Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bamboozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for lead writers.
—The Quiet American, Graham Greene
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it.
—The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
A day with nice light, a cigarette, a war …
—Comanche Territory, Arturo Pérez-Reverte
To Gerda Taro, who spent one year at the Spanish front and who stayed on.
—Death in the Making, Robert Capa
Table of Contents
It’s always too late to turn back. Suddenly you wake up one day knowing that this will never end, that it will always be like this. Take the first train, make a quick decision. It’s here or there. It’s black or white. This one I can trust, this one I can’t. Last night I dreamt I was in Leipzig at a gathering with Georg and everyone at the lake house, around a table covered in white linen, a vase of tulips, John Reed’s book, and a pistol. I spent the whole night dreaming about that pistol and woke up with the taste of gunpowder in my throat.”
The young woman closed the notebook on her lap and looked up at the scenery passing at a rapid speed outside her window; blue countryside between the Rhine and the Vosges mountains, villages with wooden houses, a rose bush, the ruins of a castle destroyed during one of the many medieval wars that devastated Alsace. This is how History enters us, she thought, not knowing that this very territory would soon return to being a battlefield. Battle tanks, medium-range Blenheim bombers, fighter biplanes, the German air force’s Heinkel He 51s … The train passed in front of a cemetery and the other passengers in the compartment crossed themselves. It was difficult to fall asleep with all the wobbling. She kept hitting her temple against the window frame. She was tired. Closing her eyes, she could see her father bundled up in a thick cheviot coat, saying good-bye to her on the station platform at Leipzig. The muscles of his jawline shut tight, like a stevedore under a canopy of gray light. Grind teeth, clench fists inside pockets, and swear in a very low voice in Yiddish. That’s what men who don’t know how to cry do.
It’s a question of character or principles. Emotions only worsen matters when the time comes to leave in a hurry. Her father always maintained a curious debate with tears. They were prohibited from crying as children. If the boys mixed themselves up in a fistfight, and lost in the scuffle, they could not return home to complain. A busted-up lip or a black eye was proof enough of their defeat. And crying was prohibited. The women didn’t have to follow the same code of conduct, of course. But she loved her brothers and there was nothing in this world that would allow her to accept being treated differently. She was raised within those rules. So, there were no tears. Her father knew very well what he was saying.
He was old-fashioned, from Eastern Europe’s Galicia, still using rubber-soled peasant shoes. As a child, she remembered his footprints alongside the farm’s henhouse being as large as a buffalo’s. His voice during the Sabbath ceremony in the synagogue was just as deep as his footprints in the garden. About two hundred pounds of depth.
Hebrew is an ancient language that contains the solitude of ruins within, like