town chronicler: As they sit eating dinner, the man’s face suddenly turns. He thrusts his plate away. Knives and forks clang. He stands up and seems not to know where he is. The woman recoils in her chair. His gaze hovers around her without taking hold, and she—wounded already by disaster—senses immediately: it’s here again, touching me, its cold fingers on my lips. But what happened? she whispers with her eyes. Bewildered, the man looks at her and speaks:
—I have to go.
—Where?
—To him.
—Where?
—To him, there.
—To the place where it happened?
—No, no. There.
—What do you mean, there?
—I don’t know.
—You’re scaring me.
—Just to see him once more.
—But what could you see now? What is left to see?
—I might be able to see him there. Maybe even talk to him?
—Talk?!
town chronicler: Now they both unfold, awaken. The man speaks again.
—Your voice.
—It’s back. Yours too.
—How I missed your voice.
—I thought we . . . that we’d never . . .
—I missed your voice more than I missed my own.
—But what is there? There’s no such place. There doesn’t exist!
—If you go there, it does.
—But you don’t come back. No one ever has.
—Because only the dead have gone.
—And you—how will you go?
—I will go there alive.
—But you won’t come back.
—Maybe he’s waiting for us.
—He’s not. It’s been five years and he’s still not. He’s not.
—Maybe he’s wondering why we gave up on him so quickly, the minute they notified us . . .
—Look at me. Look into my eyes. What are you doing to us? It’s me, can’t you see? This is us, the two of us. This is our home. Our kitchen. Come, sit down. I’ll give you some soup.
man:
Lovely—
So lovely—
The kitchen
is lovely
right now,
with you ladling soup.
Here it’s warm and soft,
and steam
covers the cold
windowpane—
town chronicler: Perhaps because of the long years of silence, his hoarse voice fades to a whisper. He does not take his eyes off her. He watches so intently that her hand trembles.
man:
And loveliest of all are your tender,
curved arms.
Life is here,
dear one.
I had forgotten:
life is in the place where you
ladle soup
under the glowing light.
You did well to remind me:
we are here
and he is there,
and a timeless border
stands between us.
I had forgotten:
we are here
and he—
but it’s impossible!
Impossible.
woman:
Look at me. No,
not with that empty gaze.
Stop.
Come back to me,
to us. It’s so easy
to forsake us, and this
light, and tender
arms, and the thought
that we have come back
to life,
and that time
nonetheless
places thin compresses—
man:
No, this is impossible.
It’s no longer possible
that we,
that the sun,
that the watches, the shops,
that the moon,
the couples,
that tree-lined boulevards
turn green, that blood
in our veins,
that spring and autumn,
that people
innocently,
that things just are.
That the children
of others,
that their brightness
and warmness—
woman:
Be careful,
you are saying
things.
The threads
are so fine.
man:
At night people came
bearing news.
They walked a long way,
quietly grave,
and perhaps, as they did so,
they stole a taste, a lick.
With a child’s wonder
they learned they could hold
death in their mouths
like candy made of poison
to which they are miraculously
immune.
We opened the door,
this one. We stood here,
you and I,
shoulder to shoulder,
they
on the threshold
and we
facing them,
and they,
mercifully,
quietly,
stood there and
gave us
the breath
of death.
woman:
It was awfully quiet.
Cold flames lapped around us.
I said: I knew, tonight
you would come. I thought:
Come, noiseful void.
man:
From far away,
I heard you:
Don’t be afraid, you said,
I did not shout
when he was born, and
I won’t shout now either.
woman:
Our prior life
kept growing
inside us
for a few moments longer.
Speech,
movements,
expressions.
man and woman:
Now,
for a moment,
we sink.
Both not saying
the same words.
Not bewailing him,
for now,
but bewailing the music
of our previous life, the
wondrously simple, the
ease, the
face
free of wrinkles.
woman:
But we promised each other,
we swore to be,
to ache,
to miss
him,
to live.
So what is it now
that makes you
suddenly tear away?
man:
After that night
a stranger came and grasped
my shoulders and said: Save
what is left.
Fight, try to heal.
Look into her eyes, cling
to her eyes, always
her eyes—
do not let go.
woman:
Don’t go back there,
to those days. Do not
turn back your gaze.
man:
In that darkness I saw
one eye
weeping
and one eye
crazed.
