Thursday 6 January 2011

January 6- Armaggedon

Like everyone she knew, Penelope expected the telegram every day. When it did come, then- so close to the end of the war, she later reflected, impossibly close- her grief was at least a sensation without surprise. She felt stunned, and still, and as though every cliche about death she had ever heard or said was suddenly both true and cliche no longer- but it was as though this was something she always knew would have to happen, and that it at least had the decency to have waited as long as it could. And perhaps it was this lack of surprise that led her to dwell so much on the site of her husband's death- Megiddo, plain of the Holy Land, where his faith had held the final battle between good and evil would take place.

She imagined, of course, that anyone would have been spooked by a death so apparantly meaningful, and that anyone would -like her- have wondered over the following months whether the conflict her husband had died in was indeed the final battle after all, and that what the Bible described as the forces of evil in fact constituted the Ottoman Empire and associated hangers on. But over time she decided this was unlikely- the practices of the Ottomans, while mysterious to her, did not quite fit with her understanding of pure evil, and the grey and widowed world she inhabited could certainly never be called paradise. So she came to think that her husband's death indeed meant nothing, and that -for now, at least- nothing really did upon the earth.

Penelope was not buried where she was out of a desire to be close to her husband, or, as those close to her thought, a misguided sense of longing. Rather her grave sits on the Megiddo plain so that when her husband returns, one day, there will be someone there to tell him that he did die once, but now things are indeed worth fighting for again.

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