lineofbattlechapter3part1

"All you could hear was that enormous screaming." Rufina Amaya Marquez, sole survivor of the massacre at El Mozote, El Salvador. (Mark Danner, 'The Truth of El Mozote,' The New Yorker, December 6, 1993.)

"Sometimes democracy must be bathed in blood." Augusto Pinochet, former Dictator of Chile.

                                               - three -

        Dirt shifted back and forth in the sifter, rustling as it fell through the screen. Kurzan set up a rhythm as he worked. Mara kneeled and leaned her cheek on the ground. Then, with care, brushed away another layer of soil. She cupped her palm over the rounded bone. A skull.
        It was slow work, this resurrection.
        Kurzan stopped sifting. She watched him finger a fragment of bone. He was such a good boy, really. She couldn't be angry with him. An orphan, she put his age somewhere around thirteen. But it was hard to tell. He already had that look in the eyes. They all did, the natives. As though something tremendous happened at this altitude.
        He slept in the lean-to down in their camp, every night seating himself upon his prayer rug. She fell asleep listening to his murmurs, om mane padme hum. Every morning, he rolled the rug and set it to the side. She caught herself watching, worried. He was just a boy, after all.
        Several weeks had passed since she and Fin had driven up into the mountains. Before the bombings and the shootings began, they'd had quite a lot of help from the local people, unearthing the remains in the cavern. But now it was only Kurzan. So Mara had spent her time entirely on this single skeleton, a female buried in a squatting position with the palms of the hands facing up. The burial position of a shaman.
        That day, there were only three of them at the site. The rest of the team, five men including Fin, had remained at camp. Gentile, a large black man with dual Ph.D.'s in archeology and visual arts, sat cross-legged on the other side of their shallow excavation. He had big hands and thick fingers. But he drew delicate pictures with long beautiful curves. She had to suppress her urge to touch his drawings. She wondered about herself, wondered if you could do that with a life, or say, just one day. To live a simple curve in a day you would have to suppress your urge to touch. Because, she thought, it was possible that touching could alter, could distort the arc that gave so much pleasure just in itself. That gentle sweep.
        She readjusted one of the lamps and leaned close to look. The spine. Completely intact. A marvelous double curve. She could almost swoon at the sight of it. It scribed an arc a living spine could not. It could make you fall into smothering darkness, she thought. This spine. Its gentle rebuff. The way it turns back upon itself.
        She saw it as a simple matter of mechanics. Of bone pressing bone until it bends well past the point of breaking.

                                                      *

        They all had M16's, she will say to her father three years later when she finally returned to the states. It was obvious. The soldiers had been trained and outfitted by American Special Forces.
        They weren't soldiers, he'll answer in a calm voice. They were insurgents. They were terrorists.
        She will say nothing. She'll use a particular weapon one time only. Survival teaches an exact manner of assessment. The instinct was strong in her. Because of their similarities, she had an innate understanding of her father, his propensity for adaptation, a mark of animals that face high levels of stress in the surrounding environment.

