(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
In front of and behind us olive trees, in front of and behind us impenetrable dust, in front of and behind us freeways and unpowered grass, in front and behind us closed cars without oxygen, in front and behind us electric birds flying back and forth, in front and behind us the portal to a yawning desert. We steal everything we can get close to, ripe and ripe fruits. We eat with four stomachs that store and benefit. We sprinkle the stones on the roads so our friends can find us. Once we were on our way home from school, now we are on our way to another school that nobody knows. A modern school where the water level runs across all its banks, the steady measured beat of civilization. We are heading home from where the future begins. We are on our way home from the open barracks to the endless checkpoints. Places that glow and flash like a thousand and one night's adventures. Tell, tell, this is how we practice keeping the night alive, devoted to a life without territories. Our heavenly beings, our new love. We find stories about where we have been, what we have seen, it is not a lie. Windblown fields, incomprehensible cities, Utopia, we always have to say the right word to pass. Say it so everyone can hear it.
Long before we left our country, we learned to postpone our suffering. Long before we had a picture of the earth we learned to walk. Long before we learned that those who say the word human are bound to contradictions that no one can see with the naked eye. Long before we wrote, the country's refugees had to say the right word to cross the river where all the streams of water flowed. This is how one knows an Israeli from everyone else, one from the other. The war against Jafta made us all animals that needed writing. The war on water made us the ones who send letters without any sender. Since then, we have been practicing speaking the incomprehensible and alien words, words from another planet, asteroid B612 without close contact. That is how we will be out of reach for a long time. We children with baobab trees in our heads do not know this language. We do not know this buck. We do not know the code for the ion-irradiated citadel.
They have to say the word. We have to say the word. Not everyone believes that they can say the word. Not everyone is sure that the word we are saying has the right tone. We didn't learn much in school besides hiding. Only now in this adult shower can we learn something: listening to the steps of the adults. Later we learned to listen to the stranger's stories but without understanding. Every day we exposed our own stories. Every day we had to slow down on the dusty field.
On the new one stretching we explore each other's eyes. On that stretch we scratch with the fingers of the battle cry written on the bombed-out walls. On that stretch we see the loose dogs and hope not to be infected. On that stretch we stop and compare each other's writing in our curly cloths. On that stretch we learn to distinguish between good and bad concrete. On that stretch we have time to ponder. On that stretch we ponder. On that stretch, we reformulate our pain without using words. On that stretch we inhabit a void that gives us hope. On that stretch, the ground changes direction under our feet. On that stretch we rest by walking. On that stretch we leave ourselves to learn to love.
Crossing a longitude, we are ready to meet with an unthinkable court. No one is ready for it, but we are. We see a cultivated field, a stone that no longer acts fence, a tree that no longer acts wood, a dirt road that ends in a wall. We crawl in behind a wall for a bombed-out house. The talented girls have saved their style booklet for us. Here we decode the young generation's future dreams. Here we play the earth is poisonous to ourselves so as not to freeze. Here we skip the drilled holes through the broken concrete. And that's how things go. There is a long way to go home. For no one knows the right word. Still, we are allowed to go. Just go. We do not know the right word. But we will be allowed to go. We do not have our family's roots in the stone desert. But we will be allowed to go. Just go. Nowhere. Just go. We only have the insects, the dummy wings, the friendship with the thin black beetles that blink in the sun. But we will be allowed to go. Just go. Nowhere. Just go. We only have our women washing for a people. But we will be allowed to go.
On the stretch we go, we grow older even though we are children. On the stretch where we walk, we play with sticks, stones and ashes. On the stretch where we walk, we are the ash children who have learned to walk.
Just go. Nowhere. Just go. We have only the geography of the stone desert, which is not the same as its soil. But we will be allowed to go. Just go. Nowhere. Just go. We are moving from A to B here in this world, in this territory that is shrinking hour by hour. But we will be allowed to go. Just go. Nowhere. Just go. On the stretch we go, we grow older even though we are children. On the stretch where we walk, we play with sticks, stones and ashes. On the stretch where we walk, we are the ash children who have learned to walk. Just go. Nowhere. Just go. On the stretch we walk, we lose our equilibrium. We change socks on the half wall. We have two couples because we know this stretch. Because we need to be ready for our Shibbolet. Being able to say the right word. Enter the new world that no one knows. It is not a clean place for we do not need to wash feet.
In television, learned we that the battle is the beginning of everything, but is it also its end? In school we learned about the phantom of war called Helena. For ten years, the Greeks and Trojans killed each other because of Helena. But who was she? A goddess, an overly beautiful and disturbing figure who should not have been born, someone you could love without knowing who or what she was? No one was able to say what they were fighting for, no one could say what was behind the war. Was she a black widow, Helena? A woman of straw, a cavity that the field mice use to build nest or something we children could hide in? We learned that she had nothing to do with the huge blow, that she was only a symbol of what the fight was really about. When the Greeks and Trojans continued to fight it was because the war had become its own goal and Helena the empty image. And there we stood, tripping, waiting for it to be our turn. But the ashes in the fireplace at this checkpoint no longer keep us warm. And we have no answer. We don't know about Helena. They don't know Helena. No one knows Helena. We do not know about our neighbors. They do not know their neighbors. We do not know their history. It too has run out of hands. It's a cold fire. There is blood in the back of our nose. There is no wooden bench like in school. But we have grown accustomed to getting up. We have become accustomed to stories being false, that Helena may not even exist that she belongs to another story that is no longer ours.
We close our eyes and cross our arms. We immerse ourselves in this last stretch. We are siblings even if we are not family. We want facts but are moving into an old story. We want news but are heading into a very old age where everyone is on their way. We want to talk to each other but look only in the stone supports. We have clear marks on the body but keep going. We never know the answer, but we are allowed to go. We are the olive-colored kids peeing down the slope as soon as we are allowed to walk. We are terrifying and immeasurable. We are ridiculous and disappearing. Also at the next town we hear airplanes in the sky. We do not know their true messages. Their voice is lost in the noise, in the noise of their own engine. From their position, we look like spots. From our position, they look like stains. They need signals. We need signals. They need help items. We need help items. They are building a new being for the machine. A foreign language, Esperanto? We build a new being, our own vulgar celestials that nobody understands, we translate the complete stranger to ourselves. It doesn't matter that we don't fully understand ourselves. We have never been in tune with ourselves. We are human beings and have therefore always had a love for other territory. We are empty and heading everywhere. School is over and this stretch will be taken out of our lives. It will no longer be used to solve our mystery.
* Shibbolet (also written Schib (b) olet (h). A form of pronunciation characteristic of a language or dialect (and which strangers are difficult to pronounce). Red-cream with cream is the Danish shibbolet. Shibboleth appears in the judgment and court decision 12 , 6 as the slogan used in Judge Jephthah's battle against the Ephraimites to distinguish them from the rest of the Israelites, and the Ephraimites were cut off from the wildernesses of the Jordan, and anyone would have to say, he said, what the Ephraimites did, "The sibling," he had robbed himself and was killed.
Carnera is an essayist and author. ac.mpp@cbs.dk.
