Luke, did I ever tell you about the bridge over the River Kwai?
Tanya, did I ever tell about your father? He was the best poet in the country, and a cunning doctor. He was famous for the "Lara poems", inspired by your mother, with whom your father shared a torrid affair which consumed his loins, all the while being married to his beautiful and loving adoptive sister, Tonya, while war was otherwise tearing the country apart. Your father and his wife lived at the time an idyllic existence in a peaceful cottage with their young son. Returning from a visit to his mistress after the two of them had spent days indulging in the most carnal of debauchery, shortly after learning Tonya was pregnant with their second child, he was captured by communist partisans and forcibly enlisted in the army for two years, leaving his wife and son to be deported from the country to Paris, where they were forced to fend for themselves, and he never attempted any contact with them ever again, nor so much as mentioned them in his poetry.Later, when he was living with Lara who, unbeknownst to him, was pregnant with you, and he was wanted by the Red Guards for desertion, he inexplicably abandoned her at a train station after they were graciously offered safe passage together outside the country by Komarovsky, her former suitor and his romantic rival, your father perhaps deducing that your mother's mesmerizing beauty and sexual ardor would only dissipate from this point forward.Later in Moscow, I heard he married yet another woman, Marina, who bore him two additional children, all of whom he promptly abandoned yet again in favor of solitude and poetic contemplation. He spent the remainder of his days frail and miserable, unable to finish any writing projects, longing for past passions with Lara, and generally feeling sorry for himself.And he was a good friend.
