I remember a tram stop with a clock next to it where, before the war, my mother and I used to wait. (…) That little hand on the clock jumping forward without me is the symbol for me of how my mother disappeared.
A wall does not seperate; it binds two things together.
But that’s just the way it is with the truth, it’s never in the same room with you, it’s never in the backseat with you, it’s never there when you need it. It always bobs up years later like a waterbird that dives in one part of the lake and pops up in another. You grab for the truth with both hands and it pops up behind you…
We do not like to think about children’s fears, Marina had said one afternoon in the weeks alone with Jean. We push them aside to concentrate on their innocence. But children are close to grief, they are closer to grief than we are. They feel it, undiluted, and then gradually they grow away from that flesh-knowledge. They know all about the terror of the woods, the witch-mother, things buried and not seen again. In every child’s fear is always the fear of the worst thing, the loss of the person they love most.
I do not believe home is where we’re born, or the place where we grew up, not a birthright or an inheritance, not a name, or blood or country. It is not even the soft part that hurts when touched, that defines our loneliness the way a bowl defines water. It will not be located in a smell or a taste or a talisman or a word…
Home is our first real mistake. It is the one error that changes everything, the one lesson you could let destroy you. It is from this moment that we begin to build our home in the world. It is this place that we furnish with smell, taste, a talisman, a name.
Janina, said Lucjan, fearlessness is a kind of despair, do not wish it, it is the opposite of courage.
