204
PARTISAN REVIEW
" As I was going there I was a bit scared: how do you act with
someone like that? Do you play? Strange, somehow it feels like a
false position. But he reassured me immediately: as soon as he saw
me-his face lit up and he smiled and said "Uncle, uncle!'"
" How big is he?"
" Big, normal size. And he isn't at all as unaware as I feared.
The nanny started getting things ready for dinner. "Vanechka, set
the table"-and he set it , only he mixed up the plates, put down
small ones instead of the big ones . And the nanny says reproach–
fully , " What's wrong with you Vanechka? Why these plates, are
you crazy or something?" -The nanny is wonderful , she's devoted
her whole life to him. They live together, the mother , the nanny and
Vanya. They live for him .
''I'm chatting with his mother about something and all of a
sudden , 'Uncle, uncle! '-I look around: he had walked up ever so
quietly from behind and was staring at me . And such a good , kind
smile. I really understand how he could be a joy. There really is a
light emanating from him. "
A bit of time passed . And then one day, a rumor started cir–
culating that Vanya was sick . Pneumonia .
The rumor moved in . It blew in from Meudon . The breeze
traveled from the red brick house I vaguely knew to be Vanya's.
It
traveled in two directions-to his sister in Clamat, and to me in
Bellevue . The illness settled in. Chained to his bed, Vanya traveled .
The days passed . The wind continued to blow from Meudon.
Soon the illness of the unseen Vanya became usual, taken for
granted, in the order of things-that destroy order .
" How is your brother doing? "
"Bad, the temperature won't go down , we give him camphor
all the time . .. . "
I knew of camphor from the last minutes of my father's life and
for me-it spelled death .
"Sit a little longer . . . . "
"I can't, I have to go to Mama, my brother's awful poorly ."
I thought about the mother and the nanny , not with sympathy,
a vicarious substitute , but with the unsubstitutive empathy of pain .
But I thought of them only occasionally .
Absorbed in your death Rainer , that is , associating it with
every other death I have endured in life thus far : the proud death of
my mother, the highly moving death of my father , many other
