew how absurdly, impossibly constructed the stories, the rumours, were; at the beginning she relied on him, he was a guide, an interpreter, a machine for going back in time; then she learned to understand him, his obsessions – he wondered if the snipers’ bullets were still buried in the walls, under the layers of primer and plaster and paint, if they were still there like foreign bodies, like pearls, fossils; and which hearts, which heads these projectiles were aimed at even though people presumed they were frozen, because their timescales were no longer human but geological – geologically speaking, nevertheless, it was clear that they were still on their fatal trajectory. Imperceptible but fatal. At night he filled the scars left by mortar shells on the sidewalks and roads with resin, with a red, vivid material that solidified like pools of blood, which always looked freshly poured but was as hard as ice or amber to the touch. This was another idea of memory. Another idea of art. He felt personally insulted, dispossessed, by this intentional, desired-for return to something that they called normality but which remained resolutely foreign to him. Which no longer existed for him, which had been lost in mornings without water, afternoons of mortar rounds, nights in blackouts. He felt as if he had been expelled or immured, like one of those bullets stuck in the walls.

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