The meal, the mortar and the bumps, a story of war

This is a draft:

We had just got the day’s lunch and were sitting in a quiet yard and having it. The lunch comes in a pot. The pot is rather large and they give you lots of food. They virtually fill up any size pot you take with yourself to the kitchen. It is the Pasdaran kitchen, they are more generous than the military kitchen. Pasdaran are the paramilitary forces that are the real backbone of the resistance to the Iraqi invasion. They are the ones that send the waves of young teenagers over the mine fields to open headways for the invasions.

The kitchen is located at the other side of the Karun. Karun is the river that cuts through Khoramshahr. At the other side Pasdaran and the mayor have their headquarters, at this side, it is mostly soldiers and militias and the front line, where the Iraqis are located at the other side of shatalarab. Here the devastation is complete, as Iraqis had it for two years and pulled down nearly everything. At the other side which remained in Iranian hands for the length of the war houses are still standing though shattered by a two year diet of mortar shells, katyooshas and artillery bombardment. You can find a family life frozen in time inside some of them who have escaped the heavy bombardment complete with rugs, TVs, beds and pillows and chairs and cars in the parking and even plants still growing inside the pots.

We use to take the pot to the kitchen, they fill it up with the meal of the day. It is always delicious and hearty. These people have money, you can smell it in the kitchen and the size of the handout. Then we hop on the car, drive over the temporary bridge(the main bridge was bombed by Iraqis on the first days of the war and is now but just a few shattered pillars jotting out of the water, good background for the first photos of Khoramshahr to send to your family), usually go towards somewhere along the river and sit down and eat. Eating is dangerous, eating is fun, eating is exciting. You can get killed any moment while eating. Of course, human beings being human beings both sides have to eat, both sides have lunch and dinner. During lunch and dinner time the war stops temporarily, there are no explosions, no shootings, no bombs. Everything gets eerily quiet, you can hear the birds chirping, the water running under the bridge, the wind howling in the empty streets and visiting half ruined houses. You can even hear the fat rats in the trenches running around. Rats getting fat by eating human remains. Rats that scare even the few ramining stray cats. Cats that have gone deaf by living under constant bombardment for two years. Cats that don’t’ hear you getting close by even when you are just behind them. They only run away if they see you, their ears being useless.

This day our feast is inside one rather standing house in a neighborhood who has somehow escaped the complete devastation in the Iraqi part. We are working here, arranging plans of the area and measuring the houses, and we have reached this house and decide it is the place for today’s lunch. We park the car behind the house. Our car sometimes becomes target practice for Iraqi mortar shells. The mortars follow us and then we try to drive fast and put a distance between us and them. Sometimes we just have to stop, open the doors and rush into the first trench or house that is nearby and pray that we, or the car, is not hit. It is scary, I don’t like it at all to be a target. Somebody having fun at the expense of my life?

We go inside the house and then to the courtyard. Like all Iranian courtyards it is surrounded on all sides by high walls. It is sunny in a mellow winter day, quiet, with a nice breeze. We sit down, move the lid and start to share the hearty meal when suddenly we hear the woosh. Something deadly is coming our way. Something very bad. Somebody had decided not to have lunch and instead ruin the pleasure of having lunch at the other side of the river. It is just one mortar, not a volley, a single mortar, and it has set its eye on our courtyard. The cold long hand of death reaching out for us from the other side of the river. Us that are not even soldiers but builders.

There is no time left. We just have time to dive onto the ground, crouched and with our hands over our heads. You don’t even have time for a prayer. Suddenly it is over us, suddenly it prefers the next courtyard. A deafening sound, an explosion, a gray blinding rain of particles big and small, lots of dust. We are dazed, death changed his mind at the last moment and gave us another chance at life. The walls, the traditional tall walls of the courtyard protected us. A 2000 year history of cultural introversion became our saviour.

But all is not well, after the first wave of sound and explosion and ricochets and debris, I feel pain in my shoulders. A quick touch with my hands exudes pain and red palms. The shirt on my back is tattered and bloody. My colleague is in better shape. That day he drives me to the makeshift hospital at the other side. The bearded doctor do a quick checkup and says it is nothing and just some very small debris left in my skin that will be rejected by the body soon and I will be as healthy as I was born. Just washes and disinfects my back. Well, compared to what he has to deal with every day, I am a completely healthy person, not injured at all.

I am out quickly.

Every time I touch my back now, it reminds me of that brush with death. I rub my fingers over all the bumps one by one, count them and think of the minuscule debris that is still embedded there. Some people keep a small bag of their motherland's soil in their pockets or at home, I don't need that, I have it on my back.