Medals

An enormous explosion threw the boy out of his bed. He woke up on the carpeted floor, wiping out with his left hand the crumbs of an interrupted dream. The room shook up as another bomb detonated nearby with ear-piercing noise. Shimmering red patches of light flared up in the dark ink of the night. Mother rushed into the room panic-stricken taking him down in a hurry to the bomb shelter. This was merely a basement shared with other people during the bomb raids. When the sirens sounded the all clear sign it was already morning. In the apartment the latched doors had burst off their hinges. The window glasses shattered into a variety of splinters and the striped curtain in the living room became a colony of ribbons. Looking out of the windowless room he saw long tongues of flames shooting up from an incendiary bomb that fell on the pavement. And then starting with a strange swishing sound, like the tearing of a delicate lustrous fibre, the walls of a house across the street folded up in a loud rumbling thunder. Mother later told him that the collapsing building buried several people, including children. A boy of his age was among them. She looked at him with a curious expression which he never saw before and it made him feel very uncomfortable. “Oh”, sighed mother, “war is so terrible, so cruel and futile. It is made by dour and stupid men in uniforms, decorated with many medals, who really never grew up.” “But father also had many medals”, the boy said. Mother looked at him gently for a while. “Yes, indeed, he had”, she said. There was great sadness in her eyes.