Читать книгу War/Peace - Matthew Vandenberg - Страница 19

Never before has it looked so large, massive, and alive. Never before has it looked like a fallen grey cloud, sharp, jagged and scary, hideous and frightening like an angry monster rising from the depths of a deep blue sea. It fills my field of vision as though it is a noxious gas, stealing air from my lungs with tentacles that stretch through the stale air and down deep into my esophagus.

I catch my breath as I try hard to take in the view, the shimmering picture of devastation before me, metal teeth like large braces floating in the sea as though they hang from a broken jaw. Then I focus on a single metallic pole, so jagged and frayed, torn and tarnished, and my spine – once so nimble – freezes. Salt water accumulates in my eye ducts as though falling from above in the way seagulls swoop down onto a wharf in anticipation of a feast. And my vision becomes blurred.

The sun still sits in the sky but it's hard to see it behind the salt water in my eyes and the thick, grey smoke that runs like lava the length of the city skyline, and above and beyond. I can still breath but this is so hard. I could be at the top of the highest mountain, caught in a snowstorm on a ridge of Everest, I could be an astronaut stepping onto the moon's surface, I could be an underwater explorer stepping onto an underwater surface just as expansive as the moon's, but I'm a healthy young man standing on a new shore on the south side of the Sydney harbor. It's new because a promenade once ran the stretch on which I now stand: it ran a healthy marathon along the waterfront, and now this run is nothing but rubble, frozen, still and dead.

I sit down. There is little more I can do now. I see few signs of life, no animals and no humans, no kookaburras, blue-tongue lizards, wombats, or echidnas, no possums, red-backs, funnel-webs, or platypuses, and certainly no other humans. Not right here. Not right now. I'm in the heart of Sydney and it's just after five and still the entire area is deserted. I stare at a stretch of Sydney's major artery, now comfortably numb, half-submerged in the chilly harbor water. Indeed the Harbour Bridge, the famous Coathanger, no longer links the north shore to the south shore. No links exist anymore. None whatsoever.

I place my head in my hands. They slide along my wet cheeks before my forehead comes to rest in the palms, like a frog settling down on a lily pad for the night, lost and alone. To say that I'm lost is an understatement. I'm stranded now, imprisoned in the south. There's simply no way I can make it back to the north. Lying like logs, lining the stretch of harbor in front of me are the largest crocodiles I have ever seen, so large I can make out the scales on their backs: gigantic nails the color army green. On my wrist I can see the letter N. One single letter, one strange anagram also which can be read up, down, left, or right. This mark, a thick tattoo, identifies me as a north-sider, and also a nightwalker, or nightrunner as the case may now be, for I must now lie low for fear of what south-siders might do to me if they catch me here. Which is fine, I guess, if you don't mind roaming the streets every night and hiding every day, walking freely only in places no one else will go, places so dangerous, so gloomy, and so rank that you cannot help but be overwhelmed by fear the moment you venture into such an area. Before the war began I was treated like a third class citizen. But this was before the war began, before the south turned on the north, and before Central became a war zone. Now I'm treated like vermin.

I stand up and look at one part of the Harbour Bridge which still remains intact, a single tower like a single mast, like the tall flagpole that stands stubbornly in the North Korean town just shy of the demilitarized zone. Across the dirty water I can just make out another tower, just a little smaller but just a little shinier.

I shrug.

The feud between the north and the south has been going on for much longer than most people believe. I could cite religious differences as the reason behind the conflict, but the root causes cannot really be categorized so easily, in just the way the abstract for a scientific article does not explain in detail all aspects of a piece of research. The south side of Sydney has for long been the side where most Catholic churches lie, while the north side has for long been home to a large population of Protestants. Therefore, naturally, Protestants have over time migrated to the north, and Catholics to the south, while Atheists or Agnostics have generally wandered freely between the sides without a conscious awareness of the division, perhaps completely ignorant or disinterested.

This division eventually split the Sydney Harbour Bridge in two. Now I stand here, hands deep in my pockets, shocked, stunned, scared, exhausted, and disappointed. I hear a safe house exists somewhere in Bondi, a place where north-siders stranded in the south can take refuge: a place where north-siders do not refer to south-siders as SS or Gestapo, and a place where south-siders do not refer to north-siders as nightwalkers lacking a sense of moral righteousness. A place where the area north of the Sydney Harbour Bridge is not referred to as Sodom, and the south as Stalag Luft S. There is indeed a place where we are all free men.

******

References

1 Poison – The Prodigy