Krista > Books: war‎ (63)

neither

TO AND FRO in shadow from inner to outershadow
from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither
as between two lit refuges whos

neither

TO AND FRO in shadow from inner to outershadow
from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither
as between two lit refuges whose doors once neared gently close, once turned away from gently part again beckoned back and forth and turned away
heedless of the way, intent on the one gleam or the other
unheard footfalls only sound
till at last halt for good, absent for good from self and other
then no sound
then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither
unspeakable home

SAMUEL BECKETT

Historically, the Balkans — that gorgeous, ungovernable, godforsaken peninsula always in turmoil, always on the fringes of civilizations, always a broken-up borderland — had for centuries been a place to survive, endure. It had also been a place to fail to escape from and — both because and in spite of this — to love fiercely. If you were from this lush volatility, chances were you’d in some way participate in at least one war — two or even three if God really had it in for you and gave you a long life.

The complexity of the narrative structure that involves not only multiple levels of diegesis and various diegetic combinations discussed by Genette but also an unusual correlation between verifiable reality and fiction, invites theoretical speculation primarily concerning elements that can be qualified as ‘disruptive’ to the memoir, related to trauma.

I’m not writing a biopic here; this is not that kind of story and mine is not that kind of life. I’ve got my conciliatory designs on the synapses between life and story of life — my own timid, wide-eyed attempt at living it — which is why I’m compelled to leave my sketches in, to show the work, as it were. If you spend your time on Earth trying to understand how you fit in life instead of living it, then to you, trying to understand is living, and what you’re reading is that hard admittance.

In the fortress of our bodies
May our ideal live on
Mingled with your blood
So that tomorrow they won’t dare,
They won’t dare to murder us.

In the fortress of our bodies
May our ideal live on
Mingled with your blood
So that tomorrow they won’t dare,
They won’t dare to murder us.

All of his torturers sound the same, Fernand can’t distinguish between their voices anymore: similar timbre, just a lot of noise, goddamn hertz. What Fernand does not know is that the general secretary of police in Algiers, Paul Teitgen, made it explicitly clear, two hours ago, that he forbade anyone from touching the suspect. Teitgen had been deported and tortured by the Germans during the war. He could not understand why the police, his police, that of the France for which he’d fought, the France of the Republic, Voltaire, Hugo, Clemenceau, the France of human rights, of Human Rights (he was never sure when to capitalize), this France, la France, would use torture as well. No one here had taken any notice: Teitgen was a gentle soul, a pencil pusher offloaded from the metropolis just three months ago. He had brought his dainty ways along in his little suitcase, you should’ve seen, duty, probity, righteousness, ethics even — ethics my ass, he knows nothing about this place, nothing at all, do what you have to do with Iveton and I’ll cover for you, or so the chief had decided without hesitation. You can’t fight a war with principles and boy-scout sermons.

He thinks of her every day. He cannot keep from doing it. Cannot keep from picking up the scattered pieces of their story, as if he had to put them in order between these walls, give them a meaning in this gray shithole, bulb on the ceiling, bunk stained by former inmates, one toilet between three. Give them a direction, a solid outline, thick, drawn in chalk or charcoal. Three and a half years together: one with the other, one through and for the other. Fernand collects whatever pieces his memory more or less readily restores to him, to form a brick — a cinderblock of love alone capable, in the face of an uncertain future, to break the bones and jaws of his tormentors.

Hélène.

This strange eventful history that made a life. Not good or bad — rather, both good and bad — but that was not the point. Above all, they had been,

This strange eventful history that made a life. Not good or bad — rather, both good and bad — but that was not the point. Above all, they had been, for so long, wildly curious. Just to see, to experience all that they could, to set foot anywhere, to speak to anyone, taste anything, to learn, to know.

I’m a writer; I tell stories. I want to tell the stories of their lives. It doesn’t really matter where I start. We’re always in the middle; wherever we stand, we see only partially. I know also that everything is connected, the constellations of our lives moving together in harmony and disharmony. The past swirls along with and inside the present, and all time exists at once, around us. The ebb and flow, the harmonies and dissonance — the music happens, whether or not we describe it. A story is not a line; it is a richer thing, one that circles and eddies, rises and falls, repeats upon itself.

To be sixty-five was to know that you dreamed the lazy lunch beneath the plane trees and window shopping along the Croisette, but that death was what was real; to be thirty-two, as Chloe was, meant you could still pretend the inverse was true. And still, why not, for the afternoon, dream?