A human eye,
extinguished,
and the eye
of a beast.
A beast half
devoured in the predator’s mouth,
soaked with blood,
insane,
peered out at me from your eye.
woman:
The earth
gaped open,
gulped us
and disgorged.
Don’t go back
there, do not go,
not even one step
out of the light.
man:
I could not, I dared not
look into your eye,
that eye of
madness,
into your noneness.
woman:
I did not see you,
I did not see
a thing,
from the human eye
or the eye
of the beast.
My soul was uprooted.
It was very cold then
and it is cold
now, too.
Come to sleep,
it’s late.
man:
For five years
we unspoke
that night.
You fell mute,
then I.
For you the quiet
was good,
and I felt it clutch
at my throat. One after
the other, the words
died, and we were
like a house
where the lights
go slowly out,
until a somber silence
fell—
woman:
And in it
I rediscovered you,
and him. A dark mantle
cloaked the three of us,
enfolded us
with him, and we were mute
like him. Three embryos
conceived
by the bane—
man:
And together
we were born
on the other side,
without words,
without colors,
and we learned
to live
the inverse
of life.
(silence)
woman:
See how
word by word
our confiding
is attenuated, macerated,
like a dream
illuminated
by a torch. There was
a certain miracle
within the quietude,
a secrecy
within the silence
that swallowed us up
with him. We were silent there
like him, there we spoke
his tongue.
For words—
how does the drumming
of words voice
his death?!
town chronicler: In the hush that follows her shout, the man retreats until his back touches the wall. Slowly, as if in his sleep, he spreads both arms out and steps along the wall. He circles the small kitchen, around and around her.
man:
Tell me,
tell me
about us
that night.
woman:
I sense something
secret: you are tearing off
the bandages
so you may drink
your blood, provisions
for your journey to there.
man:
That night,
tell me
about us
that night.
woman:
You
circle
around me
like a beast
of prey. You close
in on me
like a nightmare.
That night, that
night.
You want to hear about
that night.
We sat on these chairs,
you there, me here.
You smoked. I remember
your face came
and went in the smoke,
less and less
each time. Less
you, less
man.
man:
We waited
in silence
for morning.
No
morning
came.
No
blood
flowed.
I stood up, I wrapped you
in a blanket,
you gripped my hand, looked
straight into my eyes: the man
and woman
we had been
nodded farewell.
woman:
No
wafted dark
and cold
from the walls,
bound my body,
closed and barred
my womb. I thought:
They are sealing
the home that once
was me.
man:
Speak. Tell me
more. What did we say?
Who spoke first? It was very quiet,
wasn’t it? I remember breaths.
And your hands twisting
together. Everything else
is erased.
woman:
Cold, quiet fire burned
around us.
The world outside shriveled,
sighed, dwindled
into a single dot,
scant,
black,
malignant.
I thought: We must
leave.
I knew: There’s nowhere
left.
man:
The minute
it happened,
the minute
it became—
woman:
In an instant we were cast out
to a land of exile.
They came at night, knocked on our door,
and said: At such and such time,
in this or that place, your son
thus and thus.
They quickly wove
a dense web, hour
and minute and location,
but the web had a hole in it, you
see? The dense web
must have had a hole,
and our son
fell
through.
town chronicler: As she speaks these words, he stops circling her. She looks at him with dulled eyes. Lost, arms limp, he faces her, as if struck at that moment by an arrow shot long ago.
woman:
Will I ever again
see you
as you are,
rather than as
he is not?
man:
I can remember
you without
his noneness—your innocent,
hopeful smile—and I can remember
myself without his noneness. But not
him. Strange: him
without his noneness, I can no longer
remember. And as time goes by
it starts to seem as though
even when he was,
there were signs
of his noneness.
woman:
Sometimes, you know,
I miss
that ravaged,
bloody
she.
Sometimes I believe her
more than I believe
myself.
man:
She is the reason I take
my life
in your hands and ask
you a question
I myself
do not understand:
Will you go with me?
There—
to him?
woman:
That night I thought:
Now we will separate. We cannot live
together any longer. When I tell you
yes,
you will embrace
the no, embrace
the empty space
of him.
man:
How will we cleave together?
I wondered that night.
How will we crave each other?
