An Eldian's Journal
Wartime Shenanigans
Chapter 15: Layers of Cabbages & Bombs
The 33 minutes we spent in that basement consisted of four different interactions.
As set pieces for the show, glass and liquid surrounded us on the walls.
They were spirits,
maybe weapons.
Above us was one sleepy lightbulb that managed to add contour to the faces of each devil that breathed under it. The 'cast and crew' assembled themselves in the basement. Those that disapproved of the islanders huddled in one side of the room. Those that didn't stayed on the opposite side.
It was like water and oil.
We don't always mix yet we are forced to be huddled together.
1)
The first interaction was rather simple. It consisted of large slabs of silence that interacted well with each other. They formed walls between all of us. Over time, however, holes peeked through the gaps between these slabs. They were the sounds of crying, some praying, leftover siren sounds, and everything in between.
2)The narrator and the fighter
The interaction that followed occurred between a certain narrator and a fighter that stood in a corner. Viktor was the first to peer through the slabs of silence. His questions crawled through and then made their way over to me.
"Heinrich, do you think we're going to die?"
There was no stress in victor's voice. Instead, there was a benign curiosity of finding out what I thought. I gave him an answer while avoiding eye contact. It was a simple answer.
"I don't know Viktor."
"Yeah, I figured you would say that. I just ask 'cause everyone's quiet in here."
Despite this, Viktor seemed oddly cheerful for boy who got the shit being out of him the day before. Also, for someone that could die from a blast at any moment.
"I'm sorry Viktor… for what I did to you yesterday"
"I don't forgive you for that."
"…"
"I don't forgive you because there's nothing to forgive."
I kept my gaze on the floor. I was worried about what I would see if I directly looked at Viktor. I thought that the truth would hurt less if I only heard his voice.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Truth is, I let you beat me up with all 12 punches…not just the first one."
"Seriously?"
"Come on, do you really think you could beat me up like that if I didn't let you?"
"…"
"I saw it on your face, Heinrich."
I gazed at Viktor's face properly this time. It was a bruise; his left eye hid underneath a mask of a rubber eyelid. The pressure of what Viktor had thought of me had been lifted and replaced by the pressure of looking at his face. Another pressure would soon be applied…
Viktor asked, "Did beating me up make you feel better?"
I struggled with answering the question that day. I thought back to everything that happened after I knocked Viktor out (The self-mutilation by scratching my hands). In summary, 3 words were struggled with. Words that looked like I was making progress from the outside, but they felt bereft of meaning.
I struggled with the weightlessness of these words and dropped them onto the floor. They laid there like foam—a filler for the conversation.
***THREE GIANT WEIGHTLESS WORDS***
I felt better
The dimples of a smile budged slightly despite the crankiness of Viktor's jaw.
"Letting you beat the shit out of me. I guess that's my good deed for the week."
3) The Alpha Perv, the Cabbage Man, and the Cigarette Wielder
"Hey, Lina. pass me some of the wine will ya?"
Lina continued chugging the wine until Papa launched an earth-shattering cough and pulled the bottle from her grasp. Some of the grape-colored liquid landed on her clothes.
"Can I have some, Freddy?"
Mama interrupted. "Screw you."
"Look, I'm sorry, OK? what do you want from me?"
Papa returned his head level after finishing the rest of the wine. As usual, his thinning blond hair frowned over his scar. He then traded glances between the bottle and Dick the cabbage man.
I heard a shatter.
A shatter of a bottle.
The emergence of a weapon.
Papa broke the bottle in half and headed towards the cabbage man. He stood over him while carrying the broken glass in his right hand.
Their positions were switched from the day of the broadcast. Papa lowered the serrated teeth of the broken glass down to the cabbage's forehead. The edges of the glass salivated with droplets of wine.
The cabbage man raised his arms in front of his body as a defense. "Freddy!—" Everyone else huddled to protect themselves.
Papa lifted the glass and released a bottle full of laughter. It soon watered down into coughs. He then headed back to where he sat near Lina.
No blood was shed.
"Truth is, I don't know what I want from you. Sometimes I want you dead…sometimes I want to give you a hug."
The cabbage's cheeks raised in bewilderment. They rose the eyelids that sat pasted to his face. They formed a squint—a squint of puzzlement.
"Ever since my first son was killed, nothing's been the same."
That line began a monologue for the cabbage man. Much like a cabbage, he had layers. He unraveled them slowly with each sentence. Each morsel of his life was displayed on a rusty platter. Most of us already know his story.
