When Kenan’s children ask why this war is happening, why people are being starved and shot at, and he can’t answer them, when he sees them suffering and there is nothing he can do about it, he sees the fireman in himself and he wishes someone would pick him up and carry him away. He cannot collapse, though, because his children look to him to reassure them that everything will be fine, that the war will end, that they will all survive. There are times when he doesn’t know how he manages not to evaporate, how his clothes don’t fall to the floor, emptied of what little substance he was filling
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