we were, weren’t we? wed we were, we were once, we were, were

—orderly, quiet, dignified, brave. On the other side of the mound, where two young women and the grandmother are going now, the dead have placed themselves in neat rows across an acre-square grave. The next victims clamber awkwardly to the top of the pile where they’ll be shot by a young man with a submachine gun and a cigarette. Some of the dead have not yet died. They tremble their heads and elevate their arms, and their pardons are begged as they’re stepped on; however, the wounded worry only that the earth will cover their open eyes; they want to be shot again; but the bullets bring down only those above them, and for a few the weight is eventually so great it crushes their chests. How nice and white death is. So serene. I close the book to answer the phone.

Sometimes a foot slips on the blood-wet bodies, and a fat woman slides face forward down the stack when she is hit. As the next line climbs, there are quiet words to the wounded, and an occasional caress. From the gunman’s end, of course, the mound looks like a field full of false hair. Millions die eventually, in all ways. Millions. What songs, what paintings, poems, arts of playing, were also buried with them, and in what number? who knows what inventions, notions, new discoveries, were interred, burned, drowned? what pleasures for us all bled to death on the ice of a Finnish lake? what fine loaves both baked and eaten, acres of cake; what rich emotions we might later share; how many hours of love were lost, like sand down a glass, through even the tiniest shrapnel puncture?

Of course one must count the loss of a lot of mean and silly carking too. Thousands of thieves, murderers, shylocks, con men, homos, hoboes, wastrels, peevish clerks, shysters, drunkards, hopheads, Don Juans, pipsqueaks, debtors, premature ejaculators, epileptics, fibbers, frigid females, faddists, nags, nailbiters and bed wetters, frumps, fanatics, friggers, bullies, cripples, fancy ladies, got their just deserts, and were hacked apart or poisoned, driven mad or raped and even sabered, or simply stood in a field and starved like wheat without water; and we shall never know how many callow effusions we were spared by a cutthroat; how many slanderous tongues were severed; what sentimental love songs were choked off as though in mid-note by the rope; the number of the statues of Jesus, Mary, or the pope, whose making was prevented by an opportune blindness or the breaking of the right bones; what canvases depicting mill wheels in moonlight, cattle at dawn, children and dogs, lay unexecuted on their awls because of the gas, talent thrown out as if it were the random pissing of paint into a bedpan; so that, over all, and on sober balance, there could have been a decided gain; yet there is always the troublesome, the cowardly, midnight thought that a Milton might have been rendered mute and inglorious by an errant bullet through the womb; that some infant, who, as a precocious young man, might conceive a Sistine ceiling for the world, and humble us all with his genius, as he made us proud of our common humanity . . . well, there is always the fear that this not-yet youth has been halved like a peach; that Vermeer, Calderón, or Baudelaire Frege or Fourier (Degas was safely an anti-Semite), could conceivably, oh yes, just might possibly (Wagnerians need never worry), have (Heidegger will be okay, and all his ilk) been (Céline hates with too much style, but his heart is in the right sink) gently carried to his death between a pair of gray-haired arms, which, otherwise, were no longer even strong enough to disturb a clear soup.