that the whole shambles of it made me think of the innards of the armored vehicle I had seen the day before at the center of the city, when taking refuge from bursts of gunfire. Ripped apart by a rocket, it was still smoking and displayed a complex mixture of dislocated machinery, twisted metal, and lacerated human flesh. The force of the explosion had made this chaos astonishingly homogeneous, almost orderly. The electric cables looked like blood vessels, the dashboard, battered and splashed with blood, was like the brain of a rare creature, a futuristic war beast. And, buried somewhere in this lava of death, the radio, undamaged, blared forth its quavering rallying calls. Such a scene was not new to me. Only the sudden, sharp realization that I did not understand was quite new. Sheltering in my hiding place, I said to myself that these men who were killing one another under a cloudless sky lived in a land where epidemics were palpably more efficient at this than armaments; that the cost of one rocket would have sufficed to feed a whole village in this African country; that the money spent on that vehicle would have funded the sinking of hundreds of wells; that the blame for this war must be laid at the door of the Americans and ourselves, for we were fighting each other through intermediary nations, and also of the former colonial powers, who had corrupted the Eden-like state of these lands. But that primitive paradise was a myth, too, for men had always fought, with lances in the past, with rocket launchers today; and the only thing to distinguish the deaths of the occupants of the burned-out armored car from the carnage of their ancestors was the complex fashion in which their deaths, deaths both so individual (beneath a layer of torn-off armor I saw a long, very slender, almost boyish arm with a fine leather bracelet on the wrist) and so anonymous, were swallowed up by the interests of remote powers, their thirst for oil or gold, the cut and thrust of their bureaucratic diplomacy, their demagogic doctrines. And even by the petty concerns and anticipated pleasures of that arms dealer I had seen, two days before the fighting broke out, getting onto the plane for London. He had given his name as Ron Scalper and seemed like a very ordinary sales representative. He sought to accentuate his ordinariness by handing over his briefcase to security with a tourist's naive clumsiness, mopping his brow in front of the person checking his passport. Yes, that soldier's death was insidiously linked to the relief this man feels once he is seated in the plane, turning up the ventilation control and closing his eyes, already transported into the antechamber of the civilized world. By the same tortuous routes, that wrist, with its leather bracelet, reaches out into the life of the woman whom the man on the London plane can already picture, offering herself naked, yielding to his desire, the young mistress he has earned for himself by taking all those risks. Our age, I thought, is nothing more than a monstrous organism that digests gold, oil, politics, and wars, and secretes pleasure for some, death for others. A gigantic stomach that churns up and blends together things that, in our shame and hypocrisy, we keep separate. The young mistress, at this very moment moaning beneath her arms dealer, would utter a cry of indignation if I told her her happiness (for, no doubt, they call it happiness) is inseparably linked to that childish bracelet stained with grease and blood!
I got up, wanting to confide these thoughts to you in all their despairing simplicity: no, I do not begin to understand this grotesque organism, for there is nothing to understand. I crossed our room in the darkness streaked with reflections from the flames, I joined you at the window.
"One day it must be possible to tell the truth." I was going to give you my reply: the truth about our age was a young body steeped in beauty creams, the human flesh the arms
Ann Voss Peterson, J.A. Konrath