“So, are you saying his father literally machine gunned people into a mass grave?” she asked, brow bent.  

“Well, that was the weight of the old man’s painful confession the night before he died,” he said, already up on his toes, dancing in that half mad way of his.  

“So you’ve taken poetic license to his confession and transformed it to guilt over machine-gunning families into a mass grave?” she said.  

“Philosophical license,” he said, one finger in the air, head cocked like an old school pedant.

“You’ve taken license with the facts again,” she said.  “I thought you’d taken a vow not to write fiction.”  

“It’s not fiction.  What the man did to his own children, at the moment when they most needed a human response, was inhuman.   Instead of empathy he fought them, denied them, dismissed their feelings as stupid. He beat them down when they tried to express grief when they learned of the slaughter of their entire family when the family tree had all but one limb hacked off, was uprooted, the ground burned and sown with salt.   On this blackened dirt the bones of his aunts and uncles skittered on windy days.”  

“According to him these things may have happened, but they were the kind of trifles a mature person doesn’t waste time crying about. His children came to him grieving over a trauma to make a child vomit and he snarled adamantly that they were insane to grieve.”  

“So in your mind browbeating his children was the same as machine gunning the entire family into a ditch and feeling justified as he did it,” she said.  

“Yes, but it wasn’t just the browbeating.  The browbeating fit the pattern– take a trauma, deny it, tell anyone who may be traumatized they have no right to feel that way but that they are insane, and cowardly, in fact, to have any feelings at all about it.”  

“A very damaged individual,” she said, “but not necessarily a machine gunner of families into mass graves. You want to be careful before you go there.”  

“Nancy,” he said, “a person who is damaged this way, if he still has a soul, dies with terrible regrets.  He deeply regretted that he had lived his life in a black and white world.   The black and white world is a zero sum game where many atrocities are permitted.   After all, it cannot be black when it is white, nor white if it is black, right is right and wrong is wrong.  In fact, he told his son with sorrow, hours before he died, ‘I think of how much richer my life would have been if I’d seen life in all its gradations and colors…’  In a black and white world it sometimes becomes necessary to murder another person, even thousands of people at once.  In a nuanced and just world it is never OK to murder thousands of people at once.”

Nancy looked at him.  

“Ask God, if you believe in God, and you’ll get the same answer: there may come a time when a killer must be stopped from killing and deadly force becomes necessary to prevent an atrocity.  No God worth praying to would ever assure you– unless you see the world as black and white– that sometimes it’s perfectly fine to destroy an entire city in the name of some greater good.  There is no godly answer to the murdered souls of the dead children, old people, invalids, babies, workers in that city.  You want to say you are justified in war to slaughter an entire population?  God does not smile upon you, if you do.”  

“I thought you stopped drinking,” she said.  

“Nancy,” he said, “be serious.  I’m trying to get you to understand why I chose the metaphorical machine gun as the instrument of his towering, seething, white-hot rage, rather than a much harder to fully describe verbal whip he actually used. Brutally using words to cause pain is one way of being furious and self-righteous, but how much better is actually physically machine gunning a perceived enemy, on the lip of a mass grave he would later insist meant nothing.”  

“He insisted the mass grave meant nothing?”

“He waved his hand, Nancy,” and he waved his hand, “and he said ‘those people were mere abstractions, nobody ever knew them.  You have no right to claim to be effected by the loss of those people you never even met,’ and he smirked as he said it.  And it was true that I’d never met them, they were all killed more than a decade before I was born, almost exactly 13 years, actually.  The year of my birth would have been bar and bat mitzvah year for the infants who went into that ditch along with the dozen great aunts and great uncles wiped out by Ukrainains as Nazis gave instructions.   My grandmother Yetta knew them very well.  They were her six brothers and sisters, and their families, and her parents, if they were still around in 1943, and all the children and extended family, and also the same for my grandfather Sam’s six brothers and sisters.”  

“Wait a second,” she said, “so this guy you were referring to in the third person was actually you?”  

“No need to be so literal about it,” he said.  “Fact is, on his deathbed an old man expressed regrets, and whipped himself over having been such a cruel bastard during his life, stubborn, judgmental, enraged, unfair. This is the profile of the guy, who, finding himself behind the gun, turns and fires it, wiping out anyone who might stand against him.”  

“Which is only logical, after all,” she said.  

“It’s logical,” he said, “but not everybody sees the world as an implacable enemy worthy of death.  Not everybody is capable of actually swinging that big gun around, training it on the terrified faces, and, rejecting all of the many reasons not to, heeds only the imperative to pull the trigger.  And if they are capable of it, it will bother them on their deathbed when they have only their vanishing, irremediable lives to consider, and they’ll be filled, sometimes, with terrible, almost unbearable regret.”

“I see what you mean,” Nancy said.