...of a crossfire

…when I seized the pommel and the cantle to lift myself up the saddle turned over, I was expecting that too for three days I had been trying to find a girth to exchange for this one that was too long for her after I had had to leave Edgar behind me but you can’t get a thing out of those peasants it was as if asking them to switch girths was trying to rob them and Blum’s too was too long too so it was really the perfect moment for a thing like that to happen to me when there was shooting on all sides at once but I didn’t even have time to swear not even enough breath not even enough time to get out a word just enough to think of it while I was trying to get that damn saddle on her back again in the middle of all those men who were passing round me at a gallop now and then I saw that my were trembling but I couldn’t stop them any more than I could stop her body from trembling I stopped trying I began running alongside her holding her by the bridle she starting to canter with the saddle almost directly under her belly among the horses - with riders or riderless - that were passing us the deadly network of plucked guitar strings stretched like a ceiling over our heads but it was only when I was two or three fall that I realised that I was in the ditch of the road while they were too high on horseback so that they got shot down like ninepins then I saw Wack (things happening paradoxically enough in a kind of silence a void in other words the sound of the bullets and the explosions - they must have been using mortars now or those little tank cannons - once accepted admitted and somehow forgotten neutralising themselves somehow you heard absolutely nothing no shouts no voices probably because no one had time to shout so that it reminded me of when I was running the 1,500 metres: only the whistling noise of the breathing the swearing itself choked before it came out and then came a jostling as if the lungs were seizing all the available air to distribute it through the body and use it only for useful things: looking deciding running, things consequently happening a little as though in a film without its sound track),…

[The Flanders Road, Simon, C.]