                                                    *

        From that point on, everything happened fast. When she, Gentile, and Kurzan returned to the base camp later in the afternoon, Dodd, one of the grad students, met them at the truck. Mara heard little pops far off, gunfire. Yellow smoke billowed from behind the west ridge. Gentile shaded his eyes, gazing upward.
        "The insurgents," Dodd said. And before he went on, she felt already as if a band had tightened about her throat. It's the smoke, she thought, the yellow haze. Looking out across the weeds, she saw a faint line of gold where the smoke had settled.
        Uranium.
        Their base camp sat at the edge of a long narrow meadow, subalpine, filled with low brush and wildflowers. A stream, runoff from a glacier, cut the meadow in two. Years ago, it had been the site of a small mining operation. One of the early ones that never paid out.
        "They blew a side shaft,"ť Dodd said, "caving the supports."
        As he spoke, another blast rumbled. Kurzan opened the passenger door and stood on the running board, staring at the surge of yellow-black smoke that poured into the sky above them. Mara suppressed an urge to run. Dodd shaded his eyes, looking up. He need not have said the next bit. It was simple to deduce.
        "We've been ordered out ASAP,"ť Dodd said. "Get packing."
        Mara later remembered how everything that surrounded her seemed to deepen in color, as if overlaid in red. And damp, she thought as she helped Gentile tag and pack each piece they'd brought down that day. She kept rubbing her neck, the backs of her hands, and her palms, because she felt wet. And later, while she waded through weeds in the meadow, pollen stuck to her skin. She felt resinous, golden.
        In the meadow itself, the yellow haze had thickened. She covered her mouth with her shirt. Secondary blasts rumbled. Plumes of smoke rose.
        A helicopter burst over the ridge to her right, blitzing upslope. It passed directly above her. She saw men with weapons trained downward. They wore black. And then they flew across the sun. A red spot floated in her vision, but she ran now. The whaps of the propeller thudded in her chest, then lessened, indistinct. Within a few seconds, it was gone.
        The Black Battalion.
        She felt ill, running fast now. The Black Battalion. It couldn't be. Not here. Not now.
        She came at the mouth of the old mine shaft from the side. They stored bones and relics in the shaft. It was cool, dark, and dry. She saw Schelli, one of her fellows from Harvard. Schelli's voice was too loud. That was how Schelli liked to do things. Loudly. He was loud all over his body. Little details that she was not aware that she saw.
        Later she will recognize these kinds of details. They will become her foreground. Because of this, much that she sees at that later time will at first be unrecognizable. She will think of herself as learning the world new. And she will seem strange to those that knew her before. Obstinate, some will say. But it has to do with details. It has to do with her hands and with her fingers. And with living each day as a curve. It will take all of her attention, that kind of life. Because by that time, her spine will have been bent well past the point of breaking. It is natural, she will learn, the only course possible, given the arc that had been scribed.
        A matter of transfer, Caine had said in the car. And at the time, she wasn't thinking it could happen so soon, so close.
        So when she came upon Schelli being loud that afternoon, she didn't immediately connect the two. Fin and Schelli were arguing because there were too many crates in the storage area. The numbers didn't match.
        It was Mara's job to keep an accounting of every artifact, where it was packed and how many crates they had in storage.
        "This is what you get,"ť Schelli said with his loud voice.
        Meaning, Mara assumed, this is what you get when you leave a woman in charge.
        Schelli tried to push past Fin. But Fin blocked the entrance to the cavern and shoved Schelli back.
        "What the fuck, Shelli?"ť Fin said and his clipboard clattered on the rock. And Schelli lost his balance. But then Schelli's fists were clenched and Mara could clearly see where it was going.
        This is when Fin saw Mara. She thought that Fin looked embarrassed, ashamed. And Shelli turned and glared at her with his loud body and face. But he lowered his fists. He brushed past her, leaving in a huff.
        Fin handed Mara the clipboard and asked her to verify the count before loading.
        Perhaps it would have been better, she thought much later, if they'd fought. Or, she conceded, if I'd never fucked Delphau. And then she'd stop. And she'd remember how it didn't hurt at all, the way everything began, with Delphau's silken cock.

                                                     *

        Mara lay in bed staring at the rafters. She couldn't sleep. It reminded her of her long period of insomnia during her teens. Only then it had been El Salvador, Honduras. She was thirteen when Iran-Contra broke. During her first year at Chatham, she stayed glued to C-span, watching the Congressional hearings. She'd seen her father's testimony.
        Two things were clear to her at the time. He was lying. He felt no guilt.
        Her father's conviction on misdemeanor charges of lying to Congress came during her senior year. He was pardoned by the president while she was home for Christmas break from her first year at Harvard.
        And so, she found herself traveling farther and farther from home. She completed her grad work north of Pokhara and landed her first field assignment in the beautiful desolate mountains of Ladakh.
        Her father complained about it constantly, the distance she put between them. Miles. Thousands of miles.
        You'll have to stop punishing me for what happened in the eighties, he said to her.
        What's done is done.
        She sat up, rubbing her eyes. Rain beat on the roof.
        Her room was filled with guilt. She saw it in her boots sitting on the floor. She saw it in the walls, the doorway, the darkness itself. Yes. That was where guilt was most evident. And not just any guilt. Her guilt.
        It was like a drug, that guilt. It ran in a straight line, directly back to the same place it always went. El Mozote, El Salvador. One hundred and forty-three remains were exhumed at El Mozote before the excavation team was ordered to stop. All but twelve were children. The small skeleton of a fetus was found between the pelvic bones of an adult female.
        It was only the beginning. The tip of the iceberg. The massacre had occurred in 1983. But it took ten years before the government of El Salvador allowed a team in to start digging. Why? Because her father worked with others to obscure the truth. After all, it was the Cold War. A time when Americans would do anything, even something abhorrent, for the good of. . .what? Democracy? Folgers Coffee Democracy? Chiquita Banana Democracy?
        Mara slid to the edge of the bed and stared out the window. It was pitch black. And outside, rain fell in sheets.
        She felt sick.
        A little nausea is normal, her father once told her. Especially right before you win.
        Mr. Spiff's sunglasses had gleamed when she sat in the car with Caine. You'll know it when you see it, he said.
        Don't disappoint me, Caine said before he dropped her back at the hotel. He took her hand. I wouldn't want to see you harmed.
        Amazing, she thought. How it happens so fast.
        She would tell Fin. Of course she would. Through most of the time left, she adamantly meant to tell Fin. Because she'd spent the evening going through every crate in the mineshaft. She'd found seven extra crates to be correct. They weren't full. That would have been a give away. They would have been much too heavy. And they weren't shielded,         Goddammit.
        She felt sick again, not sure if it was her nerves or the yellowcake. Seven crates of it. Not enriched, but feedstock for enrichment to weapons grade.
        You want to believe they have your best interests at heart, men like her father and Caine. You spend a lot of time convincing yourself.
        Yellowcake. How much does it take? How easy is it to enrich? Better question. Where is it being sent?
        Yes, there'd been some nasty fallout between Caine and her father. The lines of battle had gone to shit.
        Low-intensity, low resource warfare was the term the French had given to terrorism. They'd coined the phrase, guerre sale - dirty war.
        Seven crates of it.
        Insure the transfer.
        Bastard.
        She'll tell Fin. Of course she will.
        She chewed her thumbnail, a habit her father hated.
        Harm. Was Caine serious?
        But she knew the answer.
        Schelli, she thought. He spent a lot of time alone at camp. Enough time to slip in some Uranium? Maybe. But it could be any of them. Shit. It could even be Fin.
        Mara reached under her pillow and grabbed her pistol. Funny. It didn't help her feel any better.
        And it kept raining. She walked to the window. She heard the roar of the chute as the runoff poured down the mountain.
        So, she thought, listening. The madness of the monsoons. We can't evacuate anywhere until the chute clears.
        El Mozote.
        She woke herself later, whispering the name in the dark.