Please do not get lost. If you haven’t had an Ear Check, don’t come here. Level Forty-Two will be open tomorrow. Come back then. Remember you have

Please do not get lost. If you haven’t had an Ear Check, don’t come here. Level Forty-Two will be open tomorrow. Come back then. Remember you have seven moons. You must reach The Light before the last one rises.

Lankans can’t queue. Unless you define a queue as an amorphous curve with multiple entry points. This appears to be a gathering point for those with questions about their death. There are multiple counters and irate customers clamour over grills to shout abuse at the few behind the bars. The afterlife is a tax office and everyone wants their rebate.

• The Afterlife is as confusing as the Before Death, the In Between is as arbitrary as the Down There. So we make up stories because we’re afraid of the dark.

• You hover above him, more like a mosquito than angel. The mosquitoes are said to have killed half of everyone who has ever lived. A lot more than angels have saved.

• You used to make cracks about death when you considered it an unlikely event, as we all do, until we don’t.

• Magic isn’t evil or good. Or black or white. It is like the universe, like every missing God. Powerful and supremely indifferent.

• All stories are recycled and all stories are unfair. Many get luck, and many get misery. Many are born to homes with books, many grow up in the swamps of war. In the end, all becomes dust. All stories conclude with a fade to black.

You think of dead lakes overflowing with corpses, of police stations where the rich lock up the poor, of palaces where those who follow orders torture those who refuse to. You think of distraught lovers, abandoned friends and absent parents. Of lapsed treaties and photographs that are seen and forgotten, regardless of the walls they hang on. How the world will go on without you and will forget you were even here. You think of the mother, the old man and the dog, of the things you did, or failed to do, for the ones you loved. You think about evil causes and about worthy ones. That the chances of violence ending violence are one in nothing, one in nada, one in squat.

Shortly before midnight Bruno Perzenowski and Heinrich Busch climbed up the thirteen steps. Once there, Branchaud led each man, his final stride pl

Shortly before midnight Bruno Perzenowski and Heinrich Busch climbed up the thirteen steps. Once there, Branchaud led each man, his final stride placing him above one of the two steel trapdoors. As December 17 ended and the new day began, the hangman still waited, but no telegram arrived with a reprieve. At 12:10 a.m., the hangman with practiced hand “pinion[ed] their legs, dropped the hoods [over their faces], adjusted the ropes and pulled the lever.” Twenty minutes later, Perzenowski’s and Busch’s bodies were cut down, examined by the coroner, pronounced dead, and carried directly to the common grave they had been forced to dig the previous day. At 12:45, Walter Wolf and Willy Müeller were executed. Their bodies too were brought to the common grave. The child murderer, Donald Sherman Staley, was hanged at 1: 30 p.m., bringing an end to what would be the last mass hanging in Canadian history.

Opened early in 1943 and representing a sizeable increase in employment and economic activity for the city, Camp 132 was welcomed by Hatters. That the prisoners were available for farm labour and the occasional hockey game only made their presence more welcome. The locals treated the captives with courtesy, and their manners were reciprocated. The existence of Camp 132 was as positive an experience as could be expected for both sides, except for the shocking killings of Private August Plaszek in 1943 and Sergeant Dr. Karl Lehmann a year later.

The government’s intention and the appeals court’s decisions may have settled the matter in 1946 but they do not do so today. The violation of the Geneva Convention and the War Measures Act may seem to be technical legal points. They are not. For, by trying the POWs in civilian court, Canadian authorities deprived them of something vitally important: jurors of their peers, that is jurors who understood military ethos.

“Here, I have an idea.” In the lower right corner, under the Produced By credit, Artie crossed out the John in John Doe and wrote Jane. “Jane Doe. No

“Here, I have an idea.” In the lower right corner, under the Produced By credit, Artie crossed out the John in John Doe and wrote Jane. “Jane Doe. No one, and I mean no one, will have any doubt who Jane Doe really is. Satisfied?” Maria might have been had she not noticed the one non-anonymized name on the poster. It appeared right above the title, in small but legible cursive: Art Feldman and Mercury Pictures Presents …

“People like you and me, Art? The sons of furriers and cobblers and glovers who’ve been in the business since the battles with the Edison Trust? We came out here to build ourselves a broken kingdom where only the broken prosper, and then, our children, they hold it against us when we make them whole.”

