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The house was still, the only sound the tick of the old wall clock and the faint whistle of wind pressing against the shutters. Emil sat at the kitchen table, staring into the dark swirl of milk at the bottom of his glass. His hands, still stained from the greenhouse soil, gripped the cup as though it might steady the restless thoughts racing inside him.

Finally, he looked up, his voice breaking the silence. “Grandfather… when two people fight—two groups, even nations—what are we supposed to do? Whose side do we take? Should we join the fight? Defend the weaker? Punish the one who seems guilty? How do we know where to stand?”

The old man folded his napkin with deliberate care, then laid it flat beside his plate. His eyes met Emil’s, calm but heavy with memory.

“That is the wrong question, my son,” he said softly. “It is a question born of the very Absences we must learn to see through. To ask ‘which side should I take?’ is to accept the flawed premise of the conflict—that there are only two sides. That you must pick a tribe. This is the logic of Absence One. It forces you into a box of ‘us’ or ‘them’ and erases the complex, human truth in between.”

He leaned forward, his voice gaining a gentle but firm intensity.
“The question is not ‘Which side are you on?’ The question is ‘What are you on the side of?’”

He laid a hand on the table, palm open.
“You must be on the side of the human face, against Absence Three. This means that whenever a voice, from any side, seeks to erase the humanity of the other—calling them ‘orcs,’ ‘human animals,’ ‘Nazis,’ ‘Amalek,’ ‘terrorists’—you stand against that voice. You refuse to participate in the erasure. You are an ally to the truth that a child is a child, no matter whose flag flies over their head.”

“You must be on the side of mercy and restorative justice, against Absence Two. This means that when you see vengeance masquerading as justice—collective punishment, the bombing of hospitals, the targeting of civilians—you name it. You do not excuse it because ‘your side’ is doing it. You are an ally to the principle that justice must restore, not only punish.”

“You must be on the side of sovereignty and self-determination, against Absence One. This means you support the right of a people to define their own future, but not at the expense of another people’s right to exist in security. You are an ally to the difficult, messy work of negotiation, not the clean, violent illusion of total victory.”

“And you must be on the side of hearing the cry beneath the violence, against Absence Four. Absence Four twists instincts into cruelty: ‘Strike first, before you are struck.’ This is the hardest work of the arson investigator. It means listening for the fear beneath the rocket, and the trauma beneath the tank’s advance. It does not mean justifying the violence. It means understanding its fuel so you can finally remove it.”

Grandfather’s expression softened with compassion. “These are the voices that call men to war. And if you rush to take a side without diagnosis, you may lend your strength to these very absences, believing you serve justice when in truth you only deepen the fire. So you do not join their fight. You change the very nature of the fight. You become an ally not to a flag, but to a process. The process of diagnosis. The process of peace.”

“Your role is not to be a soldier in their war. Your role is to be a gardener in the ruins. You tend to the wounded. You document the crimes. You protect the truth. You build the neutral spaces where dialogue, however impossible it seems, might one day take root. You are on the side of the ceasefire, the aid worker, the journalist, the negotiator. You are on the side of the future that must come after the fighting stops.”

He finally picked up his teacup again.
“Choosing a ‘side’ is easy. It requires only passion and emotion. Choosing a principle is hard. It requires wisdom. And that is the only choice that does not add more fuel to the fire.”

He paused, seeing the weight of the concept on Emil’s face.
“And there is another, more practical reason to avoid the trap of ‘sides,’” the grandfather continued, his tone shifting slightly, becoming that of a strategist who has seen empires rise and fall. “You assume that by choosing a side, you gain its strength. But you also chain your fate to its flaws. You inherit its enemies. And you mortgage your reputation to its actions.”

He leaned in, his voice lowering as if sharing a state secret.
“What happens if your ally is proven to be on the wrong side of history? When the mass graves are uncovered, the war crimes documented, the lies exposed? You, who stood with them, are now stained by that same evil. Your passionate choice becomes your permanent shame. Your legacy is no longer your own; it is tied to their atrocities.”

“For a person, this is a crushing moral and social cost. But for a leader of a nation?” His eyes held a fierce, warning light. “It is an unforgivable betrayal. To hastily align your people with a wrongdoer is to set the dignity of your entire nation on fire—just to keep a dubious ally warm for a single political season. You trade the long-term respect of the world for the short-term approval of a dangerous partner. You make your citizens complicit in crimes they did not commit, and targets for hatred they did not earn.”

“This is the ultimate failure of Absence One and Absence Four—a failure of wisdom and awareness. The leader, trapped in a story of ‘us vs. them,’ is unable to see the true nature of their ally. They mistake brutality for strength and atrocity for resolve. That is why the arson investigator does not join the fire. They study it. They respect its power, but they do not embrace it. Their allegiance is to the truth of what caused the blaze, not to the blaze itself.”

“So, you ask, ‘Should we join the fight?’ I say: Do not join the fight. Become the source of the water. Your allegiance should be to the principles that prevent fire. That is how you protect your people. That is how you safeguard your legacy. That is how you ensure that when the ashes of this conflict are cold, your hands will be clean, and your name will be remembered not for who you fought alongside, but for what you helped to build.”

Emil stared at the grain of the table, ashamed of his own confusion, but still unwilling to let the question go. Then do we simply stand aside while others fight? Is that what you mean?

Grandfather shook his head, the faintest smile breaking the gravity of his expression. “No. To stand aside is also a kind of absence. The work is not to cheer one army or the other, nor to retreat into silence. The work is to become what I told you before—an investigator. To ask: which absence blinds them? Which truth is hidden beneath the slogans and the slurs? To remind them, again and again, that before they were soldiers, they were neighbors. Before they were enemies, they were human. You do not join their fight. You join the soil, the roots, the water—the quiet labor of restoring what the fire consumed.”

Emil was silent, the simplistic calculus of “picking a side” completely shattered and replaced by a terrifying, but ultimately more dignified, responsibility.

He looked at his hands. They were not a soldier’s hands. They were a gardener’s hands. And he understood now that to be a gardener in a time of war was the most defiant and necessary thing a person could be.

He was on the side of the sunflower pushing through the rubble.
He was on the side of the olive tree that refused to die.
He was an ally to the thing that grew.

And for the first time that night, he felt his hands unclench. They could not hold a rifle. They were not made for choosing sides. But they could hold a trowel. They could turn the soil. They could plant what might outlast the fire. Even the fire brigades, he realized, would have to learn that truth in the end— that the laws of peace are not enforced from above, but cultivated from below.