She halts, looks back, and waves
at him again. He smiles back, the cheerless window framing his face, the
train is too crowded to wave back; so he smiles, fingering the little
silver cross she gave him that morning. “God loves you,” she sobbed. “I
love you.”
“I love you,” he whispered back in the dawn light. The cross gleams
idly in the cold neon light. It is a scanty bauble, no more than gilded
rust; but at the moment it is worth more to him than all the gold in the
world.
The train rumbles, the horn blows. A dismal breeze blows crumpled
bits of newspaper from a sleeping beggar’s hand. The clanking begins,
loud and discordant, and the iron beast begins to push itself away.
 She
can only watch, fresh tears streaking down her face. The face at the
window too is streaked with tears, but he tries to hide them in his
shame. He is a soldier now.
He cannot weep among his brave comrades.It is cruel.
The train puffs and pushes itself away from the lonely station. Away
from his world, away from her.
He will remember this moment forever, even in death; the lonely
station under the grey dawn; the cold, barren wind playing with the
trees; the soft stink of the train, an undercurrent of sweat and tears.
And her, beyond it all, beautiful even in her sorrow.He will remember
this as he goes to battle, the cross hidden in a dark pocket with his
ammunition. It is not in God that he has trust but in her.
The memory of that bitter parting still echoes in his mind as the men
die, and the machine-gunners let loose their deafening torrent; as the
tanks crawl over grime and corpses, as he clutches his gun with a
frantic heart and thinks of her.
Two years later, a clean letter greets the dawn on an equally clean
doorstep. She opens the door, and picks it up. It is a letter from his
commander. She reads it. The words rush at her, clean and uncaring on
the stiff white paper.He was shot down in the trenches, far away from
his friends and family. They found him dead by the bloodstained walls of
a captured bunker; his blood mingles with that of his enemy. Twelve
bullets in his chest.
He died in honour, he died for the nation.And in his hand he held a
tarnished, bloodstained cross.He died alone behind enemy lines,
fighting. For a dream, of freedom, of glory, of righteousness.
Far away, beneath the bloody dawn, the letter falls to the ground,
and she weeps.
- Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
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