Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch

Author:Nina Sankovitch
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins US
Published: 2012-07-23T16:50:55+00:00

Chapter 12

The Expansion of Experience

Now that I had taken the pains to learn something about it, I had better ask if I really wanted to know. I did. I needed to know, but I am not glad to know.

WENDELL BERRY,

Hannah Coulter

ON THE NIGHT OF FEBRUARY 13, 1945, MY FATHER SAW flames and smoke rising from Dresden, five miles off in the distance. Through the dark hours of the night and into the dawning of the next day, he watched in disbelief, his stomach in a knot, as the city was firebombed. He could smell the smoke and he knew there were more than buildings burning. He’d been on the road with thousands and thousands of refugees fleeing the incoming Soviet army. While he had camped in a field, the refugees continued on into Dresden, to join the citizens of one of Europe’s most beautiful cities and thousands more refugees.

By the time the bombing was over, Dresden was destroyed and most of its people killed, incinerated or suffocated in their underground bunkers. Estimates of the number of people who died in the two days of bombing range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. My father could have been one of those people if he had not stopped to rest and sleep in a field. My father could have been killed two years earlier when the partisans came to the family farmhouse and killed Sergei, Antonina, and Boris. He lived through the war, or else I wouldn’t be reading these books now. But living, like dying, caused ripples to spread through his life, impacts from what he saw, what he suffered, what he knew.

When I began my year of reading, a cousin from Belgium sent me a book titled The Assault, written by Dutch author Harry Mulisch. For months it sat on my bookshelf, relegated to a far corner. “But it is a great book,” my cousin insisted. He didn’t understand that I was frightened by the book’s cover photograph of a dead body lying on a street, and even more by the text on the back cover: “A Nazi collaborator, infamous for his cruelty, is assassinated. . . . The Germans retaliate by slaughtering an innocent family.” I was scared to read the book because I knew it was about war and revenge and hate. I had heard the stories from my father, and I knew what had happened during the war. Did I really want to read about it?

But finally, in late March, I went over to the shelf and pulled the book down. It was my year to experience whatever great books had to share with me, and my own fears couldn’t stand in the way.

When I began to read The Assault, I did not get up again for three hours. Weaving a story around an actual event, the novel is about the murder of a cruel Dutch policeman during the final days of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and how that one murder had a

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