A NETWORK OF BONES

Our town was under German occupation and suffered 75 percent damage during the defence of the town in 1945. By the time my siblings and I were born, the town was rebuilt from the ruins left by shelling and bombing, but there were still areas with forests of sunflowers and fields of poppies along the streets leading to my school. The first school was a considerable distance from our home, along a tarmac road with a sinkhole covered by a porous lid. Sometimes, the escaping stench was unbearable, however, periodically the town hall ordered the cleaning of the sewage system. Everybody knew that the original pre-war cover was missing, replaced by salvaged metal sheets.

Dad would scoff at the incompetence of the town’s ruling minister, believing that in the old days things were crafted to endure, and one could rely on walking a street without the danger of falling into sewage through flimsy plastic stink lids.

Despite his reservations about praising anything German-made, he admittedly reviewed those roads built by the Germans that wouldn’t make you break a leg when walking on them. Whenever I passed that sewage hole, I heard what I imagined to be ghosts sunken in the grit at the bottom, but it was just the sound of water dripping from the underground walls.

Ahead of that old German sewage monster, there were ruins of a house pockmarked by bullets that left holes in the mortar. From the weedy garden, young boys would often throw stones at the shattered windows, making lots of noise as if they were playing combat games. Whenever I missed the ash blond hair of my older brother among them, I would skip in fright, taking diversion down a path through the cemetery leading to my school.

It was an old graveyard with many toppled dated tombstones among which there were newer graves adorned with pots of plastic flowers and photographs of the deceased’s weathered faces. Each time I went that way, I felt the hair on the back of my neck pricked by invisible fingers. A year or so later, when I was at least ten, the town hall began raising the fences around the cemetery, levelling the ground, and making a proper road for children from my neighbourhood to the school.

It was about that time that the soil around the graveyard was dug up leaving bones appearing in odd places, even whole skulls, and arm bones. When you grow up with such a view, your eyes begin to desensitize, and your entire being overcomes the fear that we are made from bones beneath our skins with big holes in the middle of the skeletal heads. It sounds grim now as I write about it, but at that time, it was nothing extraordinary to tell your parents after school that you encountered human remains uncovered in the furrows where the big machines had been digging earlier.

Mum would have explained that those were not “our bones,” meaning they didn’t belong to our ancestors, but she wasn’t right. Dad had a milder view on life, one I much preferred, as it explained that the dead deserved respect, and what made the difference was the weight of one’s heart beating against the ribcage.

That didn’t stop us children from picking up a bone or two, studying them this way and that before abandoning them to the ground. Some would shudder with piercing screams, fearful at seeing a human part, and I probably screamed too. The echo of these sounds stayed with me, and I often incorporate spooky images into my writing material.

The sewage sinkhole, though repaired at a certain point in time, once attracted a bus load of German tourists. They were of an older generation dressed in hues of grey, leaning as one to shine torches down the darkened abyss. They were gesturing, talking in hushed whispers, though their presence brought the entire neighbourhood out to investigate. As it turned out, we found out there was a passage through a subterranean maze of corridors, branching to different parts of our town, with one opening near our school.

If everything is connected in our world, so is the network of bones in our bodies with the backbone playing a significant role in shaping who we are as individuals.

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