Five years this day. Since Lev last saw sunlight. Or said the words my son, the only one ever to do so. His look of mischief, when handing over a newly discovered novel. The last fleeting plea over his shoulder before going in with Jacson, Save me from this lad! The white cuffs soaked like bandages, drops of blood falling on white paper, these images have receded, mostly gone. But then one appears, startling as a stranger standing in the corner of a room where you’d thought yourself alone. Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives. He should still be living. Murder has the weight of an unpaid debt, death as unfinished business.

No room in the house was safe today, the radio no distraction, obscenely it reported a brutal murder in the south of the city, at one of the tanneries. The teakettle screaming in the kitchen was Natalya saying his name. A sound can transform itself exactly in the brain.

The library seemed it might be a safer place, but it was not. Upstairs in the newspaper room, the curled edges of papers lay in deep layers on tables stacked with books. His desk, all those unfinished sentences. The wax cylinders that still hold his voice, somewhere. His desk calendar, if it is there, lies open to August 20, the page he last turned over, with life’s full and ordinary expectation. The thought of that brought a crumpling grief, kneeling in the upstairs stacks waiting for something inside to burst and flood the maple floorboards. Blood seeping darkly between the cracks.

Hell is falling from the skies. A reporter for the Times rode in the plane as a witness, wondering at zero hour whether he should feel sad for “the poor devils about to die.” He decided no, it was a fair exchange for Pearl Harbor. The army’s plan was to drop this bomb on a different Japanese city that morning, a different set of men and dogs and schoolchildren and mothers, but the thick clouds over that city refused to part. Growing tired of circling and waiting, the bomber pilots flew southward down the channel and chose Nagasaki, thanks to its clear skies.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a cloud, the world was lost.

Your blood for mine. If not these, then those. War is the supreme mathematics problem. It strains our skulls, yet we work out the sums, believing we have pressed the most monstrous quantities into a balanced equation.

September 2, 1945

V-J Day. If a typewriter did not have these two letters, today it would have been a useless object. The newspaper headlines could only have been larger if they’d found a way to write “JAPS SURRENDER” down the page lengthwise instead of across the top. Hallelujah, Hirohito has fallen on his knees.

During one of the many church victory picknicks, a little girl drowned in the Swannanoa. Romulus came over this evening to sit on the porch swing and tell about it, for he was there: the girl in white hair ribbons gone missing, the hours of searching, then finding her on the river’s sandy bottom, where the water was not very deep. He told it all and then was quiet. We could hear music of some celebration still going, all the way from Pack Square. Romulus said he couldn’t tell whether it was a good day or a bad one.

MacArthur says the great tragedy has ended. We turned on the wireless, and the assured voices seemed to bring the boy back around. This man MacArthur rode horses once, cheered on by a pack of boys not much older than Romulus. Sometimes playing polo behind the academy, other times commanding bayonets into the breasts of the Bonus Marchers. “The skies no longer rain death,” he said now. “Men walk upright in the sunlight and the entire world lies quietly at peace.” MacArthur claimed he spoke for thousands of silent lips, forever stilled among the jungles and in the deep waters of the ocean. But how could he speak for so many silent lips lying blue beneath the water? Little fish are surely pecking at them now, nourished by worlds of misfortune.

November 19

Dear Frida,

Here is a small gift, my book, just arrived from New York. Mr. Barnes says it will begin turning up in the bookshops by Friday week, but he sent me two with a note: “A spare copy for your Mother and Dad!” The cover art is quite something, as you’ll see, with the twin temples of Tlaloc and Huitzilopochtli in the distance. The flames and thinly clad women running from the conquering army should make up for any archaeological inexactness. This format, I was told, worked well for Gone With the Wind.

No one here knows of my impending status as a published author. The neighbor ladies find me suspiciously lacking in ambition or family. Miss Attwood still rings up; few soldiers are home yet, so she makes do with nothing new. Last week we went to a restaurant called Buck’s, opened recently to wild enthusiasm, which wraps up your meal like parcel post and sends it out to the gravel car park while you wait. The idea is to picnic inside your auto, staring at other strangers with catsup on their chins and napkins draped on the steering wheels. You would bawl. It is called a drive-in. Now we can buy gasoline, food, and soon we’ll have new autos too. Why not make use of all at once?

The war’s end has left America with loads of get-up-and-go, and no place to send it. Also war-bond cash saved and nothing to spend it on. Unless we need hollow-lead tubing and field-combat boots, as that’s what the factories are geared for making. We still use ration stamps for almost everything. Truman is trying to keep price controls on until shortages abate, but the manufacturers can smell hoarded cash. They’re parading ad men through Congress to convince the lawmakers that Free Market is the way to go, and that Harry Truman is in league with Karl Marx. The neighbor ladies here are firm on the side of Harry and Karl Marx, they know price controls are the only thing standing between ourselves and the twenty-dollar steak. I confess to an unpatriotic yearning to buy a refrigerator, but if a Philco showed up in town now without its OPA ration tag, it would go to Mrs. Vanderbilt for the cost of my mortgage.

Meanwhile, the husbands concoct a black market with more plot twists than the Codex Boturini. Romulus, my young informant, reports his dad went to the car dealer’s to finagle a new Ford, not yet legally for sale. He was told if he bought the salesman’s dog for eight hundred dollars, they would give him a free car to drive the pup home. Romulus cheered. But he was in it for the dog.

One thing can be had without a stamp, though, and that’s my book. Please feel no moral duty to read it, you’ve done enough. Only look for the dedication page, where you’ll see a familiar name. I apologize for the title. Mr. Barnes says Vassals of Majesty sounds like a book people want to read, and it’s his business to know. What would you do? If a museum curator said your paintings should be hung on both sides with pink organdy curtains? Oh yes, I remember, you would poke him in the eye with a paintbrush and tell him to hang organdy curtains over his dog’s-ass face.