                                                   *

        She'd fallen asleep with the pistol still in her hand. Mara rolled over, listening. She didn't know how long she lay like that. But then it wormed its way into her consciousness.
        Silence.
        The rain had stopped. And so had the distant gunfire.
        Mara dressed in the dark, fumbling. Outside, the night sky was crystal clear. Above and to the west, the planet Mars had brightened, dropping toward the horizon. A faint rose color spread above the eastern ridge. The crows started a ruckus on the far side of the meadow. She smelled weeds, pines, and water.
        Mara heard footsteps behind her in the dark. She turned, pistol in hand.
        Fin walked out of the mist.
        "Mara?"
        And Mara noticed in that moment of Fin saying her name, that his voice was smooth in her mind, like a road. And she loved the quality of smoothness in his voice. And not just his voice. She loved Fin's hands and his fingers.
        She looked down at the gun, embarrassed. He walked beside her in the damp and put his arm around her shoulders. They both stood and listened. Because down slope, the chute roared. Neither of them spoke the obvious. It would be at least another twenty-four hours before they could leave. As for Mara, she didn't trust her voice. Her guilt would have been too clear.
        Fin yawned and turned to go back.
        'Wait," she said, reaching for him. "We need to talk."

                                                    *

        Dawn broke. Rain had scrubbed the sky. She and Fin sat in the office. She'd already explained about Caine and the threats. She was just about to say the word 'yellowcake.'ť
        That's when she heard Dodd say, oh shit. Dodd said oh shit a lot. But this time it was different. She remembered grabbing her pistol. She remembered Dodd running in from outside, tucking his penis back into his shorts.
    Fucking Dodd, she thought. Always fucking pissing.
        Dodd stood stock still in the doorway, staring at Mara and Fin. His lips moved, but no sound came out. Schelli, in boxers and T-shirt, tumbled out of the room he shared with another of the grad students. Schelli crossed the main room and pushed past Dodd, out into the meadow.
        A warbler sang, sip ti ti sip. Sip ti ti sip.
        Fin went out next. She was a step behind Fin. He swung around and grabbed her by the shoulders, pushing her back.
        It was too late.
        The sky in the west scuttled, turquoise and gray where the clouds broke. In the east, a thick brown scum glowed bright orange at its belly. The fog, thin and torn, reflected brilliant orange all around them as though the air itself had caught fire.
        The warbler, farther off, took up again. The meadow weeds steamed. She shivered from the cold as Fin pulled her away.
        Kurzan's body dripped, still wet from the rain. His chest was bare. He wore no shoes. His pants hung low, caught up on his penis. He hung from a rope that circled his neck twice, but he didn't look to have died that way. A mining stake had been driven through his forehead.
Kurzan's hair smoked, the damp burned off by the sun.

                                                   *

        When she finally flew out of Kathmandu several years later, she had a military escort. It was all very silly, but by that time, she no longer thought of things as being silly or not silly. A young doctor had been sent to meet her. He gave her a brief physical and then accompanied her in the transport jet on the flight to Berlin. In Germany, a private jet waited.
        They kept her arrival back in the states a secret. She should have asked for a lawyer, but the doctor had sedated her. She wouldn't have been given a lawyer anyway. Not even her father wanted that. She could have valuable information. No one really knew, did they?
        Once back in the states, she didn't know about Fin for several months. She didn't ever know a lot of things. Like the location of the hospital where they took her. She never saw another patient. They gave her a complete physical. Then the questioning started, and the drugs and the hypnosis. She would later think they had been very kind to her.