By Adrian Fry

Artwork by Marcia Borell

Carefully, Goran places a rough triangle of black slate alongside an approximately rectangular piece of concrete. The two pieces don't go together, a jagging fault line between them. Goran smiles a beige-toothed smile, relishing the way the two don't gel, an exact mismatch for his mosaic,

Goran dreams someone will come to see the mosaic, perhaps one of the American journalists who used to give him coins in return for a look of wounded innocence, perhaps the receding, fuzzily warm ghosts of his parents. Whoever comes, they'll need to bring a torch to penetrate the dark of the cellar where the mosaic grows. And they will need to be made to listen to the stories behind each piece of stone, glass, concrete and bone before they understand the precise manner in which they don't fit together, not to mention the design into which they don't form.

But when they come, if they come, when they've failed to come so often they cannot fail to come any more, Goran will need to decide where to begin. Should he begin, as the foreign journalists always do, with the things that are happening right now? Should he mimic their urgent tones, their grave excitement, the knotted gabble of their languages? Or should he, like the politicians and soldiers now indistinguishable in creased, medal encrusted khaki and shades, begin with history, explaining how destroying the present has avenged the past?

No, he'd begin with his brother, Tomas. Tomas, whose face he can hardly bear to recall but whose obsessive bedtime monologues about the Greeks and Romans had kept Goran fascinatedly awake in the shared bedroom of their childhood. Some of Tomas' tales were textbook true, others false as movies; the beauty was, you never knew which until experience taught you. Goran hadn't believed a word about Caligula, the mad Roman who'd made his horse a Senator. But now, with silence bombs exploding around the city and men hanging each other from lamp posts, he knew better.

Tomas explained mosaics, adopting the haughty manner of a teacher unsure of his ground, forcing Goran into the role of obedient, unquestioning pupil. Tomas explained how the Romans loved order, how they loved mosaics because they were a marriage of art and geometry, that they created these beautiful things simply to be able to walk over them.

They'd want to hear more about Tomas, of course, but Goran would move on, pointing to the shard of silence bomb at the not quite dead centre of his mosaic. He'd tell them how it was said that the Americans built the silence bombs, packing the rich, deep silence of space into the fat black missiles they then sold to all sides. Once, desparate to avoid the nerve-shattering sound of gunfire, Goran had ventured into a silent zone. How bad could it be, not being able to hear? For a while it was like having no ears, having to watch even more carefully than normal, not even hearing the blood in your screamed-out head. But after half an hour, your mind began to conjure sounds; evil insect buzzing, piercing shrieks and an auditory horizon over which you could just hear the pleas of those you knew were dead.

There was a lot of glass in Goran's mosaic; shards from the windows of houses that didn't have people in them anymore. But when the foreigners came, their attention would be drawn to the single surviving lens of Mr Kobi's spectacles because Mr Kobi had been behind that lens when they killed him. He'd been a quiet, dry man, a lecturer at the college who'd sometimes come round to smoke and talk about literature and politics with Goran's father. Goran hadn't liked or disliked Mr Kobi; he was just one of those things you accepted until it was gone, like a tree at the end of the street. When things got bad, Mr Kobi was found to have a brother in the South, a crime which became punishable by death since nothing else would cure it. Young men, nervous, even with guns, arrived at his house one grey morning and asked him to come out and talk with them. They appealed to his reason but, concluding he'd lost it when he didn't answer, broke down the door, charging into his cellar and battering his head in with guns so as not to waste bullets. Goran had snuck in later and pocketed the lens. You can see death coming through that lens, he'd tell them, laughing because he could see it coming without.

Tomas had joined the street gangs when the school closed, order out of chaos the motto of his gang. On the day they burned down the school, Tomas spoke movingly of the better school he'd build. When they bombed the police station, Tomas spoke commandingly of the Praetorian Guard he'd train. When he ordered the death of Mr Kobi, he spoke of a time when every approved citizen would be truly free. From the bonfires around which these speeches were made, Goran sneaked an unburned twig for the mosaic, something unburned by his brothers dreams.

Humane and horrified they'll be, the ones who come. They won't look long at the mosaic, ushering him out into the daylight and a waiting truck. Peace has come, they'll explain, Tomas' forces having won the battle to become a democratically elected interim administration. As they whisk him out of the city, he'll gaze out through bullet proof windows, catching sight of posters bearing the face of a child he once was beneath injunctions to kill. He'll ask to stop and get one for the mosaic, but they'll smile and tell him he's never going back.

THE END

This story was first published in 2001 in an anthology 'Mosaic pieces from disabled writers' Copyright remains with the author.'

Adrian