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Hardly anyone gets up from where they are. Many will never get up again; some try, but their legs, thin as wire, are too weak, and they collapse on the ground, which is covered with excrement. Others fall spectacularly on top of corpses. It’s hard to distinguish between the living and the dead.
Her sanity is already as slippery as butter. It’s better that way. She knows she’s disconnecting from reality. And she doesn’t mind. She feels happy, just as she did when she was little.
Margit opens her eyes and gives her a frightened look, as if they could still be afraid of anything.
The armistice doesn’t make the amputated limbs of the mutilated grow back; it doesn’t cure the pain of the wounded; it doesn’t eradicate typhus; it doesn’t rescue the dying from their decline; it doesn’t return those who have marched on. Peace doesn’t cure everything, at least not that quickly.
It’s all over, but in her head, nothing has finished. It will never end.
A person waiting for you somewhere is like a match you strike at night in the countryside. It may not be able to light up everything, but it does show you the way back home.
Life is back to normal when it’s small things that annoy people.
Rudolf Rosenberg’s memoir, I Cannot Forgive,
