There comes a time when she’s had enough. She decides not to go to any more sessions at the local committee that grants pensions to the wounded. She doesn’t care about losing what she’s invested in all the travel back and forth. Nothing justifies the way they treat ex-combatants. She doesn’t expect to be applauded, but she doesn’t think she deserves to be examined like an animal either, or to have everything she says questioned after being forced to confess everything she’d long kept quiet.
Over the phone, the friend of her ex-compañera-in-combat and camp asks her to try and understand. She doesn’t think they’re behaving that way because of anything to do with her, but because of people who might show up to swindle them. When it comes to money, there’s always someone trying to claim what isn’t theirs or what they don’t deserve.
How is it they can’t tell them apart?
They should be able to. Presumably they’ve been trained to.
Really?
The psychiatrist who saw her nearly succeeded in doing what no one had during the war: to make her cry in earnest. She’d asked why she was there when she was obviously fit enough to work for her food, and for that of the daughters she’d irresponsibly given birth to. She’d said they weren’t a charity, that the fund they managed wasn’t for people who’d lost children, that her loss was no one’s responsibility but her own, and that her restless nights were the product of a weak mind, which wasn’t something they could help her with. She didn’t think they should have to pay her for it.
She felt sorry for what the brother who’d been captured during the war had gone through. She had a clearer understanding now of why he’d refused to speak of it till the day he died, and wonders if she did right in pulling him from the hospital where she’d found him. She also thought of a news article she’d read some time ago about an embassy guard who, after repeated insults from one of the employees, had walked in and emptied his weapon into everyone there who’d ever humiliated him. She wondered if the psychiatrist she’d been assigned could detonate the time bombs some of those people might be, and if she really was what the white-coated woman had said. Would she protect her, as a civilian, if something like that happened while she was there, or would she let the offended person settle their outstanding issues with her however they saw fit?
The truth was she’d rather not go back there. She didn’t care whether she was given the benefits or not: she never wanted to feel that way again. She couldn’t fathom how her neighbors had put up with it.
They couldn’t fathom how she’d received notice to collect her pension on the first of the month when some of them hadn’t even gotten a date for a second interview. They thought it unfair: they’d gotten there first, their scars were bigger. What had she done differently? How had she managed to get her pension earlier? How much had they given her?
Very little. The notice explained that the damage she’d sustained didn’t merit full coverage, but that the fund recognized the difficulties that might have resulted from her partial hearing loss.
The people at the local committee had thought it suspicious that the applicant could remember neither the year nor the location of the event in which her hearing had been compromised. They thought the woman might be faking her war wounds: they didn’t believe a girl of her age and weight could endure what she said she had at the age indicated on the form, when stronger and more experienced men had succumbed to less. Even so, to give her the benefit of the doubt, they’d decided to authorize the minimum amount for her impairment.
The woman she can now refer to as her friend, not just as the friend of her ex-compañera-in-combat, asked the members of the commission in what other situation they thought she could have lost her hearing while also getting those scars on her body.
She’d rather not think about it anymore.
Her friend asks if she’d like to appeal the committee’s decision. She could help her fill out the forms if she decided to submit her case for further consideration. Or, at least, join her on the day, just as she had when she’d gone to complete the form that would ensure she’d be seen to, since she couldn’t bring herself to assert her own rights.
Did she think there was any point? They’d just say she was trying to get money out of them by any means possible. There was nothing less dignified.
Except the amount they had given her.
Some hadn’t even gotten that much. The soldiers, for example, had spent years calling for compensation that never arrived. It didn’t matter if her neighbors said they’d been paid for their services while with their battalions or if it had been their duty to their country, she still thought they should be eligible for a similar benefit—war wounds were war wounds, no matter whose side you’d fought on.
Her friend couldn’t give her that: the military had killed her younger sister’s husband and the police had ended her older sister, the one who’d been on every honor roll at the nun’s school. She told her this when she saw her again. She said he’d fallen on a mountain path and she’d been rounded up during a raid on a neighborhood in the capital. She’d been raped, tortured, and then dropped on the beach with the other organized students who’d been with her at the house they were taken from. If some fishermen hadn’t mentioned the bodies that had shown up near where they worked to a woman at the market whose daughter was their mother’s student, they’d have thought her disappeared.
