433
PARTISAN REVIEW
I was bored by such tedious work but the waterpipe seemed com–
forting that night. I remembered how Father loaded tobacco and
lit it with a rolled paper that had been ignited in the oven. His
guests and he would smoke in turns; then he would tell some
stories and recent news. At
~hose
times he looked amiable, and I
felt that his closely cropped hair and his manner of talking
should be the standard for a father. I would be happy to polish the
waterpipe again if he would come home.
I decided to get up earlier than anyone else to search again,
but the sun was very high when my mother called me to break–
fast. I detoured on the way to school, but there were so many
wheelbarrows full of coal, it was difficult to find any small object,
and the carriers were yelling at me to get out of the way. I was
late for class. When I entered the room my classmates turned
their heads with curious eyes, but the teacher didn't scold me. In
silence, she allowed me to walk to my desk and sit down .
Soon I couldn't hear the teacher's words-1 wished for the
fountain pen to magically reappear, but I realized that it was lost
forever. I blamed myself. In the dark field, nobody would have
noticed the pen if I had hung it on the edge of my left chest
pocket. Why had I taken the pen out that evening? I should have
left it at home. From then on I felt guilty whenever I dipped an
iron pen point into ink and wrote.
My mother was always busy with housework. When she
fetched water from a well, the bucket was too heavy for her
bound feet, so she had to use one arm to prop her body against the
wall. She often worked extra hours riding the pedal-driven gin to
make a little money, which always put her in a frantic mood
when she arrived home. She was so exhausted by the time she
fell asleep that she didn ' t wake up even when the hungry mice
bit the thick calluses on the soles of her feet. She had no time left
to pay attention to me after serving dinner and washing and
mending our clothes.
After a few days , she became faintly aware that something
was wrong with me-l had been extremely quiet and was obvi–
ously pondering something. She put her hand on my forehead to
check if I had a fever and asked : ''You don ' t feel well, do you?" I
answered: "It's nothing! " Eventually, I told her in a low voice: "I
lost the fountain pen! " She paused for a while, as various expres-
