But this was not the full extent of my brother’s handicap. The rest, in those early days, was expressed by his longing for Mary to return to him. I can remember the two of us running down a deserted alley, my swollen ankles killing me, Duncan’s disease in full bloom—tendrils of bright green fruiting bodies shooting forth from his hatless head like flares signaling the enemy—while behind us, through the billowing smoke of an H&S grenade attack, some dozen F&L irregulars chased us, intent on making us pay for someone else’s transgression … and as we ran, Duncan wrote a love letter to Mary—a jotted phrase or two at a time, scribbled on a thrice-folded piece of paper. One such “letter” ends, “Must wrap this up, my love! Would like to write more, but am late to an appointment.” Truff knows how he smuggled them into Blythe Academy and, later, Mary’s parents’ house.

Blythe Academy stayed open for one and a half of the two semesters Mary needed to complete her degree, although the professors and priests continued to use it as a safe haven after the students had been sent home. For the coursework Mary and all the students in similar straits still needed to complete, Bonmot made weekly rounds to their parents’ houses. Typical of him, he ignored the danger implicit in crossing barricades and encountering militia checkpoints. I imagine him, solid, strong, in his green robes, walking down the street, impervious to the bloodshed occurring all around him. To be a priest during that war required a certain amount of dissociation from the real world.

I knew what it was like to lead such a life—it conferred an illogical form of immunity by forcing you to become separate from your surroundings. You had to separate yourself, pull yourself out of the context swarming all around you. There was no choice. To allow yourself to become part of it would have meant a kind of death. (Odd you should think that, Janice, because most of the time, while not attending to my job, I was fleshing out theories of history at odds with that opinion. To me, the events of the war—the chaos—mimicked the worst qualities of my precarious relationship with Mary. My own body seemed able to express emotion through transformation. As I felt, so the world around me felt, or vice versa. I did not, of course, believe that my mental turmoil created the conflict—this was a metaphorical connection only, but no weaker because of it. Would it not be true, I began to think, that a historian could best explain those periods of history that most closely imitated the events or significant emotions of his own life?)