Some scenes in a novel stay with us long after we have finished reading. Sometimes, it is not a dramatic event or a turning point in the story, but a few quiet words that we find ourselves thinking about again.
I had this feeling when reading two novels I particularly love: Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman and Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks.
In Life and Fate, one of the most moving parts for me is the final letter Anna Semyonovna Shtrum writes to her son, Viktor. She knows that she and the other Jewish prisoners in the ghetto will soon be killed. Knowing that she may never see her son again, she tries to find the words to say goodbye.
There is a passage in the letter that I find almost unbearable:
“Remember that your mother's love is always with you, in grief and in happiness, no one has the strength to destroy it.”
And then, at the very end, she writes:
“Live, live, live for ever... Mama.”
What makes this letter so heartbreaking is not simply the knowledge of what is going to happen. It is the tenderness of a mother who is still thinking of her son, who wants to kiss his eyes, his forehead and his hair, even though she knows she may never be able to do so again.
In Birdsong, I was equally moved by the letters written by soldiers before going into battle. Among them, Stephen Wraysford's letter to Isabelle stayed with me most.
What I felt when reading it was a deep sense of loneliness. Stephen could write to Isabelle, send his thoughts across the distance and reach out to the person he loved. But he still had to face his fear alone. She could not be there beside him or share the moment he was going through.
That feeling stayed with me.
The two letters are very different. Anna is a mother saying goodbye to her son. Stephen is a man writing to the woman he loves before facing the uncertainty of battle. Yet both letters carry the weight of a possible final separation.
Both novels are very heavy reads. Their stories are difficult, and some of their scenes are painful to return to. Yet these letters have remained with me.
Perhaps it is because they bring history so close to us. We may read about war, persecution, prisoners and battles, but it is through these personal words that we begin to feel what those experiences meant to the people who lived through them.
A letter written before a possible final goodbye cannot change what is going to happen. It cannot bring someone closer or take away their fear. But it allows a person to reach out, to say what might otherwise remain unsaid.
I think this is one of the things I value about reading novels. They allow us to encounter lives far removed from our own, but sometimes, through a letter or a small human detail, that distance suddenly disappears.
And some words stay with us.
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