The Trumpet That Never Calls Retreat

As a writer of fiction, I recently turned my creative attention to the war between Russia and Ukraine. But even my creativity won’t allow me to see without tremendous pain the once joyful men, women, and children lying strewn across a landscape of streets, parks, churches, and ice-cream shops.

I’m an ordinary man whose creativity can lose him to the depths of graves, mingling with bones, sifting through dust while looking for a story. But such an imagination won’t let me see a nation of people being brutalized by its bullying neighbor. A miniscule man, flouting the will of the world, ordering mass destruction of a people and country.

I’m a man who can place the heart of a hero inside a beggar, lift him on the wings of a bird, feel the sun, drink from streams, and give bread to a stranger. But I cannot imagine burned bodies of children, rolled over by tanks, handcuffed fathers with bullet holes in their heads. I cannot imagine a blind woman, in her eighties, sitting alone in a crater that once was her home, tears flowing, waiting…for a shell or a hand.

I’m a dreamer, I could stay and watch this war disappear, men, women, and children rise from the ground, the curtain fall to applause. Ruins become homes again, buses in the street, children riding bicycle in a park, new mothers’ pushing prams, grandparents showing grandchildren how kites are flown. I could stay and watch the story develop but my mind lives in a transient abode. I dream only.

So, I run the same course that writers before me have run, Hemingway, Tolkien, Lewis, Salinger, feel the same sun, drink from the same streams, see the same sights, meet the changes they must have met while on their pilgrimage road. But I’m just a man, hopeless, carried on a tear, crossing boundaries no spacecraft could reach, away to places where sunshine, peace, clouds, and rain are but distant words in an ancient library. Pleasure just a velvet memory.

I cannot imagine metal behemoths rutting the roads, bringing their grave and gathering dangers. I cannot imagine weapons of mass destruction, missiles aimed at schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, a small man believing he is a torch-bearing colossus, ruthlessly annihilating a democracy.

I’m a man transported on the adventures of childhood, soaring on the heights of that day, riding the genius of trouble. The child who sets every sail, for whom there is never a turning back. To do or die. For there goes the child of my imagination, a Ukrainian boy, journeying with no companions. He lives in my drifting mind, sees mermaids below clamouring birds, tossed, and turned and laughs on a thousand shorelines.

I cannot imagine a child lying dead in the street, shoeless, his hand open in death. No father to collect him, pray over him, kiss his shocked eyes closed.

I imagine a goliath, as huge as democracy, agreeing to suffer the same agony, spill our guts and weapons to defend freedom. But I’m an ordinary man, watching ordinary men write a story about themselves. Not one hero among them, just the beggar, unprepared to suffer with friends, but to confine Ukraine to another project.

Will democracy ever put its roots down somewhere, be a trumpet that will never sound retreat?