And even as the women protested in their native tongue -- I did not say anything, I did not mean -- the soldiers grabbed their mouths, those spotless pale lips. How did they keep them so clean in this Hell? They pried those lips open, grabbed and pulled teeth, seized their tongues, and with the tips of their machetes, hacked them off, but the machete was not meant for such subtle work, and as a consequence, the downward stroke would slice open cheeks, necks, even as far down as breasts. That was the other item of note, the breasts. Prominent, easy to grasp, easy to pinch the nipple and sever it with a penknife. In every alley women lay, slumped and sitting on the ground in shock, staring at the items of their bodies left in the oven-like sun. Their eyes never blinked, never moved. They only looked down on their tongues, their breasts, their ears, as if they were secrets waiting to be unlocked.
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How do you apologize? Start with one, then the other, finally you apologize for everything. That ends it for everyone else. Not very fair. In fact, selfishly unfair. As if you can take responsibility for something. And so the foreign minister blusters on TV, claiming to be responsible for my hearing problem and the knife cuts that I have inflicted on my own arm so as to calm myself, what a martyr you are Minister, it suits you, just as it suited me when I was nearly run over by the truck, just like my father when he didn't ask for it. But without apologies there is no point, is there not? So apologize, I insist. We cannot move forward in history without an apology. Everything else is insubstantial air. Better to deny, plausibly. Then we have reasons for doing something. He is not apologizing, so we must make him apologize. That is the mission. The
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