it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country - SCP Foundation

“Hai zi, hao hai zi, come here, come sit at my knee and hear me, come warm my old bones.”

The old man sits in the green recliner by the window and talks about miracles in the sky.

Zhang Yu Min likes his stories. They remind him of his grandfather. So he pours the old man a new cup of tea and gently wraps his withered fingers around the mug and sits with him for a while each day during his lunch break.

There is no one else left to hear him. No harried yuppies with rosy cheeked toddlers in tow nor grizzled green-jacketed greybeards have stopped by the front desk and asked for the old man since he had arrived at the home, and he has been here for a very long time.

There is only Zhang, to hear the stories the old man has left. There are less and less each month, now. Sometimes he will come and sit and the old man will merely stare at him in a gray fog, rice-paper face pinched in agonizing suspicion, and the tea will go cold. Sometimes the old man repeats himself, skipping over the same lines. None of them make much sense to Zhang, but he likes to hear them anyway.

“The Russians had angels, you know. Ten stories high, like gods made of metal and fire."

"We stood on the banks of the Heilong with our old wujiushis and blew them out of the sky.”

“We drew the Emperor out from beneath his lake of mercury and brought the mountain down on his head."

"The Americans thought that that was our first nuclear test. I wish it was.”

“There were ten of them. Such good boys. Ten of them went into the dark. They were good soldiers, brave. Twelve came back, and all screaming.”

Zhang thinks the man must have fought in the Revolution, to have such stories. He asked him once if he had been a soldier.

“I was,” said the old man. He brought the china to his lips and drew in a trembling sip, his withered throat bobbing up and down.

“Which wars did you fight in, elder?”

The old man laughed, a wet, rasping sound that turned into a wracking cough, tea splashing over the rim of his cup as Zhang hurried over with a cloth.

“The long war, child. The one that never stops.”

He looked at Zhang then, shrunken yellow liver-spotted skin drawn back into an awful grin, like the false smile of a corpse.

“Everyone fights it, you know. Oh the Americans have their wonderful machines, and fight their clean battles ten kilometers above the earth and the Russians poke and cut at themselves with dreams of godhood. They all of them think they know the nature of the fight.”

His hand grips into a tremulous fist, held against his heart.

“Sacrifice.”

The laugh continued then, and the tea went cold.

Sometimes Zhang takes the old man out to see the sun. He pushes him in the khaki army surplus chair with its wide plastic wheels over the cracked cobbles in the square, past the formations of guangchangwu dancers with their new american speaker systems and syncopated karaoke, past the snickering teenagers sneaking smokes beneath the hickory trees, to the place where the butterflies dance between lily blossoms and the river curves by in a lazy green arc brimming with tadpoles.

He pushes the chair into the warm sunbeam and the old man closes his eyes and feels the sweet breeze on his cheeks and raises a trembling hand as if to catch the butterflies fluttering past and breathes the river in and does not cough for a while.

“I should like to die soon”, he says.

Zhang says nothing, just taps out some ash from his cigarette and watches the cloudless blue sky where an airliner has left a line of white vapor.

“The happy memories were the first to go, you know. They took them first. They’re the easiest to cut, cut and dry, leave holes in people. I remember them telling me that, and then I remember that I shouldn’t recall that conversation at all. I had earned rest, they said. They boiled me away and left me at the home.”

The old man is babbling now, words coming hard and fast, spilling out of him. His stories are almost all gone, now and the last ones leave him the fastest, the way water swirls around the drain and disappears.

“They didn’t know what they were doing. What they stole from the Russians. Imperfect. When they take the light away you start seeing the differences in the shades of black.

I had a wife once, I think. She had green eyes.

She was beautiful.”

The shop is cramped and dark, tucked between two new fast-food boutiques with modern glass and steel facades. Grave wax, incense, ghost paper spill out of the overflowing sandalwood shelves behind the counter where the shopkeep picks at his fingernails and wipes his hands on his dirty apron.

The old man walks on doddering feet as he looks hither and thither, running his hands along the sides of the coffins stacked three-high in shivering piles. Zhang steadies him as he steps carefully through the crooked aisles, holding his hand.

“This one”, the old man says, tapping the side of a sturdy oak-backed thing. Zhang hands the shopkeep a paper envelope stuffed full of pink-faced Chairman Maos, and it is done. He wheels the coffin to the back room, reserving it. The old man lets out another hacking cough, and Zhang hurries to steady him.

He waves him off, grinning.

Autumn comes, and with it, the stories dry up. The old man sits in his reclusion, staring out the window at the slate sky, eyes cloudy. Zhang makes sure his blankets are warm and dry, then sits with him against the wall. The old man is silent, so Zhang speaks to him instead, talking of this and that, holding his hand. He finds a book of poetry and reads them one by one as the days turn gray and the rains come.

相见时难别亦难， It's hard to say goodbye after we meet.

东风无力百花残。 The east wind is listless and all the flowers wither.

He feels a tug on his hand. The old man is smiling.

春蚕到死丝方尽， Spring silkworms will not run out of silk until they die.

蜡炬成灰泪始干。 The wax torch turns to ashes and the tears begin to dry.

The last veteran of the Coldest War passed into history with the lowering of a sturdy oak coffin one winter morning, and few mourned at the loss.