Dating : The City on the Plain

by Andrew Bertaina

We were up early to walk our dogs, the sky was a pale green, and the dogs peed lazily on the birch trees in a pattern of their own making when we saw the man who had leveled the city on the plain. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with reddish grey hair and a short beard. We had seen his face on posters and in short films, pictured it sometimes, in our nightmares. Naturally, our eyes followed him. He slipped into a small store while we watched, pretending to adjust our jackets, to shorten the leash on the dogs. It’s unclear, even now, what we watched for, but we found it nearly impossible to do anything else. He came out with a package of cheese and a loaf of bread, then disappeared down a side street still gleaming from the morning wash.

The news of his arrival spread quickly through our town. Since the end of the war, our lives had seemed empty, purposeless. His presence brought meaning back to them, a person to diagnose, to wonder about, to hate. We asked one another what vintage of wine he bought, which variety of cheese, as though culinary favorites could help us understand how he had reduced a city to ash. We talked to our spouses more, whispered conspiracy theories in our bedrooms, hugged our children more tightly.

The truth is, though, he didn’t look much different from the rest of us. Most afternoons, he walked the cobbled streets whistling the tune of an old song, one we recognized from childhood. Though we feared him, we reminded our children to be respectful, to nod politely before moving along. We made them stop playing the pretend games of bombing they’d taken to. Where one of them was the mad wizard, firing pine cones into the limitless blue sky, that fell and pelted the other children, who ran around, screaming in mock pain.

In the cafés, we recounted what we’d heard from newspapers and soldiers who’d passed through on the way home. That morning, the soldiers had been ordered to clear out, and they’d retreated from the walls, stood around, smoking and chatting aimlessly. Then, the man walked out from the tents and stood looking at that other town as though he were imagining every bit of it, every flower pot, every shard of plated glass, every bit of the steel mill and every solid brick of the town hall. The soldiers said wild things like his cloak didn’t move in the wind. Others, that he prayed to some demon god. Then he’d raised his arms and fire fell from the sky, waves of fire that seemed unceasing. Some of the soldiers said the screaming went on for hours, others that you could see him laughing or crying. When it was done, the church and the bell towers, the shops and the gardens had all been scorched. They said that people were flinging themselves from the battlements in wild pain, others said that you couldn’t hear a thing beyond the crackling and pop of the fire.

After a year or so, our attitudes shifted, we found ourselves dissatisfied with our spouses and uncertain why. We wondered if we blamed them for his presence here for not starting an effort to have him ousted, for being so easily persuaded by his celebrity. We wondered if there was something dangerous about having him in our town as though he were a cancer, growing.

Often, he was in the town square, sitting on a stone bench beneath statues of old war heroes, as though he belonged among them. As the golden hour passed into deep dusk, some of our dogs climbed under the fence to wander away and sit with him. He’d idly rub the fur on their necks, and pat them on the rump before walking them home. Our sweet animals, who didn’t know enough to recoil, who saw not a monster, but a middle-aged man beaming at them, not so different from us.

Sometimes we’d watch our children swinging through the summer air as they grew older, legs lengthening, and we’d picture their bodies aflame, picture the trees bending and snapping, the houses afire, until everything was ashes swept into sky.

In the third year, he built a garden. Where once crabgrass and disorderly hedges had reigned, he’d planted rows of beans, squash, peas, and lettuce. And all around his house, that early summer hummingbirds dipped beaks in the blooms and fat bees drowsed around the yard. Some even changed the course of their walk to gaze admiringly at the garden, the flowers gathering light, the grapevines climbing arbors and the neat row of raspberries climbing a trellis.

But the garden was just a distraction or so we understand now. For underneath, he must have remained the same man. Late at night, we thought about the graves lying across the plains in that other town, the small crosses that spread like a river across the ground. Nights, we dreamed that we were the man and the bodies were those of our own children. Our children, who looked strangely at us more often as they aged. Gawky and sullen teenagers who harbored some secret resentment against us despite our best efforts to keep them safe from the world.

