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how to explain it.”
    â€œYou just did,” Teodora says. “And I understand. But you’ll forget anyway. Surviving isn’t a sin. The dead are dead. You have to bury them. But the living don’t have to keep watch over their tombs.”
    Teodora hastens to light the red candles, to make the table more Christmassy. A large, wooden baptismal cross stands prominently on the sideboard. “Now what will you do, join the police?” she asks, without turning around. “Why would I join the police?” Manuela replies, surprised. “Don’t the military get special treatment on the entrance exam?” Teodora wonders. To her, the only reason to join the military is that it’s a shortcut to a permanent government job. “What does that have to do with anything?” Manuela asks. “I thought you’d be wanting to leave the army by now,” Teodora says. “It’s better to be a police officer than a soldier, right? You’re still defending your country. Patriotism. It’s the same idea.” “Being in the army is completely different,” Manuela says, blushing because Teodora’s words reveal clearly what all her relatives think, though they don’t have the courage to say it. Maybe her superiors think the same: she’s no longer fit to be a soldier.
    â€œBut you’re needed more here,” Teodora says. “I’m sorry, but who cares about Afghanistan? It’s so far away. Italy has more serious problems, the economic crisis that’s dragging us down, the Chinese, illegal immigrants, we’re being invaded, you’ll see, no one goes out after dark anymore, it’s like there’s a curfew around here. And then there’s the Mafia, the Camorra, there’s a war going on right here at home, you don’t have to go looking for one ten thousand miles away.” “Two thousand eight hundred miles,” Manuela specifies. “Only a little farther away than Iceland, but Iceland’s in Europe, so it seems closer; geography isn’t math.” “Okay, if you say so, you went to school, I don’t know this stuff,” Teodora admits, “but ten thousand or two thousand eight hundred, it’s the same thing: you’d do more good as a police officer in Italy, Manuela.”
    Tiberio Paris would always say that Teodora talked too much, and worse, she talked without thinking, that she was as rough as pumice and as sharp as a razor. He would say it was a lack of education, or her Communist education, or something like that. But Manuela, with her military training, had always appreciated her frankness. She shrugs her shoulders and smiles. But she doesn’t respond. In any case, Teodora will never understand what that feather in her cap means to her.
    Last year Manuela celebrated Christmas under a heated tensile structure as sand whirled in the wind and settled on the tent, on their camouflage uniforms, on their skin, in a kind of rough embrace. One long table for nearly two hundred people, including a Regional Command West general from Herat, a Task Force South colonel from Farah, the commanders of the Tenth Alpini Regiment and the neighboring ANA brigade, a representative of the American Provincial Reconstruction Team, and a cable TV reporter. The captain suggested she sit with her men, so she was at the opposite end of the mess hall, far from the lights that lit up the scene like a movie set. The head cook, a corporal, had done his best to make them feel at home. The smell of garlic, tomato, and chilies tickled her nostrils. But there wasn’t any wine, or coffee even, because supplies arrived in fits and starts. “Not for me, I’m a vegetarian,” Jodice said, removing a dead fly from his mouth. He placed it on Zandonà’s spaghetti, and he, distracted, ate it while the other soldiers brayed with laughter. They’d arrived a few days before. All Manuela had seen of