• For years, Maria had devised strategies for smuggling the profane beneath the most sensitive censorial snouts. At her best, she passed more colorful bullshit than Babe the Blue Ox.

• Annunziata knew the bribes were wasted, but when you’re desperate, every open pocket is a wishing well.

• She was Rubenesque, and, like both painter and deli sandwich, irrefutable proof of Creation’s genius.

A dark inkling deepens to certainty. This parched patch of Utah is indeed the farthest outpost of the Third Reich, alike in the immodesty of its vision and narrowness of its humanity.

Come, other future. Come, mercy not manifest in time; come knowledge not obtainable in time. Come, other chances. Come, unsounded deep. Come, undiv

Come, other future. Come, mercy not manifest in time; come knowledge not obtainable in time. Come, other chances. Come, unsounded deep. Come, undivided light.

Come dust.

He gazes. A rose-coloured scratch is travelling on the blue, high and far. The last plane of daylight. The celestial clock is evolving and bringing on the night. Even happiness can’t stop it. Time is his friend now, but it goes by so fast.

People say the world gets smaller when you’re dying: but there it still is, as astonishingly much of it as ever. It’s you who shrinks. Or you who can grasp the world less, who can take hold of less and less of it, until you’re only peeping at one burning-bright corner of the whole immense fabric. And then not even that.

He couldn’t help thinking, as the train hurtled closer toward his destination, that he’d traversed not any physical distance that day but rather so

He couldn’t help thinking, as the train hurtled closer toward his destination, that he’d traversed not any physical distance that day but rather some vast psychic distance inside him, that he’d been advancing not from the island’s south to its north but from the south of his mind to its own distant northern reaches.

Falling in love, or what deserved to be called falling in love, he had realized that night, was not so much an emotional or psychological condition as an epistemological condition, a condition in which two people held hands and watched in silent amazement as the world around them was slowly unveiled, as the falsities of ordinary life began to thin and dissolve before their eyes, the furrowed eyebrows and clenched jaws, the bright colors and loud noises, the surface excitements and disturbances all dropping away so that what remained — time stripped bare -— was the only way the world could truly be apprehended, so that even if this condition did not last, even if it was lost, as eventually it is always lost, to habit or circumstance or simply the slow, sad passage of the years, the knowledge that it has imparted remains, the knowledge that the world we ordinarily partake in is somehow not quite real, that time does not need to pass the way we usually experience it passing, that somehow it is possible to live and breathe and move in a single moment, that a single moment could be not a bead on an abacus of finite length but an ocean that can be entered into, whose distant shores can never be reached.

Maybe it was for this reason, it had occurred to him at that moment, that eyesight weakened with the passing of the years, not because of old age or disease, not because of the deterioration of the cornea or the lenses or the finely tuned muscles that controlled them but because, rather, of the accumulation of a few such images over the course of one’s brief sojourn on earth, images of great beauty that pierced the eyes and superimposed themselves over everything one saw afterward, making it harder over time to see and pay attention to the outside world, though perhaps, it occurred to him now, four years later in the country of his birth, walking at the back of the procession bearing Rani’s body for cremation, Rani who’d seen so much that she had never been able to forget, perhaps he’d been naive back then, perhaps it was not just images of beauty that clouded one’s vision over time but images of violence too, those moments of violence that for some people were just as much a part of life as the moments of beauty, both kinds of image appearing when we least expected it and both continuing to haunt us thereafter, both of which marked and branded us, limiting how far we were subsequently able to see.

The word em refers to the little brother or little sister in a family; or the younger of two friends; or the woman in a couple. I like to think that t

The word em refers to the little brother or little sister in a family; or the younger of two friends; or the woman in a couple. I like to think that the word em is the homonym of the verb aimer, “to love,” in French, in the imperative: aime.

The Americans speak of the “Vietnam War,” the Vietnamese of the “American War.” This distinction is perhaps what explains the cause of that war.

The night before, Tâm had lain down a child; the next day, she awoke with no family. She went from artless laughter to the silence of adults whose tongues have been cut out. In four hours, her long, girlish tresses were undone, as she faced the spectre of scalped heads.

Tâm can describe in detail how the soldiers slipped the ace of spades into their helmet straps, sleeves rolled up above their elbows, the cuffs of their pant legs tucked into their boots. On the other hand, she remembers no soldier’s face. Maybe war machines don’t have a human face.

