The wind comes off the lake and through the trees and the sky is partly cloudy and the temperature is sixteen degrees. It is good weather for sitting on the porch and listening to the radio. The radio says the war in Iran has been going for fifty-seven days. They count the days the way they used to count them in Madrid.
Witkoff and Kushner are flying to Pakistan. The Iranian foreign minister is already there. He is in Islamabad and they say there is no meeting planned. Then they say the Americans are coming for talks. Both things can be true and neither can be true. It is the way these things go.
I have seen this before. I saw it in 1937 when men who had never fired a rifle stood in the trenches outside Madrid and waited for the bombs. I saw it in Italy and in the Hürtgen forest and on a beach in Normandy where the gulls were the only birds left alive after the noise. The men who fight do not start it. The men who start it do not fight it. They will fly to Islamabad and sit in a room and drink water and say what they have been told to say. Maybe nothing will come of it. Maybe something will. A man does not refuse to hope, but he does not pay for hope in advance either.
The radio says American ammunition stockpiles are running low. The paper from New York says it could take six years to replace what was spent on Iran. Six years. They say the Pentagon is reconsidering whether it can defend Taiwan if the Chinese come. You spend the cartridges you have. Then you do not have them anymore. This is not a complicated thing. It is the simplest piece of arithmetic in the world and the men who run wars are always surprised by it.
Across the porch the grass needs cutting again. I cut it on Thursday. The mowing of grass is honest work. You begin at one corner and you go straight across and then you turn and come back. You can see what you have done. You cannot see what the men in Islamabad have done until later, and by then it does not matter to the dead.
In Gaza they killed twelve more. Six were policemen. They call it a ceasefire. Words are like that now. We use them up the way we use up cartridges and afterwards there is nothing left to mean what we meant before. A ceasefire is not a ceasefire when twelve men are dead in the street.
But on the same day in Deir al-Balah they held a mass wedding for three hundred couples. Three hundred brides. Three hundred grooms. They put on what white they could find and they danced under what was left of the sky. A man marries when there is nothing else to do. This is also a kind of courage. It is the kind that goes unrecorded because it does not bleed.
In another part of the same town they are voting. The first local election in twenty years. Hamas is not on the ballot. The papers say the people are tired. People get tired before kingdoms do. That is something to remember.
A man named Ernie Dosio was killed in Gabon by elephants. He was seventy-five and he owned vineyards in California and he had gone to hunt an antelope. The elephants found him first. The papers do not say if his rifle jammed or if he never fired or if he fired and missed. They say only that the elephants crushed him.
I knew a man like Dosio in Kenya in 1933. He was older than I was and he had the same broad red face and the same eagerness in the morning when the camp was breaking up. He shot well and he drank well and he was certain of himself in a way that I envied because I was never certain of anything. He died in his own bed of a heart attack at sixty. Dosio was luckier. The elephants give a clean death if they give it at once.
I do not regret the hunting I did. I regret some of the killing. There is a difference. A man should know the difference before he goes out with a rifle. A man should also know that the animal is older than he is and stronger and in its country, not his. The elephant has memory. This is what people forget.
The British say they will not give up the Falklands. The Spaniards say they will not be expelled from NATO. The Americans say they have not decided anything but they have written it down in an internal memo, which is the way Americans say a thing without saying it. Allies are friends until they are not. I have known both kinds. The not kind tells you longer.
In Russia Putin has ordered the economy to be fixed. You cannot order an economy the way you order a regiment. The Russians are learning this slowly because they are a patient people and patience is the enemy of arithmetic.
In Turkey they have banned children under fifteen from the small lit screens. This may be the first sensible thing a government has done this year. A boy of fourteen should be fishing or reading a book or breaking his nose against another boy's nose. He should not be looking at a screen and learning to hate strangers.
I am going inside soon. The sun is going behind the trees and the wind is colder than it was an hour ago. The radio will keep talking. The men in Islamabad will fly in and out. Some of them will come home and some of them will not.
A woman down the street is calling her dog. The dog comes. The dog always comes. This is the simple part of the world and it is the part I trust.
The grass is cut. The window is open. The war is fifty-seven days old and counting. Tomorrow it will be fifty-eight. The arithmetic does not care.
It is sixteen degrees and partly cloudy.
That is enough for one day.
