Luca Giordano

The elastic

Near the window covered with a wooden panel is a hole in the wall. An irregular perimeter, just about the size of a cockroach. A sprinkling of sun rays filters through the hole, drawing a line that dances and moves as the hours pass. It lights up what little there is to light. Wardrobes without doors, the skeleton of a camp bed abandoned in a corner.
Dust, masses of dust and bits of rubble.
Ogi and Elma hide under the rusty base of the bed, covered with an old quilt to keep out the cold. There is a cross-eyed polar bear design on the quilt, and coffee and chocolate stains.
(It’s shedding feathers.)
They speak softly. They know that when the line of light reaches the door they’ll be able to go downstairs and ask for something to eat. They’ll have to take it slowly, go down with their backs up against the wall , one step at a time, because they shouldn’t be there for any reason on earth.
Elma tries to write in her exercise book; she sticks pictures cut from old magazines onto the lined paper. Heads of models, glasses she’d like to wear. A cake.
To see what she’s writing she has to use a small torch her parents gave her.
Tomorrow is her birthday.
(The torch batteries are the last she has.)
She’s been keeping the diary since Everything started and there are already three birthdays and a couple of Christmases in it. She keeps a note of everything. She writes down what she does and what she sees and who comes to visit her. The number of shots. How many times she hides under there or in the basement. Lists.
The friends that are gone : Amar, Amina, Ahmed . Faris . Ana, Naida, Petar. Mikac known as the chicken. Darko. The things burnt out in the city: the library, the dairy shop of Ogi’s uncle, the underwear shop near the river. The school. How much she misses her mother: a lot, hugely, too much, I can’t bear it anymore. What she got for her birthdays: shampoo and hand cream. The biggest orange she’s ever seen. Two hair clips and a red and black striped T-shirt. Seventy-seven kisses.
She’s counted them . Mostly from her father and Ogi, and from neighbours who’ve come to wish her happy birthday. The odd classmate.
(Since Everything started she’s had 9,143.)
For Ogi’s last three birthdays instead he’s had : a black sweatshirt without a hood and an exercise book he gave to Elma. A U2 poster and two ping pong racquets. Only one ball.
He lost the ball when her father sat on it one day. Sorry, he’d said , I’ll try and find you another . Don’t worry, he’d answered, I never got to play with it.
The ping pong table is in the yard and you can’t go there even at night, when the sky is covered in clouds or it’s so dark that even the stars are not enough. There could not be a worse position for a backyard and the table is right there; in the middle, blue, and full of holes the water passes through when it rains.
What would you like for your birthday, he asks Elma.
For the light to come back on, she says. And to have a party.
You’d better turn off the torch if you don’t want it to run out.
A click and the only light is what filters through the wall.
Ogi plays with some rubber bands. He has a box full of every size and colour. He takes one at a time, hooks one end to the cap of a pen and stretches it with thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He aims then lets go and the elastic band takes off. Every so often he manages to hit the target; very often he’s miles off.
He does it quietly, as quietly as possible.
Stop it or they’ll find us, says Elma.
(Actually she’d like to try firing a few herself.)
A gunshot. A sudden hiss and then silence again. They hear someone running along the street outside. The sound of a door slamming. Then, another shot.
It must be the Blond, says Elma opening her eyes again.
For months now she’s been able to recognize who’s pulling the trigger. She knows that if the hiss is dulled by her parents’ room it’s Sinisa, known as the Ogre. Instead if it seems to be coming directly into the house, it's the Blond. They're positioned there, on the hill, under the same tree. She’s never seen them but she knows they’re there. Everybody knows that.
The third shot.
They hold their breath.
Where’d you like to have the party ?
Perhaps I don’t want to have one anymore, replies Elma.
At the fourth shot they recognize the sound of her father getting up from his armchair, the only one left in the house. He spends his days abandoned there, looking at the family photos on the wall. It was the Blond who left him like that one very cold morning the year before, when his wife had gone out to pick up the Aid Box. Various tins and rice. Soap. He’d been supposed to go himself, but he’d made up his mind to repair all the holes in the house.
A smattering of courage and a bit of cement.
He’d covered almost all of them. The light had even come back for a few hours, then it’d gone off again. The grenades had rained down and then it’d gone quiet. Elma 's mother hadn’t returned and from that day on, he’d occupied the chair and hadn’t got out of it since.
On the fifth shot he begins to call her, Elma where are you, he asks. His voice is tired. He goes downstairs, opens and closes the door to the cellar. He cannot find them. He starts to worry.
We've had it, she says.
Yep, says Ogi.
As he appears in the doorway the sixth shot resounds in the air. It seems closer than the others. He hides behind the wall, the two of them hug each other under the camp bed. They keep silent, lying on the ground. They look at each other expecting her father to get angry.
The shots start again and he doesn’t say a word.
His glasses are too big for him now; they fall down his nose and he pushes them back up quickly with his right hand.
(You can clearly see he bites his nails.)
He lies down on the ground and begins to crawl towards them while, outside, the shots are becoming even more frequent. The floor is cold. He gets into the same position and covers himself with the quilt too. Gunfire.
You shouldn’t be here, he says.
We know, says Ogi.
(They smile.)
He hardly fits under the bed. The edges of the base nip his back and claw into his flannel shirt. That's the Forbidden Room, the Bad Room, the Room of Darkness.
How long have you been here?
All day.
They lie still, and for a second they don’t hear the shots anymore. They lie still and look at each other. Ogi is still fiddling with the rubber band, moving it about in his hands until it flies off and hits him in the mouth. He yells, Ouch, and they laugh.
Did you hurt yourself?
A bit, he says.
And that’s the second time, says Elma laughing even louder.
Huddled up close, they keep each other warm and synchronize their breathing, fear at every shot.
Why don’t we do something , asks Elma’s father.
What?
What were you two doing?
We were waiting, says Elma.
We were passing the time mostly, adds Ogi.
Another gunshot. Very close. So close that a new hole appears and the light increases despite the dust and rubble. More firing. You can hear the cries from the street and neighbouring houses, and then the shots and the screams again. Grenades.
(Hairs on the arms become like tiny pins.)
I know!, says Elma’s father.
He reaches out for the box of rubber bands and takes a couple.
Why not build the world's longest rubber band?
Silence.
Since it all started Elma's father has been coming up with some strange ideas. Once he got it into his head to dig the deepest hole in the city; another time to run till he died. Sit in the only armchair until it was all over.
He got it into his head to make a tunnel under the house that would lead out of the city.
Build a helicopter. A rocket.
Yes, let’s make the world's longest elastic band, he says again.
Elma watches him put a rubber band in his mouth and chew it apart; then he does the same with another one . He spits a few bits on the ground along with some saliva. Are you serious, she asks when he starts knotting the two pieces of elastic together.
He nods. A shot and another hole in the wall. Dust and a little more light. Ogi and Elma watch him. He takes the box and hands it to them, Come on, he says, Take some and break them. They smile.
(The shots continue to reverberate.)

