Everyone Brave is Forgiven

by Chris Cleave

children and adults was that children were prepared to put twice the energy into the project of not being sad.

All the things we make exceptional are merely borrowed from the mundane and must without warning be surrendered to it.

Its fluttering made him sad: such a tiny pump, the heart, and such an endless flood, life.

cigarettes, and one by one they lit up with shaking hands. This was what he always had his men do when they were rattled: smoke, or brew tea, or write letters, or polish boots—anything to get back in character. But

This was what he had learned in France: that one could continue to operate quite adequately, so long as one stayed in the hour.

When they got to Bow she saw that Hilda had been right. Every window was out. In the bright sun, glass lay everywhere, so that if one half closed one’s eyes the streets bejeweled. Pavements were undulant, walls bowed, streetlamps wilted by heat. The city’s perpendiculars were defeated: it was as if the bombs had reserved a particular spite for right angles.

The eye may be an obligate scout but the heart is not an incurable follower.

One could always imagine that one’s life, though smoldering in parts, might be undamaged in the west.

The enemy dropped payloads of doubt.

There was something about the star, rising above the stable, that still pulled a crowd in from the fields.

“No?” “I don’t see any of it being as it was. Just look at us, down here in the dark. Coloreds and cripples and cranks—but we’re the ones holding on. When the rest get back they’ll have to respect what happened here.”

For a moment Alistair considered telling him. But of course, it wasn’t the right thing. The war, after all, was a legal riot and a bright pageant and a marvel of near-misses. It was a perfect adventure until proved otherwise, and so it would hardly be a kindness, on Christmas Day, to produce evidence. One pulled crackers for the snap of their mild detonation.

London had fitted her so perfectly that she had mistaken its shape for her own. Now

Such was the past, after all: it left the present cluttered with objects the survivors were immune to.

He heard the music and he heard the news from above, and it seemed to him now that the world above and the world below were playing the exact same tune.

was brought up to believe that everyone brave is forgiven, but in wartime courage is cheap and clemency out of season.

War made one do everything when one wasn’t at all ready. Dying, yes, but also living.

achieving a busy translucence.

“Your father was my choice. You were my delight. You may despise my life for its smallness—it may seem as nothing to you—but please do not think it is nothing to me. And the smaller it becomes, the more frightening I find it, because all that is left is so dear.”

Now X marked only the unexploded, the unexamined, the unconsoled.

“Women fall differently, that’s all. We die by the stopping of our hearts, they by the insistence of theirs.”

If you weren’t impossible I shouldn’t love you half so much.

The young see the world that they wish for. The old see the world as it is. You must tell me which you think the more honest.”

We are a nation of glorious cowards, ready to battle any evil but our own.”

wouldn’t, if we had any bread. All I’ve left to give the men is fairness.”

The true moments of one’s life were sadder for the fact that they must always be synchronized with the ordinary: with rail timetables, with breaks in the traffic.

Rubble to build on caught no one’s attention but theirs. It did not catch the light, having no promise but what they brought with them.

Life took longer to reassemble than it did to blow apart, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t be lovely, providing that one remembered to go for country walks, and to tune the wireless to music.