He was lagging behind the rest of the men. Trudging with heaving feet, his boots strangled in mud. He felt beyond exhausted. Each footfall was an effort. He no longer felt the blisters as he walked. The men plodded towards a small town. They crossed a stone bridge. He was almost oblivious to the deep river that meandered beneath it. Ahead of him the town was a shell. Buildings had been reduced to rubble. Nothing was left and the whole place felt hollow. Another empty town: another point to secure.
The damage in the city gave away hints to the lives that its occupants had once led. There was a broken piano listing sideways near what once must have been a cafe. The piano’s ivory keys had been spat onto the pavement. This was where they stopped. The men ejected their packs, leaning them against a cobblestone, tumbledown wall. The men unwrapped their rifles from their bodies, and stretched the weight off their shoulders. He was the last to arrive and did the same as the other men. He was desperately trying to unload the agonizing stiffness from his body. The rest of the men began to smoke, and he drifted away from them. The smell of acrid tobacco was something he couldn’t face. The young man found himself arriving at the gaping mouth of a doorless home. It’s glass windows had been blown out and littered the pavement. He sat on some of the brick and concrete that had collapsed from the house’s structure and undid his boots. The laces were grimy. He looked at his shaking hands: his knuckles bloody and split from the cold and the damp. Removing the boots were an agony as he smudged layers of open blisters at his heels. His socks were blood-stuck to his feet. He clenched his jaw as he exposed his sore, bare soles. His shoulders were slumped, his head hanging into his hands. A picture of dejection. After a time the soldier absently lifted his gaze to the interior of the broken house. He felt like an intruder as his eyes drifted between personal objects that had been abandoned when the family had fled the destruction. There were moldy books with splayed out pages stuck between the rubble. A face-down painting leaned against a broken armchair. A wooden table was splintered against the floor. His eye was drawn something hidden beneath the wreckage. It looked like a small, circular leather pouch. He stood up slowly, and began to pick his way through the rubble. The young man reached for the pouch. It lay comfortably in the palm of his hand. He ran his fingers over the scuffed leather and then clicked it open. Inside was a steel fly reel complete with the thin thread of fishing line. It felt familiar, a relic from a previous life. Another time. He found the end of the line and tugged it quickly, remembering the sing of the reel as it turned. For the first time in months, the beginnings of a smile appeared at the edges of his mouth. He wound the line back and then placed the reel into its pouch. Then he began to explore the rubble. The soldier removed chunks of plaster, fragments of wallpaper and crumbled bricks. He was only just eighteen years old: a boy in a man’s body. If one had watched him squirrel around the destruction, one might be forgiven in thinking him a child on a treasure hunt. But there was a slow despondency to his movements that gave a hint of spent maturity begrudgingly earned. There was a lack of hope. Suddenly his body language changed, his shoulders lifted and his heart began to feel less worn out. He bend down and gently lifted the long tube of a rod case. It was creased near one end from the weight of a collapsed roof beam, but a sparkle of possibility had begun to emerge in his eyes. He dusted off the case in a broad sweep of his hand and then unzipped the top. Inside, he tenuously pitched the edge of a material bag between two fingers. The young man gently pulled the bag from within its case, feeling for the ribs of a fishing rod. He took the bag outside, feeling like he had found a hidden present. He unwrapped the bag, finding the two pieces of a varnished cane fly rod. It was intact and only one of the steel eyes needed to be bent straight. He squeezed the two rod pieces together and held the cork handle. The faint indentations from the fingers of its absent owner were smooth in his hand. He flicked the rod above his head, listening to the whip of its movement. The creased grin transformed into a smile. The first in months. With the reel locked against the handle and the line neatly fed from eye to eye, he placed the rod on the ground. Memories of happier times were at the foreground of his mind. The chatter of the other soldiers, the cold, and the past few months began to evaporate, if only for a moment. Barefoot, he went back to his pack and rummaged through a side pocked to find some tape and a pair of pliers. The other soldiers ignored his movements as they always had; they didn’t see the purpose in his step. It was nothing new. He had never felt that he belonged in this knot of other men. When he returned to the broken home, the young man began searching the rubble