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But you’re alive. That was what she had to keep repeating. Even if she wished that she weren’t.
She’d never done any tailoring before, but she’d sewn plenty of human flesh in her time at the American Hospital. Fabric couldn’t be much different. Less messy, certainly.
She must stop it: mustn’t view every new person she encountered and every new thing she did in terms of what she had lost.
It was a strange word, widow—one that must be as uncomfortable to wear as orphan.
A couple of months ago, these people had been the enemy. It gave Martha a frisson of shock to see that they looked so normal. There were women in dresses and hats, some carrying shopping baskets; men in business suits; children in school uniforms. Everyone looked tidy and clean, in sharp contrast to their surroundings. What were you expecting? her inner voice reprimanded her. Ogres wielding hand grenades?
She sensed that each of them had buried something of the past when they had pulled on those ill-fitting gray uniforms and sewn on their UNRRA patches, that like her, they were wary of revealing the twists of fate that had brought them to this place.
It was scary, Martha thought, to peel off your shell and expose what lay beneath.
“As a priest, I shouldn’t say it, but with survival comes guilt. Sometimes I can’t bear waking up, seeing a new day, knowing that so many people have died.”
Kitty felt as though he’d shone a flashlight through her eyes and looked inside her head. He had described it exactly—the darkness that so often enveloped her when she emerged from sleep.
The sense of powerlessness—that no one would listen to a child—had overwhelmed her.
The relief was overwhelming: finally, someone was going to help her.
She leaned back against the wall, suddenly defeated. It wasn’t just the clothes. How were they going to stretch their meat supplies, which were already so pathetically inadequate, to feed yet more hungry DPs? What had she been thinking, coming here? Believing that she could help these people?
‘Always remember, Kitty, the riches of the mind do not rust.’
As she gazed across the water, she saw a feather, white and perfect, drifting past her. Her eyes followed it as it moved gently with the current. It looked so delicate, so fragile—and yet it glided down the river with all the strength and balance of a boat. It was not struggling to escape. It was simply allowing itself to go where time and the water would take it.
This was the path she had chosen. She couldn’t fight against the direction it had taken. Accepting this was a kind of surrender. But it was the only way to find peace.
“It’s what defines a person, the way they deal with life’s unfairness.
“America is a nation of displaced people. How can you close a border that’s been open to the whole world for hundreds of years?”
“It’s all too easy to lose your faith if you’re trying to practice it alone. It’s like a coal falling out of the fire: it soon goes cold.”
“You believe in love, don’t you? You spend all day, every day, caring for people in need. You didn’t have to take that path—you chose to. And that kind of love is the essence of what God is.”
If only . . . They had to be two of the saddest words in the English language.
As spring turned into summer, it seemed that there was no place on earth that was not opening its borders to refugees. Except the United States of America.
