When the World Goes Quiet by Gian Sardar EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Gian Sardar
- Language: English
- Genre: Women’s Friendship Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
October 10, 1918
More than a decade has passed since the storm, but the bombs and the noise
seem to conjure that day. Bombs that land far away but not far enough.
Bombs that rattle houses and doors and break panes of glass and send
papers flying in the street, just like the wind once had. The first time
Evelien took shelter in a cellar during a bombardment, right at the start of
the war, the sounds and the shaking and the suffocating underground space
grabbed her and yanked her through the years till she was back on her
parents’ small farm in their small corner of Belgium, till she was once again
inside their root cellar, held in dark and blame because she was the reason
her mother was outside, in the storm. Sometimes fault is also like a wind. It
slips into cracks and fills spaces.
The first time she hid in the cellar during a bombardment was also the
last. The memories of that day don’t just exist in her mind, they pulse fast in
her blood, increase the speed of her heart, and make her legs shake.
“I saw you the other night,” Coletta, her mother-in-law, says.
Coletta, tall with curly red hair that’s thinned during the war, handfuls
often caught in the comb of her fingers. The opposite of Evelien’s mother,
in all ways that matter, though the two women grew up together and were
once close. She comes into Evelien’s room, then opens the shutters. A
scarlet morning light pours in.
“In the alley,” she continues, “during the shelling.”
Bright shots of vermilion, blooms of blue, ribbons of green. The sky
had been a beautiful horror, lit up with the Allied effort to hit the seaplane
bases responsible for the bombings of London and southeast England.
Evelien’s futile attempt: to try to detach meaning and see the colors as only
colors. Not just as a way to spare herself pain, but to provide a bit of refuge.
To help live in an unlivable world. “It was far enough away.”
“If something happened to you, and we’re in the cellar and don’t know
—Evelien, what could we do?”
Secretly, Evelien loves the woman’s concern. But she also understands
that someone who survives four years of war might start feeling invincible,
rather than lucky, and that she’s begun taking too many chances. “I was
right at the door. Almost inside.”
“Almost inside means outside. And after curfew?”
Is it wrong that I tell myself what I’m hearing is thunder? One of the
questions Evelien first asked when the war began. I believe we’re allowed a
bit of self-preservation, August, Coletta’s husband, a short man with wide
nostrils and flyaway graying hair, explained. Eventually they saw it this
way: in the midst of a war that wasn’t ending, entrenched with unspeakable
horror and loss, the only correct way to live was whatever way they could.
And though Evelien could never forget what the streaks of light mean, after
so long, sometimes she chooses to try to only see the color. This, however,
is not something she will admit to. There’s already enough that’s wrong
with her.
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