590
PARTISAN REVIEW
AT
HOME HE
showered, rinsing off the gray, chalky river water, and
drank the coffee that had been brewing during his swim, Blue Mountain
Coffee from Jamaica, the best coffee he could get in this area, as always.
Not a sound from his wife's part of the house, while her suitcase was
already standing down in the vestibule, with an airplane ticket resting on
top, which he hadn't looked at. "Just as before each of her departures, 1
suddenly found myself picturing the strawberry slope," he said, "the
spot she once told me meant summer to her when she was a child ."
He'd traveled a great deal himself when he was younger, almost all
over the world . By now nothing tempted him anymore, not a single
place. Right here, in this very location, he felt every morning as if he
were setting out, or had set out long ago, and today would put the next
stage of the journey behind him.
"I
wanted to stay here, much longer,
much longer."
Now on the dike, visible through the garden shrubbery only by the
bright colors of their outfits, the first runners, in pairs, single file on the
narrow path (but in Taxham, beyond the meadows, almost no one ran,
even to catch the bus), talking too loudly, as if they thought their voices
wouldn't carry otherwise.
And from one of the neighboring properties a child's shriek and then
crying-heartrending-and then promptly the same from the house on
the other side. He listened. And he was sure that his wife was also lis–
tening behind her door. They listened together, even when the crying
and sobbing to left and right had died down and had long since given
way
to
talking and calls back and forth, with voices that seemed clearer
and more resonant after the earlier bawling. They also heard the train
go by over on the German side. "Heading for Bad Reichenhall."–
"Yes."
ON
THIS
PARTICULAR
morning the pharmacist rode his wife's bicycle;
she wouldn't be needing it for the next few weeks in any case. He took
the road parallel to the river bank, then a stretch through the meadows
along the river, then turned off and rode through the fields to the farm
village of Siezenheim. The cemetery there had a piece of conglomerate
with a crucified Christ-without the cross-scratched into the rock, the
cross indicated only by Christ's posture-a hydrocephalic head on a Lil–
liputian body, the little arms spread wide, the grooves in the east-facing
rock, usually hard to make out, weathered almost beyond recognition,
appearing deeper and more distinct in the morning light.
