When the World Goes Quiet

by Gian Sardar

There is nothing worse than silence, in a moment after. Ask a woman who’s just given birth. Ask a father who saw a wagon tip and is running, calling out names. Ask a daughter whose mother didn’t make it into the shelter, because of her. Silence screams loudest of all.

Sometimes fault is also like a wind. It slips into cracks and fills spaces.

in the midst of a war that wasn’t ending, entrenched with unspeakable horror and loss, the only correct way to live was whatever way they could.

bullet kills at the end of the war the same way it does at the start.”

And though the war is almost over and people are grasping at the tattered ends of hope, the dead can only stay dead.

Isn’t it wonderful, when what someone perceives is even better than what’s there? The painting was a promise: Your world doesn’t need to be the one others see.

“Right and wrong—those ideas not only depend on who tells the story, but on when the story stops. Or when it starts. Wouldn’t you agree? Not everyone gets the full picture. When you’re in the midst of something, it’s hard to see that. Though we’re at the end of this war, we’re still very much in the midst.

We shouldn’t be thankful we’ve survived; we should be angry we’ve not lived.

Bombs and guns and starvation are obvious killers, but what loneliness does simply takes longer.

But promise me that you’ll always pull the painting from within yourself. Never let someone else move your paintbrush.

Gauguin said to draw a curtain over the model while painting, Mr. Vanheule told her, in order to paint from memory and make it your own.

She misses the past, the ease of life she didn’t know to appreciate. She misses a time when no one was suspicious, when thinking of friends brought a smile to her face, and not a sense that she’d never truly known them. And though she tells herself that a plan like this is justified and necessary, the person she used to be would never have done what she’s considering, and because of this, she adds herself to the list: she misses herself.

It didn’t happen for me. It happened for everyone. All of our fates are one. Do you understand?” Evelien nods, though she’s not sure. Still, in her mind, a web shimmers beneath their feet. Everyone, connected. At a time when everyone is so divided, she likes the thought that perhaps they’re all on the same side after all.

“Trust me when I tell you there is no love like that between a mother and her child. Nothing. Other things matter, of course they do, but not like that.”

“Art is a wound turned into light. Georges Braque said that, or so I was told.”

“True. But the need to be right—to insist you are right—has caused more problems in the world than actually being wrong.

appreciation within her that didn’t just leave her enraptured by all that was beautiful in the world, but sometimes widened her very definition of the word. Years later, she saw sketches on Mr. Vanheule’s desk. Da Vinci, he said, referring to the drawings. Exposed muscle. The tendons of a shoulder. How do you think he knew the human form so well? He studied. Even what’s not visible to the eye. Life is made of layers, and artists need to be aware of those layers. Everything is informed by what came before.

“Degas said that art is not what you see but what you make others see.

these days of escape will stay hidden like a note slipped between the last pages of a book. No one will see them, but knowing they’re there, knowing where to find them to relive them and savor them, might be enough—to provide for future escapes as well.

for the Fauves, colors became charges of dynamite. An attempt to free the picture from all imitative and conventional contact.”

“When you look at a painting,” he says, “your eye is drawn to the focal point. Light and dark together, the juxtaposition, that’s what draws the eye. The contrasts. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise—because all of it is necessary. The highs and lows and the brights and darks.” He smiles. “And you don’t put the focus in the middle. So it might not be what you mean, or maybe it is, but off from center seems best to me.”

“More and more,” she says, “I’m realizing that it’s safe to assume that everyone wanted something they couldn’t have. There’s always something just outside our grasp.”

The colors of the water, he’d said of the painting that’s before her. They’re whites and grays and green and ochre, but very little blue. Nothing is simple, Evelien. Never be one of those people who just thinks the ocean’s blue.

Maybe the real casualty of war is right and wrong. Even the belief that there is a right and wrong.

The fact is, it’s not about being a good or bad mother. And it’s not about her heart coming around; it’s about accepting what’s already in her heart. For years she’s lined up justifications—a husband away fighting, the time it would take from her art—all to try to soften the edge of what she felt was wrong with her. But the truth is, she doesn’t want to be a mother. At least not now. And she doesn’t want to be married. And maybe that’s all right. And if later she decides to have children, she knows she’ll stand a better chance of being a good mother by honoring what she loves. By accepting what she loves.

What is it to want to be with someone whose life intersected so devastatingly with your own? Or maybe to want to be alone? Or, she realizes, to understand that there might be nothing wrong with a person who wants both. Uncertainty and questions and answers that unspool with each new day, truths that look different under changing lights and people who are always just slightly off from center. The hardest thing, she understands, is acceptance.

What is it to be a mother, who knows that to save her child, she must lose her? To have the greatest gift be a future you will never be a part of? A future without, but because.

Once more, everything Evelien thought she understood has changed. So many questions, so many varied responses and experiences. Nothing is absolute, everything nuanced and enigmatic and always somewhere in between.