They’re not so convinced of what he is doing; lying there under the rusty bed, while outside the firing becomes more frenzied. What’s the point, asks Ogi as Elma’s father tries to butcher one that seems tougher than the others.
If I find a reason, will you help me, he asks.
It depends, says Elma.
He rips another elastic band apart. We need the world's longest rubber band to tie to a person, he says. And he ties the rubber band he’s just broken to the end of the one he’s making. A shot more powerful than all the others penetrates the wall and another hole appears.
Maybe we should go, says Ogi.
Tie one end around someone’s waist and tie it to yours, says Elma’s father. And start getting as far away as you can, miles and miles. Go beyond the city, the mountains and the plains.
And beyond the mountains again. Go across the forests and lakes, farther and farther away, far far away. The farthest away possible, I’d say.
He tears another elastic band open and goes on. He says, With the longest elastic band in the world you can go right to the other side of the planet, and so can the other person too. Do you understand?
(They look at him for a while and don’t understand that much, really.)
All three plug their ears when the shots seem closer than usual. When they stop, Elma’s father goes back to tearing the rubber bands apart.
Then you get as far away as you can, he says. Really really far away, and keep walking. You walk so far that, at a certain point, you don’t even realize you have a rubber band round your waist which ties you to someone, and you're so far away and you've walked so far you don’t even remember who you are tied to. You don’t remember their face or why they are tied to you. You’re connected to someone by an elastic band and you don’t even remember. Mad, isn’t it?
Elma nods and smiles slightly. Her father goes on.
Meanwhile, there’s more shooting.
Then you feel a jerk, just like that, all of a sudden, and it’s the elastic band that’s got tired of stretching. It’s tired of seeing you get so far away from the other person and it’s tired of being the longest elastic in the World.
Ogi takes a rubber band and rips it apart. He hands it to Elma’s father who has stopped telling his story because the gunfire is uninterrupted and he too is suddenly strangely afraid. His heart’s pounding and he no longer notices the coldness of the floor. He breathes.
Go on, says Elma.
And he goes on.

So the rubber band suddenly takes you right back to where you started. Because the elastic stretches, but then sooner or later it relaxes and you repeat your whole route; see again all the things you’ve seen, and retrace the miles backwards. And you get closer, all of a sudden, and find yourself facing the person you were tied to all that time via the rubber band, and you cannot help but hug each other, really tight, because the elastic is so long that when you find yourself facing each other, the elastic has tied you together. It is so twisted it’s impossible to separate, it's impossible, get it?
Elma and Ogi are silent. She reaches out and takes a rubber band. She can’t break it however hard she tries. She puts it in her mouth to bite it apart, little by little.
Do you get it? You see their face again, after you’d forgotten it; after you've lived a life without even thinking about them and you can’t break away again, and it's all thanks to the elastic band.
Elma doesn’t say a word. She watches the line of light in the wall that have now become three. She sees the dust against the light. She doesn’t even feel cold anymore, huddled up as she is to her father and Ogi. After the hundreds of shots from outside only the screams and the sound of sirens reach their ears.
They say nothing.
He lays the elastic band on the ground.
And kisses Ogi on the head and kisses Elma on the cheek.

(9,144)