When the World Goes Quiet

by Gian Sardar

It’s been two years since they’ve heard from him, but a year ago she felt Emiel’s death. A constriction of air, a sudden swelling of sadness. It was a day no different than any other, except in her inexplicable and overwhelming knowledge. She knew then he wouldn’t come home, because she felt it—loss where before there’d been only an absence. And though the war is almost over and people are grasping at the tattered ends of hope, the dead can only stay dead.

Can you imagine, our collective fate rested on that one choice, Coletta has said. Right or left. From there, fighting not just in Europe, but Africa and the Middle East. Belgium, once forests and fields and blankets of bluebells, has since been blasted and cratered and veined with trenches, while the men who are lucky enough to survive are too often trapped in the cages of their minds, living an endless nightmare. If everything is in God’s hands, Evelien reasons, there is much to be angry about.

“Did you invade this country? Did you make it so an old man was cold when he slept at night? So he needed a quilt in the first place? The Germans took my son. Your husband. They took years of our lives we will never get back, the children you never had. We shouldn’t be thankful we’ve survived; we should be angry we’ve not lived. And now this happens and you blame yourself?”

There are entire floors of women whose only job is to sew closed any gashes, holes, or tears, so a man can wear the uniform without feeling the death or injury of his shadow soldier, the one who came before. The shadow soldier. Another painting she will do, she thinks, setting the shirt aside. Whole lines of shadow soldiers. Fields dark with echoes of the past, all the men who came before. An arm that lifts a rifle, shadowed by other arms, like faint pencil marks on an oil painting.

“The point is, because I was the last on, I ended up in the worst spot at the far rear but, as you might have heard from your mother, it turned out to be the best spot, because we in the back were spared. Fourteen people died that day. Many by scalding. That was when I started hearing the voices.” “You hadn’t before?” “No. Dreams and feelings and such, I was used to all that. But not the actual voices of spirits. Not till that day. I think I was brought closer to the other side, I don’t know.” “You never told me this.”

People love to write off what they can’t explain. So I keep it to myself.

“At the time, I struggled with being alive. The only thing that changed it was Emiel. Because every choice I’d ever made, and every loss and every disappointment, all of it had to happen exactly as it did to lead me to this moment and to Emiel. Evelien, everything you do is so life places that child in your arms. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done wrong, because you’re gifted the reason for the wrong. It’s all for that.”

You see the shape of the road you took and you’re grateful for every twist and turn, because it led to where you are. Cause and effect or fate, it doesn’t matter what you call it, because you hold your child in your arms and you’ll take whatever led you to that moment. It’s acceptance.

So she told him that she couldn’t take the chance of having his child while he was gone, and, good man that he was, he accepted it. Never could she admit that she’d selfishly taken the last chance he might’ve had, only to protect what tenuous grip she had on her own life. Selfish. Inexcusable.

“True. But the need to be right—to insist you are right—has caused more problems in the world than actually being wrong. We don’t need to agree on a beginning to admit we’re in the same middle, do we? We started for different reasons. True. We might each believe our countries were right once. But can’t it also be true that we’re somewhere else now?”

How do you say you feel broken, for being a woman who might not want children? Or explain that you can love someone but feel panic when thinking of being with them forever? But all this will change, because it has to. Because no man would want a wife who doesn’t want children, and no child wants to belong to a mother forced into parenting.

time loses shape when she draws.

“I’ve been with men who looked at the sky and clapped. I’ll never judge someone on how they make it through this.” “You don’t think it’s wrong?” He shakes his head. “The only thing that’s wrong was that tonight the danger was closer, and real. Not sailing over our heads or on the horizon. But it’s not wrong because your mind works differently.” She wants to laugh. He must see it on her face, because he continues. “Different doesn’t mean wrong.” “Doesn’t it?” “I hope not.”

“I keep thinking about what you said last night. You think like an artist. That’s not wrong. Being different is not wrong. It’s interesting. If it wasn’t, we’d all paint the same thing and see the world the same way and there’d be no movement, and no chance at understanding.”

“I thought I had it figured out. I’d be bad at it. What could they do? So I shot wide. And the first man I did this to, he lived. I was relieved. Because I’d gotten away with something, I thought. But then he made it to a trench, and by that point it was too late and I couldn’t do a thing. He killed three men I was friends with. Six others too. From then on, I shot well. Not because I wanted to kill, but because I wanted to save.

“My personal opinion is that a little wrong that prevents a lot of wrong is worth it. It might not be popular in the eyes of the law or the Lord, but to prevent cruelty—wouldn’t it be right to do something a little wrong? Something that helps a greater good?”

what’s right and wrong were scratched out long ago. There’s not one person left without sin who can judge after a war like this.” Not one of us is getting out of this intact.

She turns, and there, at the end of the hall, is the door to the service stairs. Fury takes hold and spreads. Fury that Mr. Vanheule was taken. Fury over Lukas, Father Louwagie, and her mother’s thwarted life. Fury over all the lies everyone’s told, including the ones she’s told herself, even fury for the five names that would’ve bought her the letter they need from her husband, a man she’s failed to love properly. As she walks, she can feel her finger on the push button, her hand drawing shut the door. Fast. A room condemned with light. What had Coletta said? A little wrong that prevents a lot of wrong is worth it.

Whose story is this, she wonders, and who is the villain?

Because Evelien should’ve given her life, to save so many. Even for the potential of saving so many—shouldn’t she have done it? Though, for all she knows, each one of the men in the house is like Joseph, with a shadow story that may or may not make the facts look different. Maybe the real casualty of war is right and wrong. Even the belief that there is a right and wrong.

And it’s strange, because her instinct is to ask him if he’s all right, to tell him that she’s sorry. But she’s not sorry. She wants the fighting and the fear to stop. She wants him gone and for Bruges to have its streets back, to sit outside in the sun and paint along the canal and speak their own language and sing their own songs. She wants the trees to grow again and the leaves to stay on branches and things to not be so broken, for people to not fear losing their children, for boys to not be forced to run toward death. She wants all of this. She wants the war over and the Germans to leave. But with them will go a small taste of something she’d never known to crave.