She hadn’t been able to attend the burial. She hadn’t even known her sister had disappeared, or that her mother and aunt had been searching for her from barracks to barracks and dungeon to dungeon. She’d found out when a compañero returning from the city had shared his condolences with her. At the time, she’d told him he was wrong, that her sister was fine, she’d seen her just a few days ago. She only cried—though not much, because it wasn’t the right time for that—when he said he’d seen her obituary and reminded her that death was an everyday thing then. She had to drink some water from a pitcher and act normal so people wouldn’t ask her any more questions, and she found it impossible to stop her tears from flowing for days, even months.
Time hadn’t erased the pain, but in a way it had helped. Before, she’d felt like her head might explode and she’d hated those men she didn’t know. She’d wanted to identify them and come down from the mountains for each one of their lives. With time, she understood they’d been dehumanized. She doesn’t think she’d kill them if she had them in front of her, but there was a huge difference between that and accepting they deserved some recompense. She didn’t understand how she could say what she had over the phone.
She couldn’t quite explain. It had to do with what she saw in them now that they were old, which was similar to what she saw in herself and her compañeros. One side seemed as defeated as the other. As defeated as the two of them.
Maybe some. Others had benefited from the troubled waters.
As had their side. It was the end of the war.
Was it?
It’d reached its end.
Why was she still prepared for it, then?
Who’d told her?
No one. All she had to do was look at how her house was built. She didn’t mean to offend, but its layout didn’t seem to correspond to any aesthetic or residential logic. No deep-rooted crops grew in the garden even though the land looked fit to sow. The birdhouse looked absurd until you realized that what mattered wasn’t what slept inside it. Her anxiety about leaving the house had confirmed her suspicions. Which is why she’d agreed to look after her property when she’d gone to bury her mother. How come no one else knew?
She and her husband had done it on their own, slowly and cautiously, during a time when people were allowed to build things whichever way they liked. They’d been told they’d earned that right and had taken them at their word. It was also her right to doubt everything she’d heard and to doubt what the future might hold for them. They couldn’t be judged for it, not after everything they’d been through.
Was it possible that the man who wanted to buy her property knew?
Unlikely. During the war, he never did anything that would’ve put him in a position to find out about or become aware of a project like that one. He was more a man for the end of the war than the beginning.
Could anyone have told him?
She didn’t think so. Back when they were just getting started, a villager had seen something suspicious and filed a report about it. After their place was searched, they made sure that everyone knew nothing had been found. That day, her husband had thrown a portion of the weapons they’d brought down from the mountains into a well, and she’d hidden ammunition and grenades in the dirty diapers of the daughter who’s now at university and who had a stomach bug at the time. She knew the new civilian police wouldn’t search them. They weren’t like the old guard, who didn’t stop until they found something compromising and took the people away even when they found nothing. They weren’t trained for that. They weren’t trained for a lot of what happened then: there were internal rifts between ex-combatants, ex-cops, enlisted civilians, and the many eyes around the world watching to make sure they followed what was written in the peace agreement. What’s more, they were already tired, despite being newly formed, because they received those sorts of reports every day, each pointing to a different person. They’d lost focus by the time their turn came to be visited.
In any case, they were more cautious from then on. They were better at timing the intervals between loads, and more watchful when transporting and burying them.
The woman offered to help however she could.
Had they taken care to protect the weapons?
Like they were her own daughters.
She’d wrapped the weapons in material that guarded them against being eroded by rust and dirt, following instructions they’d received back when they used to do the same so they could keep reserve arsenals in the mountains.
The woman understood then that nothing would happen with those weapons that would be of concern to anyone. They were just an inheritance passed on to the daughters, a measure so that, if war broke out again, they’d be neither alone nor defenseless. She also knew that she’d support them however she could and, if necessary, even return to the mountains. She imagined she’d join them too, if it came down to it. After all, life in the mountains had been quieter than anything she’d known since. But for as long as they remained where they were, she’d guard the land she’d been given and, if she could, work with her daughters and granddaughter to restore what her parents had left them, even if it took her many more years.
The daughter studying at university had promised to lend her a hand from the other continent, where she’d be helping people who would remind her of them. The daughter under her roof would make sure to look after her littlest, just as the littlest was already looking after her daughter. The girl who’d moved to that country she resented so deeply would return by the time the tractor operators came to build over their land. She would stand with her mother before them to demand that they build elsewhere, even when they explained again and again that the work would benefit them more than any other family. She’d return home with a character so firm she’d be the daughter who most reminded the mother of herself. When she gave birth to a girl, she’d call her by the name her mother’s firstborn should have gone by.