We will die, I thought. We’ll burn to death because no one would break the rule never to go outside. We will die because not one of those girls, not even the prefects who were there in loco parentis at night when there were no adults, would smash the glass and take out the key.
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This need to be always on guard was an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow siphoning of the essence. It contributed to the fast breakdown of our bodies. So I feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to address the block, and contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues, and contort again so as not to give the police a reason.
Much later, a guest at Eleven Madison Park would tell me that while most people save the best bottles of wine in their cellars for celebrations, he drinks his best bottles on his worst days. I thought of my mom’s funeral immediately when he said that, because that was exactly what we did that night. The party was perfect; she would have loved it.
Either a nation faces its uncomfortable truths, or it is overwhelmed by them; for there is a prophetic consequence in the perpetuation of lies, just as there is an unavoidable fate for all those who refuse to see.
There are some things on earth that are stronger than death. One of these is the eternal human quest for justice; a people cannot live without it, and in due course they will be prepared to die to make it possible for their children.
Fables are made of this.
Or else she would be taken over by an inexplicable rage, saying that I, the only person she loved, deserved the ugliest death because I did not love her enough. Why did you curse me so, Mother; why did you not stop her cursing, Father? Though the truth is, I do not want to know the answers. I resent even thinking about the questions—what others and the world have done should not define one as much as what one has done to oneself.
One child said he slept outside because the house was filled with the cries of nightmares. The doctor had the impression that no conversation took place in houses anymore, only vicious discipline, orders and brutal teasing.
You know, we all came out of the war aged, dearest Anna, with a sense of life and death that does not exist in normal lives. So, how does one look forward if all that exists as soft-weeping wounds? You cannot imagine any future . . . You just lie. And wait.