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This was the afterglow- the sky was clear now, clear blue, like a watercolour on soft paper. Hunks of displaced concrete squatted, tired elephants on the tarmac. Once they had been pillars and walls. Now they cast ugly, ripped shadows on the road under them. All across Reitermann Strasse, and beyond that as well. The glass from shop fronts and automobiles was tossed here and there like skirf from a sick scalp. Two releif gold letters that had once spelled out the name of a popular bank: V K. Isolated now, cracked and on their sides. V K, the only caption to the scene.
Silence. The cry of a lost bird. Near-silence. The cry of a lost Nightingale only intimates the sheer silence around it, like a man drowning at sea. Silence like a white wall with no cracks. No more voices, save for the lonely vogel who turned it's curious mottled head to the side, whistled from his perch perplexed and then dissappeared, flapping it's way to a distant, leafless tree.
At the far end of the street rose the hump of the bridge of saints, saintless now. Their bodies had been snapped at the ankle by blasts, and thrown over the parapets, and they rested in the grey water below. They left the cobbles of the bridge flanked on both sides by blocks and pulpits where pairs of brass feet remained, shawn off after ten inches and blackened by fire.
The bird whistled again, loud as a lion roaring in this noiseless city. It couldn't wake the saints, who lay under the unmoving stagnant river, knotted up in weeds now, for there was a dam of debris at each rivermouth and the water had come still.
Another form had joined the saints; it had come with a howl in the night, defecating left right and below with hurtling, whistling bombs. It had come with noise and fireworks, and they had pulled it down, the great, darting dragonfly, they'd pulled it down with anti-aircraft bullets and it had smashed into the water with a keening yell, and now the sunken bomber might never have existed, silenced and sainted, joining the ranks of the drowned canons.
It's brother had laid a hole in the dome of the old Kirk that waited between two towers at the other end of the bridge; the whole front had been blown out. The dome itself was like an egshell; like how, out in the country, they smashed eggshells so that hags couldn't ride in them: the bomber had sent the whole top of it screaming towards the ground, where roof copulated with ceiling in a hot glacier of tumbling stones.
A pair of gargoyles remained, facing eachother across the gutted vestry. First, the Ascetic, bearded and carved in stone five hundred years ago, clung against the wall, his concrete mind fused with the silence and totality of his christ as he swung from the chopsticks, all bloodied and soaked.
Opposing him, the Gryllos, his eyes wide and thin, his belly bare. His tongue lolled from the cruel, leering V of his mouth, and his sex rose up to meet it, achieving the worst a medieval carver could imagine.
The ascetic proposed a round of good, solid penetance. He spoke loftily of the peasantry returning to work, of ration books and slightly forced labour. The return of the Lord unto this place after the dust has settled. A little Jericho had been tumbled for divine sport. That was all.
Gryllos narrowed his eyes and spat. There were no more peasants, they had all gone, buried under bricks, boiled in their cars, or else fleeing across the hills. The printing presses lay empty, although untouched by bomba- by some miracle the propaganda posters still sat in their clasps waiting to be inked and slapped on to cheap paper for posting on every wall.
The Ascetic didn't listen; he chose instead to murmur about sailing a dredger down the river, decked out in flowers, to hoist the saints from the weeds and replace them. The citizenry would flock to see the marvelous event. In any case, the river could now be seen as holy water.
The Gryllos slapped his belly. Holy water now contains dead cats and old piss, does it? And why replace the old saints? We can make a saint of anything we put there. Arise, saint telephone, saint streetlight, saint shoe.
He went unheard again. The ascetic continued to chunder. He hadn't noticed, but a bubble had come to the surface of the water and burst, followed by others. Gryllos watched. There's your saints, rising now. See them. Not tadpoles: baby mosquitoes or nymphs or call them what you will. Six whirring flippers, a long tail and gnashing teeth. The Nightingale flew across the bridge towards the Kirk, pausing to shit with no compunction on the burnt stones that shot by underneath.
There's your saints. Why, the spawn of mosquitoes, that's it: the sunken bomber's given birth to abundant beasts of prey. A monstrous birth. But the Ascetic rambles on, talking about crown princes and holy men, ignoring the shining bulbous eyes of the saints who rise from the foetid silt.
The nightingale whistles, and the Gryllos, aware in his madness, starts to sing back. As they choir together, the one unsure of the other's presence, the walls of the Kirk give a last groan and tumble suddenly to the side, smashing Ascetic and Gryllos alike into bouncing fragments. The bird scoops towards the sky and away as the first saint rears it's needy, pincered head. |
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