It is not what France
gave you but what it did not take from you that was important. –Gertrude Stein
There’s no one
thing that’s true. It’s all true. – Ernest Hemingway
Prologue
Though I often looked for one, I finally had to admit that
there could be no cure for Paris. Part of it was the war. The world had ended once already and could
again at any moment. The war had come
and changed us by happening when everyone said it couldn’t. No one knew how many had died, but when you
heard the numbers—nine million or fourteen million--you thought, Impossible. Paris
was full of ghosts and the walking wounded.
Many came back to Rouen or Oak
Park, Illinois, shot through
and carrying little pieces of what they’d seen behind their kneecaps, full of
an emptiness they could never dislodge.
They’d carried bodies on stretchers, stepping over other bodies to do
it; they’d been on stretchers themselves, on slow-moving trains full of flies
and the floating voice of someone saying he wanted to be remembered to his girl
back home.
No comments:
Post a Comment