Bambert's Book of Missing Stories by Reinhardt Jung

Author:Reinhardt Jung [Jung, Reinhardt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-51374-8
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 1998-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Not long ago, the city of Sarajevo was under siege in a terrible war. Marksmen on the heights around the city fired at it from above. Its inhabitants crept into their cellars for shelter, and all the roads around Sarajevo were closed. No bread, no meat, no flour, no milk— no food at all was allowed into the besieged city. The people inside were starving.

During the day, they emerged briefly from their cellars to breathe fresh air. It was dangerous, for the snipers up on the mountains shot at anything that moved in the city below. They fired rifles, howitzers, and shells.

One morning, a child came out of the door of one of the cellars, which were barricaded with sandbags. He crouched down in the dust, playing with a little stick, and seemed to be drawing something on the ground.

Not two minutes had passed before a second child came out to call the first one in again. “What are you doing out here so long? Playing target practice or what?”

“I'm drawing a picture,” said the child crouching on the ground. Then an explosion shattered the morning air, and once again a nearby building went up in flames. The child with the stick said, “Boom!” and drew the ruined house in the dust with a few strokes.

“Are you mad?” cried the child standing beside him. “You're to come in at once, before those men up in the mountains train their sights on you.”

The child in the dust did not answer.

Yet again there was a flash in the mountains above the city, and a shell hit an empty high-rise building down below. Smoke rose into the sky, and the thunder of the explosion shook the city in the valley.

“They've hit the high-rise building,” said the child playing with his stick in the dust. He drew the outline of the building and then made a gaping hole in it with his stick. The high-rise building in the dust broke up.

“Come back down into the cellar!” shouted the child standing beside him.

“I can't!” the child crouching on the ground shouted back. “I have to finish this game. Now I'm playing that the next shell hits that factory!”

And he drew the factory on the ground and stuck his stick into it, swirling up the dust.

“Bang!” he said. “Crash!”

Sure enough, at that moment, a shell did hit the factory, and black smoke rolled toward the sky.

“You see?” said the child crouching on the ground. “I haven't finished yet, but it won't take long!”

“Come in!”

“I tell you, I haven't finished. I must play the game to the end!”

“Oh, stop it, do stop it and come back in!” begged the child standing beside him.

“Not now,” murmured the child who was playing his game, “not now. You can see it's no good. I'm much too near the end.”

The standing child was in despair. “What makes this game you're playing in the dust so important that you won't come in?”

“I'm playing war,” said the crouching child, “but I'll soon have finished.

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