This fiftieth anniversary will confirm in all likelihood that memory is a faculty of forgetfulness. It forgets that all Vietnamese, no matter where they live, descend from a love story between a woman of the immortal race of fairies and a man of the blood of dragons. It forgets that their country was surrounded by barbed wire that transformed it into an arena and that they found themselves adversaries, forced to fight each other. Memory forgets the distant hands that pulled the strings and the triggers. It only remembers the blows, the aching pain of those blows that bruised roots, snapped ancestral bonds, and destroyed the family of immortals.

Besides chronicling one of the most ingenious hoaxes ever perpetrated (and one of the only known examples of a con game being used for good instead of

Besides chronicling one of the most ingenious hoaxes ever perpetrated (and one of the only known examples of a con game being used for good instead of ill), The Confidence Men explores the strategy that underpins all confidence schemes: the subtle process of mind control called coercive persuasion, colloquially known as brainwashing. The answers to this book’s central questions — How does a master manipulator create and sustain faith? Why do his converts persist in believing things that are patently false? — also illuminate the behavior of present-day figures such as advertisers, cult leaders, and political demagogues. Above all, The Confidence Men is the story of the profound friendship of two men who almost certainly would not have met otherwise: Jones, the Oxford-educated son of a British lord, and Hill, a mechanic on an Australian sheep station. Vowing to see the scheme through if it cost them their lives, each was sustained throughout its myriad hardships by the steadfastness of the other.

This is the true story of the most singular prison break ever recorded — a clandestine wartime operation that involved no tunneling, no weapons, and no violence of any kind. Conceived during World War I, it relied on a scheme so outrageous it should never have worked: Two British officers escaped from an isolated Turkish prison camp by means of a Ouija board.

In the end, what aided the mediums most of all were the times, for it was only in that liminal era, poised at the nexus of the scientific and the spiritual, that this particular con could have stood a chance. The period saw the resurgence of the Victorian ardor for spiritualism, a movement, itself founded in fakery, that has been called “conjuring in disguise.” It was a time when cutting-edge technologies such as the phonograph, radio, and telephone were making disembodied voices audible to an enchanted but largely uncomprehending public, rendering the idea of discourse with the dead an authentic empirical question. It was an age, suspended between alienism and Freudianism, when the observed symptoms of mental disorders had been neatly codified and could thus be well emulated. It was a time when orthodox psychiatry endorsed the belief that mediumship could result in madness. And it was a time of sustained, widespread social upheaval, when many stood ready to grasp at whatever straw might offer succor.

Because airpower was young, the faculty of the Tactical School was young — in their twenties and thirties, full of the ambition of youth. They got dru

Because airpower was young, the faculty of the Tactical School was young — in their twenties and thirties, full of the ambition of youth. They got drunk on the weekends, flew warplanes for fun, and raced each other in their cars. Their motto was: Proficimus more irretenti: “We make progress unhindered by custom.” The leaders of the Air Corps Tactical School were labeled “the Bomber Mafia.” It was not intended as a compliment — these were the days of Al Capone and Lucky Luciano and shoot-outs on the streets. But the Air Corps faculty thought the outcast label quite suited them. And it stuck.

The Bomber Mafia is a case study in how dreams go awry. And how, when some new, shiny idea drops down from the heavens, it does not land, softly, in our laps. It lands hard, on the ground, and shatters. The story I’m about to tell is not really a war story. Although it mostly takes place in wartime. It is the story of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer. A band of brothers in central Alabama. A British psychopath. Pyromaniacal chemists in a basement lab at Harvard. It’s a story about the messiness of our intentions, because we always forget the mess when we look back. And at the heart of it all are Haywood Hansell and Curtis LeMay, who squared off in the jungles of Guam. One was sent home. One stayed on, with a result that would lead to the darkest night of the Second World War. Consider their story and ask yourself — What would I have done? Which side would I have been on?

The full attack lasted almost three hours; 1,665 tons of napalm were dropped. LeMay’s planners had worked out in advance that this many firebombs, dropped in such tight proximity, would create a firestorm — a conflagration of such intensity that it would create and sustain its own wind system. They were correct. Everything burned for sixteen square miles. Buildings burst into flame before the fire ever reached them. Mothers ran from the fire with their babies strapped to their backs only to discover — when they stopped to rest — that their babies were on fire. People jumped into the canals off the Sumida River, only to drown when the tide came in or when hundreds of others jumped on top of them. People tried to hang on to steel bridges until the metal grew too hot to the touch, and then they fell to their deaths.

