Jeff Koopersmith

A vision of the coming costs of war
From the Front
By Jeff Koopersmith

March 17, 2003 -- NEW YORK (apj.us) -- She stooped to cover their tiny heads.

Little Shala and Mokeem, her son and daughter, were lying on the stone floor shivering from the cold> They whimpered, tears streaming down the chubby cheeks that only the young enjoy without self-consciousness. The bedspreads, hers included, that lay under them were covered in dust and ash. Mokeem, the younger at only three, clung to his five-year-old sister's curls in some frenzied effort for tranquility

The first bomb had hit at 12:37 AM. The blast it made passed through, it seemed, quicker than the clamor -- first a "whoosh" followed by a flash and an explosion that rang in their ears hours later.

Neither she nor the children could hear each other anymore and a sort of sign language was her only means of communicating with them.

Her beloved husband Sharif had been standing uneasily at the window when the first bomb exploded. He had a demitasse of coffee in his left hand -- a habit he had picked up at Yale while there studying for his doctorate in 1978.

Just before the blast, the window took wing in an explosive rage, and a jagged slice of glass flew cleanly, like some ancient scimitar, through his shirt collar, cutting so modestly that even after, he turned to her, a bewildered look melting to his face, as his head plummeted from his body to the flooring with a dull thud.

She remember that clunk for the rest of her days.

Her first impulse then had been to protect their children. She flew to them in the next room, scooping them to her breast and covering their diminutive faces as she pleaded with them, dragging them to the toilet, to stay in the tub while she hurried back to Sharif. She recalled that bathrooms were surrounded by pipe and often survive when buildings around them crumble.

Sharif lie there, in two parcels -- a head and a torso surrounded by a lagoon of red, now eight feet in diameter. Rivulets of blood oozed in the grouted channels between the white tiles on the floor -- now canals of dreadfulness. She thought, crazily, of the movie "The Shining" as she watched the blood course between her bare toes, as she maniacally struggled, over and over again, to stick his beautiful head back to its body, screaming nonsense, furious tears blinding her efforts. And then she stopped and stood frozen looking at the feet of her darling, her beloved, who knelt at her feet, only six years before, and begged her to marry him as if she was not praying for him to do so for years before.

He was used up. His eyes glared up at her, eternally unwrapped and gaping as if to ask, "Why?"

Minga turned from her anguish gazing over the city from the hole that was once that window. For as far as she could see fires burned out of control. She heard useless sirens woven between bombs exploding at random. It was dazzling, she thought to herself, so much grander than the fireworks at the river.

The lights went out that moment, and in the dark she slipped and fell. Groping, she felt Sharif's mouth with her fingertips, still agape and for some reason, and she traced them, recalling the melody of his kiss. She pulled his stranded head to her lap and sat, for minutes, stroking his thick black hair and sang to him -- a lullaby her mother used to croon every night before she kissed away the ghosts that sometimes invaded Minga's dreams.

Her lap was now a sea of crimson, but she could not see that.

The song ended, she bent to kiss Sharif, one finishing time, goodnight. "Sweet dreams my love," she whispered, and fled from the apartment, her children in tow, onto Fifth Avenue and toward Central Park where she thought she might find safety.