irretrievable

My lover had another brother. Twirling my hair around his finger, he laughs when he tells me before there was hair on his body he almost aced a poker game. But the soldiers had busted in, bundled them all at the end of cold metal barrels to the border. Recounts this coming of age with the nostalgia I’d tell throwing up on wine coolers and half-smoked cigarettes. He laughs about his two friends, deft footed soccer champs that evaded the heavy laced boots of the captors. Chuckles about the complaints of boys with nothing for three nights two days on a concrete floor. As if hunger would make combatants of anyone. Throws his naked arm over my naked breast, looks closely at my eyes, then says really it was ok, his father was still alive then. His father was a powerful man. The soldiers were afraid when they knew whose son they’d taken so they swung the bars open and thrust him back to childhood.
-He’s just a kid, his dad said.

My lover’s arm fills the groove between my head and shoulders. Wraps around to tangle his fingers in my hair on the blue pillow. He laughs at the ceiling and then, in the silence, the spots of darkening blue cotton by his cheek spread.
-I have another brother, he says. Present tense.
-My father was not so powerful again. He argued with them. Leave him here, why do you take my son? But the soldiers said this is his country, he must fight.
He’s just a kid, his dad said.

Eventually the bullets ran out, the tanks stalled, the nights were silent for months. For years. When the other boys came home they weren’t boys anymore, unrecognisable in their prickly faces and sinewed limbs. As stiff inside as the corpses they’d created.
-your brother? they each said, exhaling tobacco between shots of home brewed whisky.
-don’t know him, they each said, turning back to their girly magazines until finally one said,
-I think he crossed the border. But he wasn’t sure. But hope was better than grief.

So my lover’s other brother, the tangible one, crossed the border too. Woke before dawn for yet another bus to yet another dusty town, looking always for the one right face among the stares from skins much darker and a language less ancient. Returned only with the heavy weight that words might cement what an unspoken concensus said
-leave unsaid. The disappeared can reappear. The dead do nothing.
But that was years ago, and now silver peppers the spirals of the tangible brother’s beard and his belly resists the pull of the belt.

My lover on his back puts his arm across his eyes and sobs like little boys at gunpoint don’t dare do.
-sorry he says, like soldiers never do.

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Tags:

africa, lover, soldiers and war