Ernie Sickert, the etiolated young man who had brought them news of the break‑in, had appeared out of nowhere. He was wearing what had become a uni

Ernie Sickert, the etiolated young man who had brought them news of the break‑in, had appeared out of nowhere. He was wearing what had become a uniform for him, grey flannel trousers, starched white shirt, and mulberry bow tie. Tall and so lanky that he verged on emaciation, Sickert had both hands up on the top of the door frame from which he hung like human drapery. An elaborate stack of towering pompadour crowned his narrow head, a hairdo that he had adopted during his days when he had played tenor sax for the Rhythm Alligators, a local dance band. Ernie had an expectant air, an I’m‑preparing‑to‑lick‑ice‑cream look on his face.

“I’ve got a problem. A big one. The storm has cut Connaught off from the outside world. Completely. Telephone, telegraph lines, they’re all down. Roads are impassable.The foreman of the section gang came in on a handcar at six o’clock and said that the railway trestle bridge over Cutbank Creek to the east is ready to collapse and that the embankment on the west line has washed out. There’ll be no trains running to Connaught for days. Which means that I can’t contact any other detachments to let them know what’s happened here, can’t warn them that Ernie Sickert is on the loose. It all falls on me. I’ve got no one to turn to for help.”

The great glacier of anger that was Oliver Dill was grinding the bedrock of his being to gravel. The pressure of it was inescapable; sometimes he felt it a little less, sometimes a little more, but it was always present. For the last three years the glacier had been moving toward some unknown destination the way an icefield moves, inch by inch. This afternoon it had brought him to this point: Would he act as Judith would want him to act and try to spare the boy’s life? Or would the glacier follow the natural course of its inclinations, implacably inch forward and crush Ernie Sickert?

Vidalia was stalled. Coming to the end of Dov’s journal left her wondering if life wasn’t a court convened and presided over by idiots. Left her wondering why she had clung so tenaciously to optimism, to belief in a better future if those things could be taken away as easily as they had been taken from Dov, by an accident, a stumble in the dark, by a politically motivated arrest.

For many years, in his mind Dill had been trying to correct the past. But the past was beyond correction. If the past led to death then death was surely beyond correction too. You carried the past into the future on your back, its knees and arms hugging you tighter with every step. His heart was where it was.

Take your lead from me, Mayfield. Do as I do. Creative havoc, well‑played, leads to victory. Creative havoc is the jazz of war.

In any case, they soon come back. The flickering along the wrack continues until morning comes. The sirens, now that night is done, must go back to

In any case, they soon come back. The flickering along the wrack continues until morning comes. The sirens, now that night is done, must go back to the sea and hide — they lost their voices when they died. They cannot sing their secret song, “The Mystery of Right and Wrong”; they know the words but no one who would sing them truthfully to you.

I wasn’t sure if the book was making me worse or if it was all that was holding me together. My supposedly secret illness. But it somehow reassured me to think about the ways my sisters coped. Carmen had her drugs. Gloria had her hypersexuality, though not many people called it that at the time. Bethany had her anorexia. I had my diary and Het Achterhuis, which I kept reading even after I knew it by heart. The thought that we were all freaks made me feel less like one.

Girls, get used to contradictions, truthful lies and false non-fictions. What isn’t there is everywhere; the things which are, are not, you see, however much they seem to be — and what is not is what will be as long as you and I agree.

It struck me that Rachel had been right when she said that history happened not in some nebulous, exceptional elsewhere, but in ordinary concrete places, to commonplace people. My world shrank to this pair of unexceptional streets, to Hans and his family, to Anne Frank and hers. History, the war, the fate of the Franks, were personal, local, terrifyingly actual and immediate. I imagined Hans as a teenager looking out of one of the windows of the house, his hands pressed to the glass as the Nazis marched past, their boots clumping on the cobblestones, row after row of bluff and bravado and menace without purpose, a lethal behemoth composed of men just like the ones who ran South Africa and those who supported them, greater only in number, driven to savagery by a group of men whose madness they need not have fallen for but did for reasons that flattered none of humankind.

