“You don’t get it. A prophet is not a religious figure, but an artist.”

“A frustrated artist?”

“Of course! Not only frustrated. A martyr!”

“Misunderstood? Unacknowledged?”

He didn’t detect the dig.

“Yes! Misunderstood by his peers. Just think about it, the Bible, the Koran, Das Kapital, none of them are works of art, they aspire to portray reality, but that just repulses the modern person. My book won’t! We have no more need for truth, realism is dead, the world has changed. Art and fiction are the new religions of humankind. The prophet of the future will no longer be a sacred creative. He will be an artist who destroys reality and helps us understand the world outside the old paradigms.”

“Dad, war is humanity’s new religion, not art. You watch television, you know that better than I do. It’s what you say all the time.”

He gave a nasty laugh and rubbed his hands.

“But the war of the future will be its own art form. We will see life only through images on the screens and the pages of books. Anywhere but in reality. Everything is an illusion! This is what will save the world! War will no longer kill.”

With that, he fell into a smug silence.

When the fighting broke out and the roar of artillery and armoured vehicles, and the cries of the frightened and the wounded entered our lives, it didn’t feel much like an illusion. Especially in the beginning. But in this chaos his madness had finally found its place and ceased to be madness at all. I remember that it even cheered me up somewhat when the fighting started getting serious: it meant he had been right all along. It meant he wasn’t such a fool after all.

When you’re in the middle of a war, it’s hard to believe that there’s anywhere in the world not going through the same thing. I think you get it. I remember you saying: “In a dream, it might seem like the world is falling apart, but really, it’s just an eyelid twitching.” You said it was just human nature to over-dramatise and to project. It’s difficult to resist. What was that phrase of yours? I liked it: the charm of their obsessions, it’s hard not to soak up their world.

It’s the same with war, probably. When you’re suffering, you like to think everybody else is too.

The first shells dropped inside the city limits in the final days of spring. Outside, the sun was shining, birds chirped, and an unfamiliar white flower below Dad’s window smelled sweet. He was writing on the wall under one of the squares: “The doomed man writes: I dream of the world’s end.”