One cannot cross a river without getting wet

“One cannot cross a river without getting wet” is an African proverb used to express the narrator’s guarded hope that the collective experience of the Zombie War cannot simply disappear when ordinary life returns. Its image turns survival into an irreversible process: crossing the danger changes those who make it across, even if the destination looks peaceful.

Meaning in Context

The proverb appears after the narrator reflects that the war brought people together. The narrator does not call the conflict good, but contrasts the wartime community with the earlier isolation of the narrator’s parents, who missed the communal spirit of Pakistan while barely knowing their American neighbors except through complaints about noise and barking dogs. The proverb gives figurative form to that contrast. A river crossing is difficult and shared, and wetness is the unavoidable residue of passage; likewise, the war’s common ordeal has left a mark on people who once lived as strangers.

The Hope and Its Qualification

The proverb does not support uncomplicated optimism. The narrator openly expects that once the world becomes peaceful and comfortable again, children and grandchildren may return to the selfishness, narrow-mindedness, and narrow social habits of the prewar world. The possibility of forgetting therefore remains real. Yet the narrator immediately asks whether what everyone endured can truly go away, making the proverb an answer rather than a prediction of permanent political unity. Its force lies in uncertainty: the shared wound may fade from daily behavior, but it cannot be assumed to vanish from human memory or social identity.

Global Shared Experience

The proverb also enlarges the narrator’s observation beyond one neighborhood or one country. During a cruise across the islands on the Pan Pacific Line, the narrator encountered people from many places whose specific circumstances differed but whose stories were broadly alike. The repeated structure of those stories confirms the proverb’s central logic. The catastrophe produced different local histories, but it also created a common passage through fear, loss, and survival. The river is therefore both literal metaphor and historical boundary, separating the prewar world from the society that emerged after it.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Placed near the end of the testimony, the proverb functions as a modest counterweight to nostalgia and disillusionment. The narrator misses objects associated with the old world, including the kind of luxury car that no longer exists, but the proverb shifts attention from lost commodities to the consequences of collective experience. Its plain, portable form contrasts with the enormous scale of the war, allowing a global transformation to be understood through one physical fact: anyone who crosses water carries evidence of the crossing. The expression thus condenses the book’s larger question about reconstruction—whether survival produces only a return to old habits or leaves behind enough memory and solidarity to make a different society possible.