A lush, enormous banana leaf was folded carefully around a tightly packed pie chart of delights, over rice: slippery, soft curried cashews; dark, crispy snips of zippy batu moju, or fried-eggplant pickle; seeni sambol, a relish of supple tamarind-and-chili-glazed shallots; a fluffy curried-mackerel-and-potato fritter.
The other unforgettable image is “a snail in the shadow of a boot coming down” that comes at the end of this riveting passage in Luke Mogelson’s excellent “Everyone Is a Target”:
Shortly after 11 p.m. that night, back in Bakhmut, I was jolted from bed by what sounded like an airplane colliding into the hotel. The electricity went out. I dived to the floor. A second impact was even louder. Then there came a third and a fourth. Bits of ceiling sprinkled down, and I braced for the roof and the two stories above mine to follow. Close shelling always induces a burst of animal fright, but this was different. It’s one thing to face an indiscriminate bombardment; it’s another to find yourself—or believe that you have found yourself—at the terminus of a warhead’s deliberate trajectory. We tend to think of artillery combat as remote and impersonal, but when you are on the receiving end of a strike it doesn’t feel like that. It feels as intimate and vicious as any other way of killing. For me, curled up in a ball, trying to cover as much of myself as possible, the sensation was one of naked, defenseless exposure, like a snail in the shadow of a boot coming down.
Two memorable images; two completely different realities – hard to reconcile, except in terms of the art of description. Both are brilliant.
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