Homeland

by Fernando Aramburu

And how people fight against returning to the planet the atoms they’ve borrowed. Actually, what’s rare and exceptional is to be alive.

She softened the terrorist, convinced him to take the step he’d taken. How did she do it? Well, because she loves him. He’s her brother, that I understand. She doesn’t justify his actions. To the contrary, she judges them, severely, without secondary considerations. But he is her brother. She’s trying by all means possible to liberate him from himself, to pull him out of his atrocious past. And when she learned of the remorse of the prisoner in his far-off jail, she wrote me on her iPad: “Something’s changing in him. He’s thinking a lot. Good sign.”