again. When he emerged, he had found a nail stud from some furniture and feathers from a burst cushion. He had also scratched some horse hair from the padding of a rumpled settee. He worked away the thread from a seam in his jacket and cut some wool from his sock. He placed the nail in the teeth of the pliers began to bend it into the arc of a hook. Once that was done, he fashioned an eyelet which would anchor the fishing gut. Satisfied with its shape, he then taped the plier’s handle together so that to hook was held firm in its grasp. Wedging the pliers between two bricks, and on his haunches, he began to fashion a fly from his hook. He wound the wool, thread and feathers and hair around trying to imitate a mayfly. His hands found their way around the hook with an old familiarity. After some time, he was satisfied by the product of his imitation. The young man then retrieved the rod, pulled out a length of line and threaded the fishing gut through the hook. He shrugged off his military jacket and then made his way back to the river. With every footstep towards the stream, the violence of his life began to recede. He chose a break between some gnarled trees and made his way down the bank. There was a patch of pebbled sand which hurt his feet and then he was in the water. Upstream he saw some telltale rises. Something was feeding gentle off the surface. He distracted himself from the cold by drawing out more line and deciding where he would aim his first cast. He chose what looked like a deep pool that looked slower than the fast-running water that pushed against his shins. With a beautiful arc of his arm, he conducted the rod into looping notes of line. With a final flourish, he threw the fly towards the pool. It landed gently on the surface, ebbing with the current not quite where he wanted it. He drew in the slack, his eye focused on the fly. Nothing... For his second cast, the memory began to return to his arms more readily. With a swish, the infinity of line looped behind him, gained momentum, and landed in a neat seam across the water during his forward cast. The fly landed perfectly. It was gentle. Enticing. He stripped in the line too quickly, excitement and recollections taking their firm hold of his mind. There was a rise. An abrupt swallowing of the water. His heart beat quicker into his throat. And the fish disappeared, leaving his fly untouched. And so it was that the young man made his way along the stream. His footing became more sure over the slippery rocks, his body measuring the current. He cast towards the rises he saw, desperately hoping that one of them would plunge his fly deep into the water. Time seemed to elapse without him knowing and the town became a speck in the distance. The conflict that had knotted his shoulders were massaged away and he remembered a simpler time. He thought about afternoons stalking trout in the Drakensberg streams. He thought about walks in the mountains with his father and their collie, Impi. He thought of the day he tracked one of the Nguni calves into a deep kranz where he was forced to spend the night after the weather had turned. It had been a long time since he had thought of anything other than foxholes, keeping his rifle clean and the paralyzing fear of gunshots. The artistry returned as his mind wandered. He traced a signature in the air with the line, and threw the fly to the water’s edge of the opposite bank. It was smooth and flowing and wonderful. The fly drifted over ripples made in the water. And then it was gone. It was taken into the deep caverns of the river. Pulling tight, the line stretched away from him. Almost by instinct the young man struck the tip of the rod upwards, and the line unzipped the water, sending with it a spray of liquidity. The reel began to whine as it stripped out the line. The fish was running fast. He gained better footing, and as he did so, everything went slack. He furiously clawed the line back in. There was an explosion in the water in front of him. The silver silhouette of a fish danced on its tail, straddling the surface. And then it was gone in a splash. He was connected to the fish and felt its life through the line as it darted beneath the water. He let out a yelp: it burst from his lungs with a boyish innocence and bounded over the water. Life seemed better. The trout ran again and the boy was lost in his fishing. And then he felt the sound of a blast in his chest. It almost knocked the young man over. Behind him there was an eruption of frantic shouting. Panic. Men’s voices. And then flames. They exploded over the town in the distance and licked at the edges of the stream. An empty stone returned to the pit of his stomach and fear clawed towards his neck. He glanced at the carnage over his shoulder. And then looked back and the arc of his fishing rod...
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ContentSome thoughts about things, sometimes philosophical, sometimes just musings. The world through my eyes... Archives
March 2023
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