The Wound by David Ball

Author:David Ball [Mauvignier, Laurent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000 Fiction / Literary
ISBN: 9780803276536
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2014-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

And now, in the night, the cold finally gets to you.

Bernard tries to shift position often, his limbs go numb and he tries to hear the men to his right and to his left, the ones who are shifting position like him and you can hear from far off.

You tell yourself it’s them, because even if your eyes get used to the night, what you’re on the lookout for, at first, what he, too, tries to hear rather than see, is all the sounds that don’t come from him, from his body whose breathing is so heavy that sometimes that’s what scares him, as if someone were breathing behind him, as if there were someone right next to him—and so hands and fingers grip the rifle very hard, eyes strain to spot a shadow in the darkness, a shape—but what emerges in the bluish gray is the outline of the landscape you’ve known for months but at night you’d rather see it from up there, when you’re a sentry, rather than out here at the outpost.

The difference is that up there you’re in a stone tower, solid, firm, made of gray stones that have no fear of bullets, and you climb up there through a staircase you access through a steel door, locked by the commanding officer. There’s nothing to be scared of up there; you tell yourself that if the base were attacked, it’s probably the only place where nothing could happen to you.

Sometimes, when Bernard is on sentry duty with the night stretched out in front of him, the cold doesn’t keep him awake. It’s mild out, you could even fall asleep more easily than in the barracks, because here, at least, neither the snores nor the smells of sweat disturb your craving for sleep. The cicadas help move you toward sleep, that gentle floating, too, that you feel, of the wind in the trees and the brush, that numbness whose caress you get to like very quickly, telling yourself: this could be a lot worse.

You imagine what’s happening on the other side of the base, behind the big oil tanks. You imagine the sea and the ships whose sirens can sometimes be heard in the distance, and on the other side, behind the hills, you tell yourself that this country stretches out, a country you only know by name and the ideas people have about it, postcard clichés, the desert, the camels, one imagines turbaned horsemen galloping down the trails at top speed, the sand kicking up like a cloud around them and broad, supple movements when they twirl their huge, curved, sickle-shaped sabers high above their heads.

But for now you cling to your rifle and Bernard, like the others, is ruining his eyes looking for shapes moving in the night.

Wild dogs do come prowling around, he knows that very well, he can spot them sometimes from his sentry post in the tower—brown spots sticking out in the transparent blue, pinkish in some places—but from up there

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