The Bridge

The second table would not move. Not with two of us, not without taking it apart.

The first had crossed earlier, in daylight. By the time we gave up on the second it was dark.

Then, up the hill, a horse and cart — neighbours on their way home. They stopped. With all of us on it, the table went the last stretch, to where it stands now. It was settled by the end of the night, and everything is ready for the first guests.

Down the mountain at quarter to seven, an hour and a half on foot to the town, where the next days will be spent — meeting people, helping where I can.

A dog took up with me near the bridge. Pale blue eyes, a tail going the whole way. It walked behind me, then ahead, the way a dog will see a stranger across its own ground. I looked back once and it had gone — over a footbridge, to an old woman on the far side.

Early afternoon I went out for supplies and crossed back over the river. Ahead, a line of police, the traffic stopped.

The heart goes first and the head behind it. Men are called here, twenty to sixty. I am sixty-four, and a foreigner — there is nothing in it for me. The head knew that. The heart had already started.

Then the kneeling. Women along the road went down. The traffic held. The police knelt. It was not for us.

A man was coming home. Perhaps thirty cars behind him, an ambulance third in the line, all of it moving slow past the lowered heads. Every car carried two flags — the blue and yellow on one side, red over black on the other.

Red for the blood, black for the earth it falls on.

I never knew him. Everyone else on that road did.

A stranger has one thing to give at a passing — to stop, and stand, and let it by. I gave it.

The tears came on their own.

The second in four days.

He was a stranger only to me.

Day 9 — Kompostieren — Soil and Peace
Verkhovyna, Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine
© 2026 Michel Garand | Soil and Peace | CC BY-SA 4.0
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