Read Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me for Free Online Page B

getting any better, you know, we ought to do something, I’m going to call an ambulance.” But she still insisted that she did not want to be moved or bothered or distracted (“No, don’t do anything yet, don’t do anything, just wait”), nor did she want voices or movement around her, as if she were so full of foreboding that she preferred everything about her to be in a state of utter paralysis and preferred to remain in the situation and posture that at least allowed her to go on living rather than risk any variation, however minimal, that might upset the temporary and precarious stability – her already frightening stillness – that was filling her with panic. That is the effect panic has, which is why it is so often the downfall of those who experience it, for it makes them believe that they are somehow safe inside the evil or the danger. The soldier who stays in his trench barely breathing, scarcely moving, even though he knows that the trench will soon come under attack; the pedestrian who feels unable to run away when he hears footsteps behind him at dead of night along a dark, deserted street; the prostitute who doesn’t call for help after getting into a car whose doors lock automatically, and realizes that she should never have got in beside that man with the large hands (perhaps she doesn’t ask for help because she doesn’t believe she has a right to it); the foreigner who sees the tree split in two by lightning and falling towards him, but doesn’t move out of theway, he merely observes its slow fall on to the broad avenue; the man who watches another man walk over to his table with a knife in his hand and doesn’t move or defend himself because he believes deep down that this cannot really be happening to him and that the knife will not plunge into his belly, the knife cannot be destined for his skin and his guts; or the pilot who watched as the enemy fighter managed to tuck in behind him, but made no last attempt to escape from the enemy’s sights by some feat of acrobatics, certain that, although everything was in the other man’s favour, he would, nonetheless, miss the target because this time he was the target. “Tomorrow in the battle think on me, and fall thy edgeless sword.” Marta must be conscious of every second, mentally counting each one as it passed, aware of the continuity which gives us not only life, but the sense of being alive, the thing that makes us think and say to ourselves: “I’m still thinking or I’m still speaking or I’m still reading or I’m still watching a film and therefore I must be alive; I turn the page of a newspaper or take another sip of my beer or do another clue in the crossword, I’m still looking at things, noticing details – a Japanese man, an air hostess – and that means that the plane in which I’m travelling has not yet fallen from the skies, I’m smoking a cigarette and it’s the same one I was smoking a few seconds ago and I know that I will manage to finish it and light the next one, thus everything continues and I can do nothing about it, since I’m not in a mood to kill myself nor do I want to, nor am I going to; this man with the large hands is stroking my throat, he’s not pressing that hard yet: even though he’s stroking me more roughly now, hurting me a bit, I can still feel his hard, clumsy fingers on my cheekbones and on my temples, my poor temples – his fingers are like piano keys; and I can still hear the steps of that person in the shadows waiting to mug me, but perhaps I’m wrong and they’re the footsteps of some inoffensive person who simply can’t walk any faster and therefore overtake me, perhaps I should give him the chance to do so and take out my glasses and pause and look in a shop window, but then I might stop hearing them, and what saves me is the fact that I can still hear those footsteps; and I’m still here in my trench with my bayonet fixed, the bayonet I will soon have to use if I don’t want to