Page 46 - To Family with Love

those gloomy, gray and scary ones of yours? Or maybe a won- derful one about dogs?
− Don’t bother, son, stories are for the living, and it seems that this damn war killed me a long time ago.
− That’s not true, Dad, it’s not true, you just mustn’t play cards, and the war is as good as over. Here, our units are soon to reach Novi Sad, Belgrade and Niš.
But he wouldn’t listen to a thing anymore, and he wouldn’t even talk anymore, although, in the meantime, my story had led our army all the way to Moscow, Tokyo and Beijing. As it turned out, the more I went on, the more his spirits lowered.
There was little use of my ma, she was just crying incon- solably, so as I saw that my old man didn’t need me anymore, I turned to her to help her at least a little. We just hugged and cried, because in those moments we couldn’t find any reason for joy whatsoever.
Whenever it was time to say goodbye, things would get even worse. My old man would always use the same trick, which my ma would fall for every single time. Just before the parting, he would pick up a fight with ma – always about the same issues, to which he would add a few new ones each time, such as the money issue, so all hell would break loose, and since home and family had no place in that hell, he would leave almost joyfully to go and continue fighting his war. Had he not been doing that, I believe he would never have been able to leave at all. I would always rush to my hideout under the stairs to my dear stray dogs before all of that because I didn’t understand adults very well at the time, and I had no idea as to why they were doing all of that to me. To somehow calm down and comfort myself, I would measure my height to see how much I had grown since the last time, because despite all the hardships, when it came to grow- ing, thank God, I was still making great progress. One meter six- ty-nine centimeters and eleven millimeters. Jesus and Mary, on
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