1945
The war in Europe is over. Russians met Americans on the bridge across the Elbe and it is over. I have seen pictures in LIFE of bodies burned at Gardelegen. I have read about captured girls my age that Nazis kept in brothels. The Mona Lisa will return to the Louvre. My father in his chair beside the lamp reads the news. Now children who asked, “Will bombs fall on us?” can look at the sky without fear. Stretched on the floor, I am reading PERSUASION. Mother has put a cake in the oven, chocolate. She’ll call us to come taste it. The globe of the world my father found in a second-hand store has been installed, a glass globe with a light inside and only one flaw, a crack running from the North Pole to Madagascar. Crickets are singing under the open windows. A warm evening with dusk slowly falling. The globe shines in the dark beside the bookcase.