You don't yet.
Now you will.
"Erik, that was his name. He got conscripted to expand Marley's borders… 'I'll bring honor to Eldians' he used to say…Then he got himself shot…The only thing he brought was heartbreak."
He then looked at the boy that reeked of shellshock. His only surviving son. His throat began to cry, and his words began to sob. No one handed him a tissue.
"Look at how they massacred this child."
I looked at the shell-shocked son. He was three-fourths intact, but he was a scrambled version of an 18-year-old boy. A boy whose mental state was shuffled by humans that acted like moles in the ground by digging trenches. Civilized worms squirming with cold bullets in their hands and warm ones in their flesh.
"I find bliss now by selling my cabbages; yelling at naughty children; stupid customers… I think I've come to terms with the tragedies of my children."
His face churned a raw grimace. A sour expression with teeth in full display.
What followed next none of us knew. We learned it right there and then.
"But now and then, it hurts. I feel that powerlessness like a bullet occasionally. I felt it again with that broadcast…but by the end of it…it angered me so much—"
The cabbage looked over at papa. The fire was long gone in those eyes of his. The only thing left were embers and charred wood. They looked at Papa's cerulean eyes.
"—So much so that my little speech made me…it made me feel powerful."
'It made me feel powerful'. A cognitive mural was produced in my head when I heard that sentence. A mural that was sewn from various encounters in the past weeks.
A thread stitched through all these encounters.
A well-woven thread.
It's a theme you've heard me mention so many times before.
Words.
The power of words.
The cabbage man looked over at Lina. I was expecting her to interject or at least show some sign of anger for the cabbage. Rather, she drew a melody with the puffs of cigarettes. The diamond face stayed sharp.
The cabbage's voice grew spikes. "That Reiner… I hate those Honorary Marleyans."
Lina marked her entrance into the conversation. "You just hate them because you aren't one of them."
The cabbage looked at his remaining son and back at the ground. He and his ivy hat dropped a sigh. "Despite my boys fighting, we never received the honorary Marleyan status. 'They need to be war heroes for you to be Honorary Marleyans' the government said."
The words rolled out and died from their loss of momentum. The 'performers' took a break from their conversations. The only thing we heard for the following seconds was the one-sided conversation of the siren that faintly made its way through the walls and shelves of spirits.
"You say all that, Dick. But why'd you have to cut my head? Did that make you feel powerful?" Papa asked.
An obese pause followed next with the cabbage's reply. "No Freddy…It didn't."
"Then why did you do it?"
"I just f-felt so angry then…and when some people started saying they didn't hate the islanders…I j-just couldn't take it."
***A FEW FACTS***
The cabbage man's reasons were pitiful
He was a simple human then
A simple man who was subject to the pain of simple human dramatics
Lina stood up with the help of her only functioning arm. The other one still in a makeshift cast. She then walked around the stone-like devils on the floor and searched through the shelves for the vice that is alcohol.
She acted as if she knew everything about humans just from how they acted on that radio broadcast night. She was complacent in her smugness. She asked her questions as if they were rhetorical in nature.
The ego of an almost 18-year-old girl is quite potent.
"Why do you all hate the islanders?" She asked.
The anti-islanders in the basement traded glances with each other once again. It was as if they were trying to nominate someone in their heads but simply couldn't narrow someone down. Alas, someone spoke their mind. It wasn't the cabbage man.
"They left us here to die. Why do we have to suffer while they get their own island to live in peace? It isn't fair. People that don't believe that are just naïve." The person looked at my family.
(Indeed, the people that hate things definitely aren't the naïve ones.)
The sleepy light shined a mask of luminescence on Lina as she turned around with a bottle in her hand. Her diamond face cracked into a smug smile.
"You say all that, yet you're in the basement of a family that doesn't hate the islanders. If you truly cared about all of that you probably would've gone to a different home."
"…"
"These islanders are like cards for you to pull out when you need something to blame."
I gazed at the girl, no, woman. She shut up the anti-islanders like they were a group of children being scolded by their mother.
What followed next was some nice, crunchy silence.
The kind that proves you just destroyed an argument.
"You know what happened to me in the past few days, Dick?" Asked Papa.
"…"
"A brick shattered a window upstairs. 'Paradis devils' was carved on there. It's written on my door as well."
The 'audience members' looked at each other. They traded glances at each other like each one was a lump of hot coal that couldn't be touched.
"It wasn't me, Freddy."
