In the end we had to tie it up outside the house, low moaning that after a while turned into loud barking. The barking that used to indicate pleasure. In the early hours I watched him stand or try to stand, with his neck turning ecstatically from side to side, looking in the direction of the road as though he had spotted something, perhaps hallucinating, half blind. Seeing someone coming. But no one appeared.
At six o’clock the dog had been standing like this for two hours, it had started to rain, and I had been outside and tried to drag it underneath the shelter of the eaves, clapping the wet coat, drawing the dog’s body close to mine, but it was reluctant, it did not take long until the dog was out in the rain once more. I put on my slippers, went outside and talked to him. Now he seemed more disappointed, it must have dawned on him that no one was coming, his barking had become quiet and complaining. I unleashed him. He immediately resumed his wandering, the same stiff, mechanical gait with his neck thrust down between his legs and his coat saturated with rain, straight ahead now, across the terrace, over the driveway, along the road. I lay down to sleep, I was exhausted by the hours between being half asleep and wakefulness, the howling, the barking, I fell asleep and did not wake until nine o’clock, with the feeling I had overslept. Simon, who was first up, asked if I had seen the dog.
I told him I had let it go.
He looked at me. Waited in the doorway, looking at me without accusation, as though this was something I had to discover for myself. I couldn’t let it in, and it couldn’t stay like that any longer, I said.
He nodded. But there was no agreement in his gaze. We knew that I had killed it, it had not happened yet, but we knew it. By eleven o’clock it had still not returned.
We searched, Marija as well, and when we spotted Max standing by the side of the road down beside the highway two hundred yards from our house, I was certain it sensed we were there, and that was why it attempted to cross the road. There was not much traffic, it was a Sunday. It wanted to cross, its fur plastered to its skin, to its body, it was skinnier than I remembered it had been at any time before, it started to walk, and I don’t think either of us noticed the car approaching. The vehicle was driving slowly. Perhaps that was why we thought the dog had plenty of time, that it would make it, perhaps the driver also thought it would have reached the other side long before, but then the dog changed its mind, and the driver was not fast enough. It moved backward, but was hit all the same. The dog withdrew toward the side of the road again, looking down at its leg that seemed to snap, its head following its eyes downward, it fell, slumped, collapsing onto the gravel. Max lay motionless before we managed to cross over, he looked at me, I recall, with an expression of surprise, I placed my jacket over the dog’s body, though I don’t think the gesture meant much to him. Marija took my hand and Simon’s hand, held them both, we formed a circle, a little circle around the dog. She talked to the driver of the car who was repeating over and over how sorry she was, that she hadn’t seen it, that it hadn’t been easy to spot. Her children inside the vehicle, she must have forbidden them to come out, because they were staring at us through the rear window. The dog’s death had been so distressing, so dramatic, Marija made coffee and sat with us for the entire afternoon, evening, listening patiently to stories about a dog that probably had little to do with the real dog, the one that was now gone. She did not once say we could get a new dog, she said nothing. She listened, and I think Simon wept.
•
I DID NOT believe, I have never believed that I was cowardly. But what does it mean to be cowardly, it depends on what you are confronted with. If there is something you do not really fear, then you are not a hero. There is always something you are truly afraid of. For most people cowardliness is measured by what you risk losing, weighed against the thought of losing yourself, is that not the way it is?
Marija liked to hear Simon read. He used to read aloud to me from the newspaper. He has always been good at reading aloud. He has a rich, deep voice, expressive. No, I hardly remember it any longer. It is disappearing all the time.
When he was reading she used to come in. Perhaps she had been standing in the kitchen, but when she came in and stood in the doorway in order to listen, the seriousness in her expression, even when he was reading lighthearted subject matter. And corrections. He has always had an obsession about correcting language, he would come in from his workroom just to read out a mistake he had found in the newspaper.
He never corrected her. He knew perfectly well what it was like to try to master a foreign language. It took him far too many years to put aside his own accent, his own minor linguistic errors. She didn’t know that, that he too was not from here, from this city, from this country, that he too had once had an accent. He never told her that.
•
ONE MORNING SHE had arrived early, she had let herself in, I wasn’t even aware she was there. I came out of the shower and was about to walk down the stairs. It was quiet in the house, I don’t remember where Simon was.
It came to light later that she had spilled water on the stairs, she was on her way down with a full bucket. The old linoleum was as slippery as a skating rink, I took one step and felt myself lose my footing. It happened so quickly, just an assortment of movements running into one another, a dance devised by an unorthodox choreographer. I had a feeling of being hurled out in midair and then landing beyond the steps.
She came running up from the basement and knelt down beside me, feeling my feet, my arm joints.
It’s not painful, I said. But she was already trying to help me up, as you do a patient, she supports me, almost lifting me into the bedroom, I hang on to her tall body, as I’m carried off.
I am laid on the bed. It’s all right, I say, to reassure her. I was lucky.
She is talking about phoning for the physician. She lies down beside me. Her feet stretch out beyond the bed, she is so tall. She holds my hand.
I need to hold it, she says. I feel it was my fault.
It’s my own fault, I tell her.
No, she says.
We lay like that. I fell asleep after a short while, I saw her face in a landscape resembling a garden, a confusing collage where she obviously did not belong.
Are you sleeping.
I awoke.
No, I said.
She lay looking at me.
It was lovely to lie there with her.
She began to talk, as usual about her favorite topic, about her daughter and her prospects. Still she held my hand. She did not let it go until I said I wanted to get up. I thought: We are so close.
I can’t explain why. Why it was Marija. But it felt as though we had been waiting for someone or other. From loneliness, or simply boredom. Perhaps she reminded us of the girls. We let her in. It felt as though we had been waiting for her all the time.
I THINK ABOUT that morning, and it is almost as though I forget everything else, now it all seems strangely unfamiliar, and I am just as astonished as my eldest daughter was when she stood before me that day and asked why, what was it that happened, what meant you could not forgive her.
I wake all of a sudden. I must have dozed off in the chair here, and now I have that heavy feeling I sometimes get when I drop off during the afternoon, as though something existential, fundamental, has risen to the surface and lies just below, about to reach my consciousness. But the only thing I feel is sadness. And I can’t manage to grasp what was almost so clear to me as I was on the verge of waking, and consequently there is nothing I can do about it, no way to make it disappear again.