ARNOST LUSTIG
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better for what she had done for me and for herself, and for what she
had gotten only from herself and what she had been able to give away.
This was the true innocence.
It
was composed of both our scents mixed
perhaps with green poison that newborns sometimes accidentally swal–
low during birth. She had taken me in like a woman accepting a victim.
She spoke with her mouth but her body was a mouth, too. It cleaned
me. I have no idea how long it lasted.
She lay gazing at the sky through the window that jutted out from the
sloping roof. Her body and eyes themselves were open doors another
person could pass through and never look back. The sky brightened. A
short streak set the clouds off from each other. In a little while the sky
would become a brilliant blue, the sun gold; it was everything that lasts
and passes away. Eternity. I thought about the rain and the blue sky, the
mountains and flatlands, trees and meadows, about the world that was
somewhere and which we would get a look at on our journey to the east.
"So now you've seen a star fall," she said.
"It granted my wish," I added.
Her voice sounded deeper, like when you wake up early in the morn–
ing and rasp.
The sky covered an emptiness that set it apart from the earth. That
secret, heavenly river that had not been holy for a long time. It was
heading toward an unknown sea with us in tow. The incomprehensible
or indestructible and at the same time wretched. She closed her eyes.
The river was lost under her lids. I sensed how everything-utterly
everything-begins and ends.
The little attic took on the dimensions it had lost. Night had already
transformed into day, and light into motion. Shadows gone, everything
took on its earthly form: boxes, suitcases, a purse of crocodile skin,
cases. A couple of spiders climbed the ledge of the window. Earwigs and
bedbugs meandered along the edge of the wall. She didn't notice them
and I tried not to see them either.
It
was Wednesday. Lea looked through
the window at the place where she would be in just a couple of hours.
"It's never all there is," she said.
"It's what I wanted."
"Was it so much for you?"
"We're different people," I said . "It meant a lot to me."
For a moment it occurred to me what our children might look like. I
sensed the presence of a third person.
"For as much as you come alive during it, it takes my life away."
"It
wasn't like that for me," I said. I still didn't believe that something
bad could happen to me, or worse than what had already happened.