"I know it wasn't you. You only have ambition whenever you're scared or angry." He then looked out into the 'audience'. "Whichever one of you did this, I applaud your effort." A reserved chuckle made its way out of his mouth. It managed to go through without a cough, surprisingly.
4)The Iron Maiden, The Grinch + Shell Shock
The cabbage man huddled next to his wife and whispered to himself. He gargled the sentences in his throat but they managed to make their way out of his mouth "The islanders have to be the reason why our lives are so miserable. Shouldn't they? It must be someone else's fault, right?...There has to be someone to blame…"
Mama was apparently offended by something that the cabbage's wife (The Grinch) did. "What are you looking at, swine?"
"Nothing, slut."
"Ok, man-legs."
"Apple body"
"Bitch."
"Whore."
Viktor attempted to interrupt this bout of petty squabbling with a whistle. The first bit was a melody that frolicked throughout the room but shortly lost its energy for it must have sensed the darkness in the room despite the light above. It then transformed into something linear.
A high pitch to a low pitch.
The sound of something descending.
A descending bomb.
With the ending of this pitch, a certain shell-shocked soldier exploded.
It was the cabbage man's son.
He exploded into wails and shivering.
"AHHH! AHHH!"
"What's wrong?!" The Grinch asked her son. She then looked at Viktor and shot him with a command. "Shut it!"
The Grinch tried calming her son down because of his battle with PTSD. Viktor looked at me as if he just screwed up big time. (Which he did.)
I didn't predict what came next.
Buttery lyrics flowed from the mouth of the grinchy woman as she patted her son's back.
Her voice floated around the room as she comforted her son. It was by no means professional or even refined for that manner. Each lyric was a nice, long stroke but they had holes here and there and her pitch was off numerous times.
But they got the job done.
It got the job done because the boy's wails quieted down,
and my mama's eyes dropped a few silver tears.
(It feels weird introducing the Grinch like this to you. Displaying her soft layers first is something that I never thought I would do. But hey, it is what it is.)
You said that you didn't give a damn about her son, mama.
Did you really?
XXX
After 33 minutes or so the crow that was the bomb siren muted itself. Alas, the Hateful Seven + 1 and the rest of the 22 devils climbed up the stairs without trading any words with each other. I stood at the main door of my home with my parents as everyone walked out. It must have felt weird for them to protect the very people that hated/threatened them.
The Dassler siblings were the second to last group that walked out. Viktor waved as he bolted off, but Lina pulled at my ear and said, "I told you, Ricky."
All the way back in chapter 8, the cigarette wielder predicted how the cabbage man was going to act. She was correct. 'What a puzzling woman' I thought. Indeed, the puzzle pieces that made up this young woman were all mismatched. Some had sharp edges while others were rounded off and burnt. Some were soaked.
Or maybe that was just my hormones making me over-interpret things.
Dick the cabbage man and his family was the last group to walk out. Instead of Dick rushing out without saying thank you, he lifted his ivy hat towards us and put it back on.
A sign of acceptance?
A sign of farewell?
As I was thinking about this, the 'crows' reignited.
Not with the sound of a siren, but the voice of a fascist.
A dictator. A man who wallowed in his patriotism.
"My fellow Marleyans. On this day, October 19th 850, the mid-east allied forces threatened to attack the port-side city of Liberio with the use of aerial weaponry: bombs from the sky…I can assure you all that it was a bluff."
Everyone that had left their 'bomb-shelters' looked up at the speakers above our heads.
"…Foreign countries have advanced in technology. Blimps and dirigibles are being replaced with sleeker aircraft. Armored mobile vehicles called "tanks" have emerged. All of this marks mankind's evolution of conventional weaponry to overcome the might of our titans…"
"…I know what you all must be thinking. Marley is technologically inferior to other countries despite our overall military prowess…maybe by 10 years in fact."
"…It won't be long until these novel aircraft will drop bombs that rival the destructive potential of a few colossal titans…"
"…However, our country was able to take control of the Eldian race that enslaved us for so long. We are a nation that has the ability to work with cards that are against us…"
"…Remember the character of these nations…rebels… that dare uprise against our legitimacy. Remember their wish to retaliate..."
Next came the words that have shadowed the pages of this journal ever since chapter 4.
"…They wish to declare war. So be it...I accept their desire."
XXX
***A RIDDLE***
Which bomb doesn't hiss,
doesn't crackle,
doesn't boom,
but still bites?
Answer: A bomb that's never launched.
A bomb that is never used still bites. Knowing the existence of one still hurts.