We blamed the man for it. He had come to live in our quiet city, among quiet people, who wanted nothing more than to live and die in relative peace, but he’d disturbed our reverie, upset the equilibrium we’d worked so hard to establish after the war.

And then, no one saw him for a week. We asked one another if he’d left our town, gone off to a distant war. None of us knew him at all beyond a passing wave. A brave middle-aged mother of four went looking for him, knocked at the door and peeked in the windows, where she saw him, swinging from the rafters.

When the news broke, we felt comforted, certain we’d been right to avoid him. We felt safe for the first time in years. A man who carried around that kind of destruction, and then never spoke of it, never owned what he’d done, was maniacal. It was as though he thought we’d all forget.

A week passed and the details of the letter he’d written started to come out. In it, the quiet man described his presence among us not as soothing as we’d imagined, but as a living hell. Each time he heard the bell of a child’s laugh, each smile of a passing family, each slight rising of the wind reminded him of ashes and death. Every day had been torture.

The teens remained sullen, perhaps sensing our secret elation that he’d taken care of something we wanted to. They started staying out late and smoking in the town square where he’d held court with the dogs. Where we once had also courted and smoked in our vanished youths. They held meetings and formed a secret society. When we asked, they wouldn’t tell us what they talked about. But some things slipped out, at dinners, they seemed to suggest we’d been responsible for his death, for his isolation. Perhaps if we’d welcomed him into our town he wouldn’t be dead. They saw him as a different person than we did, and they rebuked us for not understanding.

After his funeral, a sparsely attended affair, we retreated to the bars and spent the evening drinking amber ale and talking. We imagined the city on the plain reduced to rubble and ash. We could finally speak freely about it, relieved from the burden of holding back for him. We realized we were thankful for the service he’d done us, decimating that town which had long threatened our prosperity. Now that he was gone, we thought he might deserve a statue in the park after all.

The teens remained aloof, standoffish at meals and sulky. Their meetings seemed to be building in intensity despite our best efforts to stop them. Some of them, we heard, venerated the man, compared him to Jesus, the sacrificial lamb. They became strangers to us. We tried grounding them, but they sneaked out anyway, disobeying us night after night. How had we lost them?

One night, they all disappeared together. Notes were left saying they’d gone to live in that other town, to restore it to its former glory. Each of the teens had crafted a final parting gift, left on bureaus or nightstands. They said the gifts showed us the key to solving all the problems in our lives. When we opened them, half-fearfully, we found tiny mirrors, small reflections of our own lined faces. At first, we dismissed the mirrors, dismissed the teens. The young were always foolish. They’d return in shame.

A week passed without their return. Then a month. We wandered our newly spacious houses, looking for traces of the childhood they’d abandoned, posters on the wall, small shoes in the closets, an old doll. It was then, alone with our thoughts, that we felt sad about our broken marriages, our shabby little houses, our shabby little lives.

Late at night, as we lay with our spouses, something dawned on us as we thought about those mirrors, the way they reflected the gray in our temples, the wrinkles on our foreheads and beneath our eyes. We got up from our beds, and walked softly through the house, kissing the children who were still at home, still young enough to sleep, and thanked every nook and cranny of our house, every small staircase or alcove for being there, unburned. We walked into the yard and the silence of the night where the moon hung heavily in the branches of the trees. The teens had the right of it.

We’d held our tongues when our towns suggested retaining the services of the man. In our silences, we’d tacitly accepted the war; we’d all been guilty of the decimation of that other town, all a part of the immense effort to forget what we’d done. We wanted them to forgive us for our apathy, for our failures to speak when we had the chance. We didn’t know if the teens would ever return, didn’t know if they should. At night sometimes, we saw lights in the distance, our teens slowly rebuilding that other town, fires burning on the plain.