he added his final heroic touch by spitting into my father’s face. A family, my father liked to say, is both peace and war, but this was family war as I could never have imagined it. Spitting into my father’s face the way he’d spit into the face of that dead German soldier! If only he had been allowed to go along unrehabilitated, on his own stinking trajectory, but that hadn’t happened, and so this was how the great menace undid us and the abomination of violence entered our house, and I saw how bitterness blinds a man and the defilement it spawns. And why, why did he go to fight in the first
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