heard it in their voices, felt it in the gentle shuffle of traveling America. We are not like we were before. Now our habit is more often to accept and heal rather than to reject and punish. Would things have been different if our postwar consciousness had, by some miracle, arisen before the war?
My son came up to us when we were still standing together in the front yard, and put a surprisingly big hand on my cheek.
“Dad,” he said, “we’re in good shape.”
“Good, Andrew,” I said, and I was glad to feel his name on my tongue. “Andrew. Anne.”
They fed me an enormous supper of fried chicken, green beans, biscuits, and, for dessert, egg custard. Afterward I took out my notebooks and read to them for a time of our experiences on the road. Anne and Andrew told me the chronicle of their life here at home.
The bus service into town is improved.
Andrew has started his sophomore year in high school.
The price of bread went up twice last week, so Anne is back to making her own.
I have eight orders for gardens, and I think I’d like to get back to that.
It was nearly midnight when we went to bed. I do not think I have ever felt anything as good as lying down beside my wife in the dark and feeling the softness and warmth of her.
I expected to fall into deep black sleep after our intimacy, but I did not. The voices of the road came back to me, all the words at once, softly, persistently possessing me.
I got up, stood looking long at the shadow of my wife in our bed, filled with an emotion so rich that it hurt. I went past my son’s room, listened to his heavy sleep, and then came down here to try to write this last little bit.
I suppose the world is passing through a thundering moment of history. I do not feel it that way, though. Words like
The “U.S.” and the “USSR” I grew up with are gone, and that is strange. It is, I suppose, also history. If we could have our old America back, I suspect that most of us would gladly take the old Soviet Union too. We could live so well together, in the calm of present maturity.
In retrospect the war seems odd and exotic, as if it was fought not by us, but by innocents disguised as ourselves, who, in their fury, forgot how fragile we were. It is eerie to remember the bitter hatred I felt against the Russians when they shot down that Korean airliner in ’83, or after the Kabul firebombing in ’85. Those brutal acts seemed the work of pride, but time and experience have revealed that they were the fearful doings of the trapped. I wish we could reach back through time and heal our relationship. And how would we have done it? The Soviets were punished without surcease for the whole seventy years of their existence. It would have been a remarkable adventure to give up our punitive habits and try to view them as one does a friend who has fallen from the grace of accepted ways.
But what that past world might or might not have done matters little now. It has disappeared so utterly that even granting it consideration seems an indulgence.
I think much more of healing my own body. I touch my hands to my face, running my fingers over the wrinkles that complicate my cheeks. These are the hands and this is the face of a Warday casualty. I wonder what is going wrong in the deeps of my body, in among the pulsing organs and the blood. Are there cells that should not be there, obdurate and growing in the softness of me?
I want to die right here in this house, attended by my wife and son. Even if I must feel pain, I will not choose euthanasia. I want my pain. Perhaps that is a silly and outmoded notion, but I do not recall giving myself life, and feel uneasy about taking it from myself.
I look down at the table, listen to my pencil scratching along the pad. Lord, heal me. Heal my world. Heal the past. If we could accept one another so completely that we were free of all judgment, of all anger, of all denial, would heaven not shine through us then?
Would it shine even through the engineers of Warday, the soldiers and the fliers, the generals and the bureaucrats who worked the machine? The greater justice is not to punish evil, but to give the evildoer the courage to experience his own conscience.
If we are all participants in the glory of mankind—the songs of children, the joy in the bedrooms of the world, the great cathedrals and paintings—then are we not also each responsible in some way for the failures? Or at least, if we accept them into our hearts as our own, can we not heal ourselves?
I wonder. I hope I can come to terms with the feelings that this journey has evoked in me. We bear weighted memories; we all hold the dead in our hearts. Our humanity demands that we do this.
Their memory is the conscience we so urgently require if we are not, in the future, to drift back to the old recourse to war. The Europeans, especially, need to remember this. Otherwise another century will see them again battling for senseless dominion.
To decide that a given war can be endured and survived is to let oneself come that much nearer to fighting it. War’s greatest tragedy is not the destruction; it is the lives that are prevented from unfolding. And size counts: the greater the war, the more profound the wrong.
The mere existence of nuclear weapons was the most revealing symptom of what was out of balance about the past. Two societies, in varying degrees acceptable or unacceptable to one another, were so interested in their differences that they came to hate their common ground. That obsession was as a cancer in the mind and heart of the old world, which spread cruelty and blindness through the whole enormous body, and finally killed it.
When I awake in sweat and dread, sensing that things are starting to grow in my body that shouldn’t be there, imagining my flesh tricked into destroying itself, I get my heart to stop its thrashing by remembering that at least the war is over. I must still live with my personal consequences, but I am coming to terms with that.
Now I am going upstairs. I’ll finish these last few lines in bed.
As I slip into our room, I see that Anne is sleeping heavily, her right arm stretched across my side of the bed. I lay it on her breast and get into bed beside her. There is a sense of completion now. At last I am going to sleep.
I lie down, drawing the sheet up around my chin. I sit with my pad on my knees. Music comes to me, an unknown melody, and an image of my son rises in my mind. I want to allow myself to have hope for him and his generation.
If only we have gained wisdom from the fire. If only we can accept how alike we all are, one and another.
Credits
Jacket design by Robert Reed
Jacket typography © copyright 1984 by Andrew M. Newman
Front jacket photograph by Gary Gladstone/The Image Bank
Back jacket photograph by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
BOOKS BY THE AUTHORS
