קַרְטוֹגְרַפְיוֹת

Cartographies

One of the last times I visited my grandfather, he laid out a map before me. Not a regular map—not one that leads from place to place, but a map of Leftovers. It didn’t have names of cities, but burn marks. Not roads, but half-dug trenches, which had closed and then opened again. He moved his finger over the markings, caressing lines that were engraved in him.
“Here I fought for the first time,” he said, pointing to a small hollow in the north.
“We thought it would be just one battle,” he chuckled bitterly.
It seemed the map marked all the wars at once—trenches from the first one, bunkers from the second, a pistol from the third, a crater from a bomb that hadn’t yet been dropped. But in my grandfather’s eyes, all of these were one continuous moment.
“There are places I never got to fight in,” he continued, “but they’re still inside me.”
I asked him if he remembered the end of any war.
He laughed. “There are no endings. Only layers. Sometimes you’re on top, sometimes buried beneath the others.”
He showed me a square in the center of the map—not a city, not a camp, maybe a house that collapsed and was rebuilt every night in his memory.
“There,” he whispered, “there I waited for the order to return home. But it never came. So I stayed.”
I asked him if he knew where home was.
He took a pencil and drew a thin line—broken, not straight—leading between all the points on the map.
“This is my home,” he said, “the path between the wars.”