When I kiss you,
my tongue will be slashed
by the shards of his name
in your mouth—
woman:
How will you look into my eyes
with him there,
an embryo
in the black
of my pupils?
Every look, every touch,
will pierce. How will we love,
I thought that night.
How will we love, when
in deep love
he was
conceived.
man:
The
moment
it happened—
woman:
It happened? Look
at me, tell me:
Did it happen?
man:
And it billows up
abundantly,
an endless
wellspring. And I
know—as long as
I breathe,
I will draw
and drink and drip
that blackened
moment.
woman:
Mourning condemns
the living
to the grimmest solitude,
much like the loneliness
in which disease
enclothes
the ailing.
man:
But in that loneliness,
where—like soul
departing body—
I am torn
from myself, there
I am no longer alone,
no longer alone,
ever since.
And I am not
just one there,
and never will be
only one—
woman:
There I touch his
inner self,
his gulf,
as I have
never touched
a person
in the world—
man:
And he,
he also touches
me from
there, and his touch—
no one has ever
touched me in that way.
(silence)
woman:
If there were such a thing
as there,
and there isn’t,
you know—but if
there were,
they would have already gone
there.
One of everyone would have
got up and gone. And how
far will you go,
and how will you know
your way back,
and what if you don’t
come back, and even if
you find it—
and you won’t,
because it isn’t—
if you find it, you will not
come back,
they will not let you
back, and if you do
come back, how
will you be, you might
come back so different
that you won’t
come back,
and what about me,
how will I be if you don’t
come back, or if
you come back
so different that you don’t
come back?
town chronicler: She gets up and embraces him. Her hands scamper over his body. Her mouth probes his face, his eyes, his lips. From my post in the shadows, outside their window, it looks as if she is throwing herself over him like a blanket on a fire.
woman:
That night I thought:
Now we will never
separate.
Even if we want to,
how can we?
Who will sustain him, who will
embrace
if our two bodies do not
envelop
his empty fullness?
man:
Come,
what could be simpler?
Without mulling or wondering
or thinking: his mother
and father
get up and go
to him.
woman:
In whose eyes will we look to see him,
present and absent?
In whose hand
will we intertwine fingers
to weave him
fleetingly
in our flesh?
Don’t go.
man:
The eyes,
one single
spark
from his eyes—
how can we,
how may we
not try?
woman:
And what will you tell him,
you miserable madman?
What will you say? That hours
after him, the hunger awoke
in you?
That your body
and mine, like a pair
of ticks, clutched
at life and clung
to each other and forced us
to live?
man:
If we can be with him
for one more moment,
perhaps he, too,
will be
for one more
moment,
a look—
a breath—
woman:
And then what?
What will become
of him?
And of us?
man:
Perhaps we’ll die like he did, instantly.
Or, facing him, suspended,
we will swing
between the living
and the dead—
but that we know. Five years
on the gallows of longing.
(pause)
The smell
your body emits
when your grief
plunges on you,
lunges;
the bitter smell in which
I always find
his odor, too.
woman:
His smells—
sweet, sharp,
sour.
His washed hair
his bathed flesh
the simple spices
of the body—
man:
The way he used to sweat after a game,
remember?
Burning with excitement—
woman:
Oh, he had smells for every season:
the earthy aromas of autumn hikes,
rain evaporating from wool sweaters,
and when you worked the spring fields together,
odor from the sweat of your brows,
the vapors of working men, filled the house—
man:
But most of all I loved the summer,
with its notes of peaches
and plums,
their juices running down his cheeks—
woman:
And when he came back
from a campfire with friends,
night and smoke
on his breath—
man:
Or when he returned
from the beach,
a salty tang
in his hair—
woman:
On his skin.
The scent of his baby blanket,
the smell of his diapers
when he drank only breast milk,
then seemingly
one moment later—
man:
The sheets of a boy
in love.
woman:
Sometimes, when we are
together, your sorrow
grips my sorrow,
my pain bleeds into yours,
and suddenly the echo of
his mended, whole body
comes from inside us,
and then one might briefly imagine—
he is here.
(pause)
I would go
to the end
of the world with you,
you know. But you are not
going to him, you are going
somewhere else, and there
I will not go, I cannot.
I will not.
Copyright © 2014 by David Grossman. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
