As soon as we got into her room, Xyla opened him up.
To my surprise, the child did not rush through the evening meal in her eagerness to play the new game. Indeed, she politely inquired if she could, again, select the menu and, given permission, spent the better part of an hour examining the various options before making a decision. Which was: Pasta in a cream sauce of her own creation speckled with chunks of albacore.
“It would be better with bread,” she assured me.
“Bread doesn’t keep well,” I replied. “And since we are going to be—”
“Well, couldn’t you pick some up? When you go out the next time, I mean?”
“I will. . . try,” I finally agreed, understanding intuitively that the child was not referring to typical manufactured bread—she expected me to visit an actual bakery. That was out of the question. Still, if I remembered correctly—and, in fact, I have never failed to remember correctly—there was a bakery of some sort right within the airport.
We ate in relative silence, for which I was grateful. The child’s manners were superb—she invariably asked if I would pass a condiment rather than reaching for it herself. But her visage appeared troubled.
“Is something wrong, Zoe?” I asked.
“Do you like it?”
“It?”
“The *food*. Do you like the food?”
“It’s delicious.”
“Well, you didn’t *say* anything.”
“That was bad manners on my part,” I said, truthfully enough. “I was enjoying it so that I forgot myself.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” she said, smiling. “I just. . . When people don’t say anything, I never know. . . I mean, I always think. . .”
“I promise to tell you what I’m thinking, Zoe. How would that be?”
“Oh I would *love* that. You’re not. . . teasing, are you? You’ll really tell me?”
“I certainly will. But only when you ask, fair enough?”
“Okay! And I won’t ask all the time, I swear.”
“Whenever you like, child.”
Throughout the rest of the meal, we talked around pockets of silence, but never once did she ask what I was thinking.
“Can I do it myself?” she asked as we started to clean up after dinner.
“I thought it would be easier if we both did it.”
“No. I mean, yes, maybe it would. But it doesn’t have to be easier, does it? I mean, I would like to do it myself. It would be fun.”
“Very well, Zoe. And thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She smiled.
Not having access to a newspaper, I flicked on the television set to watch PBS as the child busied herself in the kitchen portion of the basement.
I must have been resting my eyes, half-listening to the television, when the child tapped me on the shoulder. Startled, I turned to her, waiting for her to speak.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the screen.
It only took a second to ascertain. “Some footage of tribal warfare,” I told her.
“Why are they killing everyone?”
How to explain xenophobia and its natural byproduct, genocide, to a child? “They hate each other,” I tried for simplicity, knowing what was coming next.
“Why?”
I was not disappointed, but no closer to an explanation. It was clear that the child was not trying to be annoying, that she was deeply puzzled by what appeared, on its surface, to be patent insanity. Yet, in thinking through to a response accessible by a child of Zoe’s age, I could not escape the internal logic. After all, tribalism is per se insanity. Still, I made another attempt:
“Do you know about Indians, Zoe? Have you ever studied about them in school?”
“Not really. But I know. . . something about them, I guess.”
“All right. You know Indians are aligned into tribes, yes?”
“Yes. Like Apaches and Navahos and—”
“That’s right. Now, even today, there are tribes too. In the Balkans, in Africa, in the Middle East. And some of them hate each other. They have for many, many years. Sometimes, when that kind of hatred builds up long enough, one tribe attempts to exterminate the other.”
“Exterminate? Like with—”
“Yes, like with termites in a house. But the difference is. . . it would be. . . as if the goal was to
