“The year the war came closer I was six or seven and it did not matter to me. I lived with my brother, father and mother and our hut had two rooms with mats on the floor and a line of wooden pegs from which our clothes hung and in the evening we sat in the yard outside, watching our mother cook on the fire by the grapefruit tree. When the tree flowered I opened my mouth wide to swallow the scent.”
“After these things—after disease and after death and after pain and after laughter and after betrayal and after old age and after grace and love and after a foolish son the heaviness of his mother and a woman of valor who stayed with me in beauty in the abyss—after all that I woke up into a half sleep and stayed there four months. And it was bad and it was good and it was sad and it was lost and it was a miracle and it was what it was and it wasn’t what it wasn’t and it could have been and I recalled it was night.”