Let’s go back to the beginning..In those days, as the story goes, the world was at war; and when there’s war, things take on a different shape. The air was different, the people were different, and the smells were different. War smells like the absence of the things you once loved. I long for the smell of pine-sap and the fragrance of incense that surrounded the Villa Gardenia. War becomes the ghost of, say, a construction worker that seeps into people’s clothes and walks among them. It becomes different but not uncommon. War itself doesn’t often resemble its own name.