The Union Jack

So much, then, for the story of the Union Jack. “Johnny rejoiced wholeheartedly in the prospect of the fight — I think that neither he nor Brattström would have shared my apprehensions,” I read during the severe winter that soon set in, during which my aforementioned ailment flared up again, so to speak, in the form of a fever of reading, or perhaps it was my reading fever which flared up again not long afterwards in the form of the aforementioned ailment. “Johnny repeatedly assured me, with the delightful rolling of his r’s, that the two boys were in deadly earnest and certainly meant business. Complacently and with a rather sardonic objectivity, he weighed the chances of victory for each … He gave me my first impression of the peculiar superiority, so typical of the English character, which later on I came so greatly to admire,” I read.

What naturally also belongs to the story, perhaps needless to say, is that several days later, on that same bend in the road, but coming from exactly the opposite direction to that in which the Union Jack had disappeared, tanks suddenly veered into sight. All but wavering in their haste, their uneasiness, their fear, they always paused for a moment at that bend. And though the road, the pavement, the district, the city, everything was by now wholly deserted, with not a person, not a sound, not a soul to be found anywhere, the tanks, as if anticipating even a stray embryonic thought, each and every time let off a single cannon round, strictly one, before clattering onwards. Since the gun position, direction, and trajectory were always the same, for days on end they always pounded the same first-floor windows, outside and eventually interior walls of the same decrepit, Secessionist-style apartment block, so that finally the yawning void looked for all the world like a corpse’s mouth, gaping in terminal wonderment, all of whose teeth were about to be knocked out one by one.