My father came home from the war with the skull of a northerner, polished smooth as silk. The lower jaw was missing, but the rest of the teeth were intact, and I asked him if he had removed their fangs and he laughed and patted my head.
The skull sat on our mantle. When friends visited, he would take the skull down and cradle it under his arm like a beloved pet and tell the tale of how he acquired it. The story changed depending on his audience. When it was dark and dreary, the rain streaming outside, the roll of thunder like the distant sounds of bombing, he said he came upon the northerner while on beach patrol. She popped her head out of a dug-out and fired three lavender-kissed bullets in his direction. They ricocheted off his fellow soldier’s helmet and one grazed his arm.
“A ricochet usually isn’t deadly,” he said, “but it sure feels that way.” And he would roll up his sleeve and display his scarred arm and beam triumphantly at his audience.
During some stories, the woman was very tall. Other times, she was short and muscular, with red-stained teeth sharpened into points, and she was eating the heart of one of his comrades. This was the first detail that made me doubt my father’s story, I admit. I was young. The skull itself was nearly white, including the teeth. And the white teeth were worn, not sharp.
I was never supposed to touch the skull, but one night when my parents were out at a rally, I dragged an old milk crate up to the fireplace and touched the rim of one eye. The bone burned me; icy cold. I gasped and sucked my finger.
“How did you really die?” I asked. “I hope you died terribly.”
The skull only leered at me.
When my father was drunk and on his own, decompressing after a long week at the patent office, he would tell a different story, railing on in the living room, stomping past the mantle, talking to ghosts in the skull.
“You deserve to be here, you know! After what you did to us. To all of us. To me. I should have crushed your skull in and burned it up with the rest of you, but I wanted you to see us. To see what you will never have. My life. My family. This house. Our world! Our world will never be yours now. You understand that?” He put both hands on the mantle and shouted at the skull, his spittle splattering across its forehead.
I asked my mother one night, “Does father love the skull more than me?”
And she looked very sad and brushed the hair from my eyes and said, “No. It is not love that he feels, it is anger at things left undone.”
“But we defeated them all,” I said. “The northerners. It’s done, isn’t it?”
“Not for him.”
When I was older and allowed to visit the homes of others, I expected them all to have skulls on their mantles. But when I asked about it, everyone peered at me as if I were odd, all but one girl, Mirisha, whose expression became somber, and she gestured for me to follow her, and we went quietly down into her cellar where it smelled of old wine and crushed mortar dust, and she carefully opened a battered trunk with great curled writing along the top. Inside, resting next to a battered old scattergun, a tri-pointed silver medal, and surrounded in soft violet silk, polished white skull. This one bore a great crack in its forehead.
“My mother calls it Fuck-Face,” Mirisha said. “She says if we’re naughty we have to stay down here with Fuck-Face.”
I shivered. “My father keeps ours on the mantle.”
“When I’m old enough, I’m going to burn it up,” Mirisha said. “We should burn them up together.”
“I don’t know. Who would my father talk to, then?”
Mirisha did not look at me, but at the skull, and she nodded. “Yes. My mother, too. I think she would be very lonely without Fuck-Face.”
“What do you think really happened, in the war?”
“They killed people. Collected their skulls.”
“Have you touched it? Does it burn?”
Mirisha’s lips trembled. She nodded.
“Let’s put it away,” I said. “It’s easier to forget about, down here.”
“My mother doesn’t forget.”
I knew even then that she was right, not just about her mother, but about my father. They would never forget.
As I got older and the war became further away in time, visitors reacted differently to my father’s stories as he strutted around our living room with his skull. They no longer looked at him in admiration and wonder. When he lifted the polished skull from the mantle, ten years after the war, and began to talk about stalking the enemy woman into the deepest part of a tangled forest, one of my university friends said, “That’s horrific. And obscene. To desecrate a corpse like that.”
The room grew silent. My father froze. Then he began to shake with rage. “You little fiend!” he said. “You spoiled, mewling brat of a child! What do you know about how your freedoms were won! About how they are kept! You are free to sit here and insult me because I kept murderers like this one from slaughtering you in your beds.”
“So instead, you brought her body into your home?” my friend said, and my father yelled at her to get out, and she did, and she was never allowed to come back.
I lost a few friends this way.
I left home after university and traveled the world, or what parts of the world I could. The northernmost reaches of the world were still off-limits, their shores shrouded in green miasmas and red electrical storms leftover from the war. I met many old people still clinging to those days, to that war, and I found another woman with a skull, an old matriarch in the village of one of our allied countries, and when I asked her about it, she spits at me and made a ward against evil.
“Why do you keep the skulls?” I asked, and that made her laugh.
“Why do you wear a hat and trousers? Because it is expected! It’s a story! It’s a lie we tell ourselves, a lie that makes us who we are, a lie that says we are civilized people doing what’s expected of us.”
I thought about that on my travels, but after that period, life carried on, and like everyone else, I became mired in the trappings of adulthood and responsibilities. I married, I had children, I danced and went to rallies. I cheered when they finally opened the northern coast to sea traffic. I mourned the death of our leader.
One day, as my children played in the gullies behind my home, their shrieking voices filled with delight at some discovery or other, my mother called and told me I had to come home. My father was dying.
I took a long, winding train ride back to my village, and I went to his side and found that he had the skull with him, tucked tightly under his arm.
I said, softly, “Who was she really, Papa? The skull?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. There were so many. So many.”
“What do you mean? So many attacking you?” Surely that would have made it into one of his stories …
“So many skulls.”
“I don’t understand.”
He began to weep. “A field of skulls. So many skulls. No buildings. No grass. Just dust and skulls and glass, from all the heat. It incinerated everything but their bones. Their cold, cold bones. Those northerners. So cold.”
“You’re saying she was already dead?”
“All of them were dead. An army? A village? I don’t know. We stumbled upon them. Thought they were ours, at first, some atrocity committed by the northerners. But you can tell from the skulls. Their skulls are icy cold.”
“But you and your squad … you said all the time … you fought dozens of people. Killed dozens of the enemy, you had those marks on your scattergun—”
“I thought war could be just and honorable. I was wrong. We were all wrong.”
“I’m sorry, Papa.”
When he died and we buried his ashes, I put on a thick pair of gloves and I buried the skull with him. I saw Mirisha at her own mother’s funeral, many years later, and asked about the skull in her cellar.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mirisha said, and she wrung her hands, and she would not look at me. “My mother was a hero. She would not go around carrying skulls like trophies.”
But I was no better. Because as the years passed, I, too, forgot about the skulls. It was easier that way. And when my granddaughter came home from a rally and told me she was joining the military because her grandfather had been a hero, I nodded and told her I understood. I told her I was so happy for her.
“The world needs brave young people,” I said, and how I wished I could have given her that skull and explained, but I had buried it, as we had buried our stories and memories with our dead, so that each generation, again and again, had to pay the same price, had to learn the same lesson, had to fight the same war.
When she comes home, I hope she brings a skull. I hope we can keep it on the mantle this time, yes, but tell the truth of it. I hope we can tell the truth.