Story Three: "Dancing Amidst the Explosions

It was summer; the city was thundering again, and the windows were rattling. I was in the kitchen making borscht when I suddenly turned on the old tape player—Aznavour, "La Bohème." My neighbor from upstairs came running down, frightened—but I simply held out my hand and said, "Let's dance. So we don't have to hear it."

They danced in the hallway, between two walls, to the rumble outside the window and the creaking of the old floorboards. It wasn’t graceful. It didn’t follow the rules. But there was more life in that dance than in thousands of perfectly orchestrated evenings. And, most importantly, we didn’t hear those terrible sounds...

Since then, I have known: happiness is not cancelled by war. It is cancelled only by cowardice.