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growing up at seventeen, growing old at eighteen,
Nothing will ever be the same. The teenager could feel that as plain as the hornets still buzzing and the explosions still ringing in his ears. Nothing will ever be the same.
“Isn’t it magnificent?” Michele said. “What’s magnificent?” Uncle Albert said, looking around, puzzled. “This place. How clean the air is. And the smells. No burning. No bomb stench. It seems so . . . I don’t know. Innocent?”
“He loves your mama.” “He doesn’t show it. It’s like he’s afraid to.”
He’d had to think constantly, evaluate constantly, and rely on faith, which he realized was tiring—not easy to sustain at all.
“You want me to guide them, Father?” Pino asked. “The three Jews?” “Three of God’s children whom he loves,” Father Re said.
“But we can’t stop loving our fellow man, Pino, because we’re frightened. If we lose love, all is lost.
“I won’t let that happen,” he said with all the confidence of a seventeen-year-old
“Whatever you may think, Colonel, you are not like God, though you were made in his loving image.”
“I’m a student of happiness, you know. It’s all I really want—happiness, every day for the rest of my life. Sometimes happiness comes to us. But usually you have to seek it out. I read that somewhere.”
“No, and I don’t want to know, not really. I don’t like guns.” “Why?” “They kill people, and I’m a people.”
“Those six words of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, are more powerful than any bullet, cannon, or bomb. The people who hold these six words true are unafraid, and they are strong. ‘Let not your hearts be troubled.’ People who hold these words true will surely defeat tyrants and their armies of fear. It has been this way for nineteen hundred and forty-four years. And I promise you it will be this way for all time to come.”
“Do what I sometimes do when I get scared: imagine you’re someone else, someone who’s far braver and smarter.”
a sky that almost constantly threw snow, as if God were doing everything in his power to blot out the scars of war.
Maybe that’s all it takes for the future to exist, Pino thought. You must imagine it first. You must dream it first.
“It sounds like too much to me, too, Pino, but I’m afraid it’s not too much for God to ask of you.”
“God wants you to fight in a different way, and for a greater good, or he would not have put you where you are.”
When we’re apart, I feel like all the music stops.”
It all made Pino realize that the earth did not know war, that nature would go on no matter what horror one man might inflict on another. Nature didn’t care a bit about men and their need to kill and conquer.
“Faith is a strange creature,” Schuster said. “Like a falcon that nests year after year in the same place, but then flies away, sometimes for years, only to return again, stronger than ever.”
forth. “But where will I go to . . .” “See her?” his father said. “You go to where you were both happiest, and she’ll always be there. I promise you that.”
“I’ve never told anyone about my war, Bob. But someone very wise once told me that by opening our hearts, revealing our scars, we are made human and flawed and whole. I guess I’m ready to be whole.”
