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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.
It’s problematic, this appreciation. It renders her the only one in a group of women more drawn to the shocked and tired set of a mother’s face than the baby,
Though Belgium was neutral and forced into the war when Germany invaded, the war’s catalyst has reduced over the years and become simple in her mind, like something simmered on the stove too long: a little to do with an Austrian archduke who was shot point-blank when his motorcar took a wrong turn, landing him in the path of a young Serbian conspirator, and a lot to do with allegiances that sparked one to another to another like a long chain of dynamite, the entire world becoming bright with pain.
“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.
This war is the first fought with aircraft, and though at first the people in Bruges looked at the friendlies, the Allied planes, with sympathy and hope, now, after so many bombings, that’s changed. If the plane above her isn’t German, it’s a threat—a twisted side effect of living in occupied territory, that they fear their own side.
And so we pull the blanket of numbness tight around our shoulders,
A bullet kills at the end of the war the same way it does at the start.
We shouldn’t be thankful we’ve survived; we should be angry we’ve not lived.
To be angry, you must feel. You must grasp the magnitude of loss or injustice—and she’s not ready for that.
trust is a wager no one wants to make—
The books splay, pages fluttering, before they hit the flames. Entire worlds extinguished, one by one.
Last times are rarely known in the moment—a blessing and a curse.
Explain your sympathy to the sheep, her father once said, after she cried when he’d shot a rare lynx that killed their lamb. What he didn’t understand was that she’d cried for both of them, but mostly for all the horrible necessity in life, for the fact that needing to eat for one meant death to the other.
“People don’t want to be wrong about someone. I promise he’d only need a minute to trust you again because he wants to be right about you. You need to do one thing.
her.” “I disagree. People love her because they don’t know her. It’s the look on her face. Mysterious. Her face tells you she has many stories.”
Mona Lisa
How will it change? This whole time, the goal has been for the war to be over, but though they will be free, their country will still be destroyed, the men they love still gone, and their faith in others—and themselves—left in smithereens.
Evelien found God in nature. Or—as she discovered that day at the gallery in Paris—in art.
you weren’t like her. But you didn’t know her always, did you?” “People said I had it easier,” August says, “because I didn’t believe in God. But I ask you, how can that be easier? To not have a reason? To know that there is no reason for all of this?”
It didn’t happen for me. It happened for everyone. All of our fates are one. Do you understand?”
“So having a child is seeking forgiveness?”
he said that because he translated by instinct and not by method, he was a tender barbarian.”
“Art is a wound turned into light. Georges Braque
says. “True. But the need to be right—to insist you are right—has caused more problems in the world than actually being wrong.
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?
“For once,” he says quietly, his words a heat on her skin, “I did my best. But I’ll have you know, all I wanted to do was my very worst.”
No longer are they shaken, squeezed, and rattled. The chaos is once again farther away. All part of the deadly tug-of-war, sometimes over mere meters of land.
style.” “When I almost fainted, my world broke into a Seurat.”
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.”
“Degas said that art is not what you see but what you make others see.
But through his eyes, it’s magic. Like how one sees the world when first in love. Beautiful, but in no way accurate.”
“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. Which makes sense and doesn’t make sense, and is all part of this battle of logic, and the only thing you can do, the only thing that works, is to stop thinking. And
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War throws rules out the window.
She’d arrived in a place where she loved him, loved him always and forever and since the day they met, but not how she needed to. Not in a way that involved need at all.
What is it to love someone you’re afraid to see again?
lashes. “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.”
“Well, you don’t go back, do you? At least you hope you don’t.” Coletta jots down another number. “You might take comfort in this, and you might not, but life is repetitive. Maybe it’s the journey humans need. But every so often, a war or a plague or what have you. A hundred years pass, and our streets look different, so different that we think we’re nothing like the people who came before us. Our situations, our circumstances, they’re all new. They must be, we think, because we’re so different. We want to be different. But at the core, everything’s the same. A hundred years ago, two hundred
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I think because so often her sadness came out as anger.”
Maybe the real casualty of war is right and wrong. Even the belief that there is a right and wrong.
That’s part of the punishment. You know they’d forgive you if they met you. You know that. The real issue is that you didn’t need it from them to begin with. You need it from yourself.”
