My foot felt something soft.
I hated him so much that I felt ill.
It was the dog, sprawled out on the porch and sleeping peacefully.
My hands were still soapy.
I was lying on the ground, and someone must have turned off the light, because it was dark.
The stars had disappeared, the muggy night was silent.
For a long time I thought I should be going home now; go home; I could think of nothing else.
But in the distance the sky flared up with lightning, followed by sounds of rolling thunder.
And then my legs were carrying me, my head was pulling me, my feet felt a path that was leading to some unknown destination.
As the rumbling thunder brought the flashes of lightning closer, the air itself swirled and thickened, the wind howled into the tree crowns.
Only when my mouth felt something hard and cool, the taste of rust, only then did I realize that I'd gotten home: below, among the trees I could see the familiar windows all lit up, and this, then, must be the gate, its iron hinge must be in my mouth.
It was like entering a place that was already familiar for the first time, as if I had seen before what now seemed so strange.
I had to look well to see where I really was.
In the cool of the gathering wind, large warm raindrops began to fall, stopped, then started again.
I lay there for a while, in the light under the window, and wished that no one would ever find me.
I kept watching flashes of lightning slide down the wall.
I didn't want to go inside, because I loathed this house, yet it had to be the one and only place for me.
Even today, while attempting to recall the past with as precise and impartial perspective as possible, I find it difficult to speak objectively of this house where people living under the same roof grew so far apart, were so consumed by their own physical and moral disintegration, were left to fend for themselves, and only for themselves, that they did not notice, or pretended not to notice, when someone was missing, their own child, from the so-called family nest.
Why didn't they notice?
I must have been so totally unmissed by everyone that I didn't realize I was living in a hell of being absent, thinking this hell to be the world.
From inside the house I could hear the fine creaks of the parquet floor, other small noises and faint stirrings.
I was lying under my grandfather's open window.
Grandfather switched day and night around, at night awake, wandering through the house, and during the day dozing off or actually sleeping on the couch in his darkened room, and with this brilliant stratagem making himself inaccessible to the rest of us.
If there was a way for me to know when this mutually effective and multifaceted disintegration had begun, whether it had a definite beginning or when and why this commodious family nest had grown cold, I would surely have much to say about human nature and also about the age I lived in.
I won't delude myself; I do not possess the surpassing wisdom of the gods.
Could it have been Mother falling ill?
That was certainly an important turning point, though in an odd way her sickness seems to me to have been the consequence rather than the cause of the prolonged decline; in any case, the family glossed over her illness with the same lies — so vile in their seeming benevolence — they used about my little sister's condition, or Grandfather's asthma attacks, which, according to Grandmother's confidential revelation, no treatment, diet, or medication could remedy because they were simply hysteria.
And all he needed was a bucketful of cold water on his head, she said.
But it would have been as unseemly to talk about the physical manifestations of this slow decay as it would have been to mention why Grandmother never talked to Grandfather, who in turn refused to say a word to Father, the two men passing each other, day after day, without even a greeting, each pretending the other didn't exist, even though Father was living in Grandfather's house.
Maybe it's fortunate, or unfortunate, that to this day I cannot decide what is better, knowledge or ignorance; no matter how much I tried to live their lies and find my place in the system of falsehoods, contributing to the smooth operation of the system's fine mechanism with effective lies of my own, and even if I could not see what had set it all in motion or what was covered up by what, still, over time, I did gain some insight into the layers of deception; I knew, for instance, that Grandfather's illness was real and quite serious, and that any one of his attacks might prove fatal; as Grandmother gravely and passively watched them, I felt she was actually waiting for his death, which could happen any time; and I also knew, of course, that my little sister was incurable, was born braindamaged, and so she'd remain, but the circumstances of her birth or conception — the cause of her condition, if indeed there was one such thing — were shrouded in the conspiracy of my parents' guilty conscience, which is why they were compelled to talk constantly about the hope of finding a cure, as if with their hope they were trying to mask an awful secret which no one must ever find out; it seemed as though every member of my family used lies to hold the other members' lives in his or her hand; and because of an inadvertent gesture of mine, I also knew that what Mother was recovering from was not a successful gallbladder operation.
I was resting on her arm, watching her breathe, and all I wanted to do was touch her neck, smooth my hand over her face — and that's why I'm talking about an inadvertent gesture: she was not asleep, only her eyes were closed, and as I clumsily reached toward her neck, my finger got caught in the cord of her nightgown — it wasn't tied properly or it just came undone — and the light silk material slid off her breast or, more precisely, in that fraction of a second I thought I saw it slide off and saw her breast, that is what I was supposed to see there, but in fact what I saw in place of her breast was a network of ruddy scars, the traces of many stitches.
I heard a clicking sound; someone quickly shut the window above me.
The storm could not have come at a better time; I lay there hoping the downpour would drive me into the ground and I'd be dissolved, absorbed, but instead, the cool rain sobered me up.
I scrambled to my feet, to knock on the window and be let in.
To my astonishment, Grandmother's terrified eyes looked back at me from within the room; on the couch Grandfather was lying on his back with his eyes closed.
While I was waiting at the door, my pants and shirt soaked through, it was pouring, thundering and lightning, and by the time Grandmother finally let me in, my hair was sopping wet.
But she didn't even bother to turn on the light, didn't say a word, and without paying any attention to me hurried back into Grandfather's room.
I followed her.
But she didn't hurry back to help him; she immediately sat back down on the chair she'd risen from a moment earlier; she was in a hurry to be present when the expected finally happened.
The rain sluiced down in great sheets on the large glass panes, in which a continually flashing blue light illuminated the mysteriously blurred images of trees; approaching rumbles made the glass tremble; it seemed that all the heat preceding the storm had been trapped in this room.
Grandfather's chest rapidly rose and sank, a still open book hung from his hand as if ready to drop, but he seemed to be holding on to it, clutching the last object connecting him to this world; his face was white, glistening with perspiration, and more pearly beads were gathered in the stubble over his mouth; his breathing was very fast, whistling, drawn-out, labored.
The light coming from under the waxed-paper shade of the lamp on the wall above Grandfather's head illuminated his face, as if to ensure that there would be nothing mysterious in his struggle; Grandmother sat motionless in the shadow, in the warm and friendly dimness, peering out, a bit tense, full of anticipation.