Chapter 1
I once attended Elaine and Stanley Peplinski’s wedding and about a week ago -I attended their funeral. The young husband and wife had been murdered and the convicted one was serving a lengthy sentence in a SuperMax somewhere in Minnesota. Stanley’s corpse was found in a hotel in Wollochet while Elaine was found shot in their own house.
But a link was missing or probably dead.
I had attended many funerals in the past forty years but never had felt so awful ever since my wife’s death. More than my wife’s death’s grief, I have a regret which still exists inside my mind. I wasn’t in the USA when my wife died. Instead, I was at war by shooting people in back Cuba. While our troops, including myself, had been celebrating their triumph in camp, my wife had been taking her last breaths. While I had been listening to victory songs and news on the radio, my wife had been listening to death whisper inside her ears.
Now I don’t know what death had muttered. She had died while nobody was expecting her to die. She had passed away abruptly without any underlying health issue or some concealed chronic illness - the ones even the spouses hide. But it wasn’t the case there.
The news of Stacy’s death had shattered me into pieces like a clay pot. The thought still holds the strength to rattle my old bones. It hurts me more than arthritis. And nobody’s company is enough for an old man whose wife had died forty years ago. Yet here I am alive, with my second wife dead too and a grown-up offspring named Joey.
“Do you fear you will have to leave everything behind? This thought has given me sleepless nights and stressful days.” Hansen had asked me. Everything Hansen had said wasn’t really hard to remember, after all.
“I don’t fear death anymore.” I had said to Benjamin Hansen more than anyone else. Well, Hansen was a man rude, or friendly enough, to ask an old man about his death.
“An old man fears death more than anything. In his old days, he becomes religious,” Hansen had said on the same balcony, “and he rarely believes anything that hasn’t got a word God in it. The old man remembers his past days, his crimes, works of his in adulthood, and his sins. The old man fears he cannot remember what good he has done for he has got a weak memory. Good things can be forgotten easier than the bad ones. He then begins to fear if his sins have outnumbered good deeds.”
“So, you are saying, I may not fear death but it is hell what I fear?” I had asked him.
“You fear what I said. You are frightened of your sins. Those will eventually lead you to the inferno.”
“Since when did calling a neighbor for a drink become a sin?” I gulped my wine.
“Sins are those which the old man has said to me. Things you’ve admitted to have done.”
“Wars? I’ve been in wars many times. I’ve walked out of every bloody war I’ve got in –”
“You walked out with bloodied hands and clothes drenched in the blood of adversaries with victory.”
“Even history books say, even God will admit we were right in there. Adversaries were the ones who wanted our heads. We chopped theirs for keeping ours on our shoulders.” I paused and darted him a question, “Have you ever killed a man before, Hansen?”
“Of course not. That would make me a murderer –”
“But doing the same thing on the battlefield has made me a warrior. This world is a shit of a place where everyone who enters inside a battlefield thinks he’s a knight or a soldier. They rarely seem to accept, that those who go to war aren’t warriors but those who walk out of it are.” I found my voice rising.
Hansen had smirked as he always liked to debate with old man. He enjoyed my words more than the wine I offered. I also seemed to like Hansen listen to me and it also had made me question him at some point.
“You think I will have to pay to Lord for killing someone?” Tarot suddenly asked.
Hansen paused for a while, “Circumstances have given you a point. But..”
“But what?”
“But if you step on fire, even by mistake or you are made to do it, then it’ll hurt you. Fire would not spare you from burns because you were meant to do it or it was just an accident.”
“This isn’t a thing that a man of my age wants to listen to in his final years.” I was more of upset by then and didn’t want the conversation to go any further. What the hell was he talking about anyway? And why?
“You just said you don’t fear death, didn’t you?”
And what can be better way to end everything than humor? To end awkwardness one should also find humor where humor can never be in millions of years. I had broken into laughter and soon began to talk on casual things.
I didn’t remember the conversation that we had three years ago until Hansen vanished with no trace.
