At home it smelled like sulfur, burned flesh and dirt. Dust was clogging his nostrils, drying his skin so that later it would be cracking and his lips would bleed for days. Robert’s limbs were heavy and his head was hollow. He wasn’t there. Sometimes it felt like he wasn’t there at all.
‘Stay,’ his distant cousin said to him when he first arrived at her place. Robert remembered the words but not himself at that moment. ‘You can stay here, I swear.’ She also promised to try to find him a job and then looked at him with pity as he was lying down on her couch.
It was a good job that she found for him through her friends. Cones, barrels, signs. Bulldozers, jackhammers, concrete pumps. Construction never was Robert’s passion, but it was bearable. He would feel exhausted by the end of the day and fall asleep instantly on that same couch without even noticing the way his cousin glanced at him now.
He would assist the pavers laying hot asphalt on the road. He would remove damaged pavements. He would spray concrete with certain compounds. Occasionally the tasks would differ. Once in a while Robert would fix the road after the military machines would run through them and gravel would roll under his feet. The feeling would bring him both terror and nostalgia in equal measures.
‘Everything will be alright, I swear,’ his mother used to say but it was hard to believe even when he was little.
Robert didn’t feel safe in this small town that was supposed to become his new home. The life there felt terribly normal, so orderly and quiet that it appeared to be on the verge of collapse. Robert had this feeling that he had no one to talk to about, the instinct that this too was going to end soon and that he was the only one who was grasping it.
Sometimes by the end of the working day he would stink of sweat, or his clothes would smell like paint. And some days his skin would be covered in dust and mud but maybe it only felt that way. Robert’s loneliness sharpened greatly when he would look at his colleagues having lunch together, telling disgusting jokes to each other, petting each other on the back. At those moments he felt the trace of something in himself, that terrible thing that was there but couldn’t be touched.
His cousin told him to never speak a word about where he came from – though where he came from meant what happened to him – and what happened meant what he was. Not a word about it. Not a word about what you are. Not a word about the way Robert’s heart would sink when helicopters were flying too low above the ground. Not a word of the way he would be about to puke when some smells got too strong. And especially not a word of the way the world would feel like it was about to crack open.
‘You are safe now, I swear,’ his grandma used to say.
‘It’s going to be okay, I swear,’ he heard his cousin’s voice. It was gentle and irritated and it was mixing up with a bunch of other voices from Robert’s memories, whispering promises, taking oaths, breaking their vows.
‘That’s fine, I swear.’
‘This is going to end soon, I swear.’
‘Swear, this isn’t going to end this way.’
‘This can’t happen here, I swear.’
‘I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute…’
Robert woke up once more, on the couch in his cousin’s flat, having that same terrible dream. In his sleepy mind it was bursting and banging, loud, and the sound of bombs landing on the city was intermingling with the voices and the sound of jackhammer digging into the concrete, bursting it open, and then the sound of asphalt being purred on the ground, in the same place again and again.
Then he saw a tank on the road one day, on the spot that his crew had fixed before. His skin was sweaty. Why, Robert thought, does war have to make everyone filthy?
‘We don’t know anything about you, man.’
Robert struggled to realize his coworkers were speaking to him. He paid no attention to the beginning of the conversation so now he found himself puzzled, not knowing the right thing to say.
‘Me,’ he said finally. ‘I’m okay.’ They stared at him for a few seconds that felt like weeks and then got back to their usual pretty meaningless and, for that reason, charming discussions, back to ignoring whatever it was that was happening around them. Robert smelled something in the air, something bitter, and since the men didn’t seem to notice the odor, he wasn’t sure whether he hallucinated that smell, whether it was a memory, and if so, whether it was of the past, or of the forthcoming.
Robert woke up from his nightmares. Robert didn’t talk much. Robert turned up for his shift. As the machines were working loud, once in a while Robert would cover his ears. Sometimes he would disappear from everyone’s gaze to throw up from the overstimulating scent that no one but him sensed.
It’s a good job, Robert would think during those moments. This doesn’t matter at all, he swore to himself. And as the road became covered in holes from all the bombs hit and as it really started to smell like sulfur and dirt and as the emergency sound systems were banging on his ear drums, he felt like he was, for once in his life, right. The war that started long ago began again and it still didn’t matter at all.