In the cold of night, I took off my regulation trench coat and my shirt. I slid my shirt onto your body and tied the sleeves against your stomach,

In the cold of night, I took off my regulation trench coat and my shirt. I slid my shirt onto your body and tied the sleeves against your stomach, a very, very tight double knot that became stained with your black blood. I picked you up and brought you back to the trench. I held you in my arms like a child, my more-than-brother, my friend, and I walked and walked in the mud, in the crevices carved out by mortar shells, filled with blood-stained water, dispersing the rats that had left their burrows to feed on human flesh. And as I carried you in my arms, I began to think for myself, by asking for your forgiveness. I knew, I understood too late what I should have done when you asked me, eyes dry, the way one asks a favor of a childhood friend, like a debt owed, without ceremony, sweetly. Forgive me.

The rumor spread. It spread, and as it spread it shed its clothes and, eventually, its shame. Well dressed at the beginning, well appointed at the beginning, well outfitted, well medaled, the brazen rumor ended up with her legs spread, her ass in the air. I didn’t notice it right away, I didn’t recognize the change, I didn’t know what she was plotting. Everyone had seen her but no one described her to me. I finally caught wind of the whispers and learned that my strangeness had been transformed into madness, and madness into witchcraft. Soldier sorcerer.

I am the shadow that devours rocks, mountains, forests, and rivers, the flesh of beasts and of men. I slice skin, I empty skulls and bodies. I cut off arms, legs, and hands. I smash bones and I suck out their marrow. But I am also the red moon that rises over the river, I am the evening air that rustles the tender acacia trees. I am the wasp and the flower. I am as much the wriggling fish as the still canoe, as much the net as the fisherman. I am the prisoner and his guard. I am the tree and the seed that grew into it. I am father and son. I am assassin and judge. I am the sowing and the harvest. I am mother and daughter. I am night and day. I am fire and the wood it devours. I am innocent and guilty. I am the beginning and the end. I am the creator and the destroyer. I am double.

P.S. I had a dream last night that we were in Paris for Christmas. You, me, Will, Alice. The snow fell in thick fat flakes as we strolled along the

P.S. I had a dream last night that we were in Paris for Christmas. You, me, Will, Alice. The snow fell in thick fat flakes as we strolled along the Champs-Élysées, the lights of the Eiffel Tower twinkling in the distance. It was the most perfect dream, Thomas. I know we will get there one day. I promise we will.

She came to Australia with the bookshop still in her imagination and thought: How much farther can I go? This is where I stop. A very long way west of Budapest, of Auschwitz. She had read enough to know that we cannot speak of things that are “meant to be.” If her long journey from Europe to Hometown, to Tom Hope, to the bookshop of the broken hearted was meant to be, then Mein Kampf was meant to be, and the cleansing, the säuberung of the students in Opernplatz were meant to be. She said: “Too bad about that.” Hannah's happiness was great enough to embrace contradictions. It was without doubt meant to be, this bookshop that would bankrupt her, this love for a man who would one day notice her gray hair and her wrinkles more keenly than he did now. Too bad about that. For now, a little taste of paradise.

“Silence becomes a woman.” Every woman I’ve ever known was brought up on that saying.

“Silence becomes a woman.” Every woman I’ve ever known was brought up on that saying.

Looking back, it seemed to me I'd been trying to escape not just from the camp, but from Achilles's story; and I'd failed. Because, make no mistake, this was his story – his anger, his grief, his story. I was angry, I was grieving, but somehow that didn't matter. Here I was, again, waiting for Achilles to decide when it was time for bed, still trapped, still stuck inside his story, and yet with no real part to play in it.

I thought: Suppose, suppose just once, once, in all these centuries, the slippery gods keep their word and Achilles is granted eternal glory in return for his early death under the walls of Troy...? What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times? One thing I do know: they won't want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won't want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won't want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they'll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps? I just hope they manage to work out who the lovers were.

We’re going to survive – our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams – and in their worst nightmares too.

In the epilogue, when the story moves briefly to the present, Beirut Hellfire Society’s underlying connective thread – a kind of geocultural determinism – becomes fully visible. Pavlov’s half-Swedish great-niece comes upon the scene and starts to morph into Pavlov. “Yes, it’s a story about families and lineages,” says Hage, “that asks how people are transformed by their geographies. How important is it to stay in one space? Maybe we should all become wanderers. I just don’t know.”