Saturday 25 September 2010

Pregnant with Perilous Potential.

Imagine the scene. It’s 1944 and a young woman stands looking out of her living room window. Her husband is an infantryman serving on the front line, and she hasn’t had a letter from him for some time.

She sees the postman approaching and feels the usual onset of a nervous dichotomy. Postmen can bring good news, and they can bring bad. Her anxiety leaps higher as the man opens the gate and walks up the path. And then the ice cold vice of dread grips her somewhere in the vicinity of her heart. The postman is not holding a letter, but a telegram.

She feels light headed as she opens the door. She takes the little piece of paper, pregnant with a hellish potential, from the outstretched hand of a man averting his eyes. His attempt at disinterested nonchalance is unconvincing, and his feeble whistle has a falseness about it that irritates her. She carries the article, so light and seemingly insignificant that a zephyr’s breath might carry it away, through to the living room. She places it with unnecessary care on a small table, and then sits down weakly and stares at it. She feels no urge to cry, just an enervating numbness; and she still hopes against hope that no tears will be needed.

She knows she has two options. She can ignore it and live in torturous ignorance, or she can open it and face the prospect of even more torturous knowledge. Eventually, she decides to open it.

How long, I wonder, did it take her to make that decision, and where did she find the courage?

I have cause to be curious.

2 comments:

lucy said...

I have cause to be more curious about what's in the telegram than how long it took her to make the decision. WHAT DOES IT SAY?! Did he die? You better not leave me hanging, Jeff! Tell me what it says. I want to know! :P

JJ said...

Bloody Philistine! Where's your sense of mystery?!

Telegrams always brought bad news, but it could be different degrees of bad news. It could say that he'd been killed, that he was missing believed dead, or that he was simply missing. The last one could, of course, mean that he'd been captured and was in a prison camp, or that he'd become seperated from his unit and would turn up again. Or even that he'd gone AWOL.

But that isn't the point, Lucy dearest. The point is that if somebody gives you bad news verbally, you've got it in one. There are no choices. But a letter/telegram/e-mail/text message, or whatever, carries mystery and requires you to make the effort to open it.