She did not understand, and stopped smiling.
A black-bearded man, standing near the bed, puffed on his pipe in quiet contemplation of Magin. Magin hardly breathed. His throat was dry and he could not swallow.
“Water,” he said again, hoarsely.
“Water,” answered several voices.
Then the black-bearded man said a few guttural words and the people began talking vigorously. “Uurk,” said a small man. “No, tsatet ruck!” shouted another. The dogs, who had come to the hut at the heels of the men, became excited and barked sharply, one after another, outside the door. Magin fainted.
When he regained consciousness the room was empty. He tried to think clearly, but his thoughts faded and slipped from his grasp. The pain had wrapped around him tightly. His throat burned. He looked across at the inner wall and followed the grain of the wood. It was dark and water-stained. He looked at the floor. Clumps of snow lay over the pocked dirt. His eyes turned up toward the ceiling, and found only deepening darkness over the beam. His eyes moved down over the outer wall, from stone to stone, until they fixed on the window. There, beyond the pane, was a crowd of faces, staring intently at him.
Startled, he turned away. He heard fingers moving over the sill. Snow rustled below the window. He tried to close his hands around the mattress, testing his strength, and waited for the voices to rise again.
Away from Home
It has been so long since she used a metaphor!
Company
I like the students. I like their company. I like them here — if only they would remain in the indefinite future. They must be somewhere in my future or they will not be here for me, for company, where I can talk to them sometimes all day long. But that future must never come. Because it is so hard to meet them in the class itself. The problem is that in order to have the company of them here, in my imagination, I must pay the price of that future arriving, as it does, with all the difficulty of that encounter.
Then there is another sort of company in the letters I have not answered. If I answer the letters, those patient or impatient people waiting for answers are no longer present to me. If I answer the letters, I suppose I may be in some cases present to them, then. But, though not telling myself this is the reason, I don’t answer these letters. And yet this is selfish, and of course impolite. I answer some, in fact. But most go unanswered for weeks, months, more than a year, several years, or forever. Several times, I have waited so long to answer a letter that the person has moved away. Once, I waited so long to answer a postcard that my friend died.
But maybe these people are no longer waiting for answers by now anyway; maybe their attention is no longer on me, and this company is only an illusion: the friendly or neutral words are still there on various sheets of paper in different envelopes, but in the minds of these people who wrote the unanswered letters the words for what they are thinking about me, if they think of me at all, are no longer friendly or neutral but unfriendly, dismissive, even disgusted. I believe I have this company, but I do not have it, unless believing this is enough, and I do in some form have this company, whatever they may be thinking.
When I answer one of these letters, true, sometimes all I receive in return, weeks later, is a brief, tired reply. But more often the reply comes quickly and is full, warm, even delighted; and then, just because it is so generous and such wonderful company, it may sit again on my bedside, or on my desk, or on my pile of correspondence, for weeks or months or longer before I answer it.
Finances
If they try to add and subtract to see whether the relationship is equal, it won’t work. On his side, he is giving $50,000, she says. No, $70,000, he says. It doesn’t matter, she says. It matters to me, he says. What she is giving is a half-grown child. Is that an asset or a liability? Now, is she supposed to feel grateful to him? She can feel grateful, but not indebted, not that she owes him something. There has to be a sense of equality. I just love to be with you, she says, and you love to be with me. I’m grateful to you for providing for us, and I know my child is sometimes a trouble to you, though you say he is a good child. But I don’t know how to figure it. If I give all I have and you give all you have, isn’t that a kind of equality? No, he says.
The Transformation
It was not possible, and yet it happened; and not suddenly, but very slowly, not a miracle, but a very natural thing, though it was impossible. A girl in our town turned into a stone. But it is true that she had not been the usual sort of girl even before that: she had been a tree. Now a tree moves in the wind. But sometime near the end of September she began not to move in the wind anymore. For weeks she moved less and less. Then she never moved. When her leaves fell they fell suddenly and with a terrible noise. They crashed onto the cobblestones and sometimes broke into fragments and sometimes remained whole. There would be a spark where they fell and a little white powder lying beside them. People, though I did not, collected her leaves and put them on the mantlepiece. There never was such a town, with stone leaves on every mantlepiece. Then she began to turn gray: at first we thought it was the light. With wrinkled foreheads, twenty of us at a time would stand in a circle around her shading our eyes, dropping our jaws — and so few teeth we had among us it was something to see — and say it was the time of day or the changing season that made her look gray. But soon it was clear that she was simply gray now, just that, the way years ago we had to admit that she was simply a tree now, and no longer a girl. But a tree is one thing and a stone is another. There are limits to what you can accept, even of impossible things.
Two Sisters (II)
The younger sister is bored in the shop and rings the bell. The older sister comes slowly down the stairs and asks the younger sister why she rang the bell.
The reason is simple: to see her come down. Because she is so fat and moves so slowly; the stairs buckle and creak under her, she has trouble breathing, she holds the banister as if it were still her father’s hand, her plump knees knock against each other. It is very amusing to the younger sister and breaks the tedium of the morning.
She says none of this out loud. Out loud she says, “There has been a mistake in yesterday’s figures.” But of course the older sister cannot find the mistake, though she goes over the figures many times. Her dress is tight under her arms and her ankles are swollen from standing so long.
The younger sister cannot play this trick very often, or she would be found out. But that makes it all the more exciting to her.
The two sisters, no longer young, are forced to sleep in the same bed. They dream of different things and carefully hide their dreams from each other in the morning. Sometimes they touch by accident in the bed and fly apart as though they had been burned. They do not sleep well and are not refreshed in the morning. One wakes early, goes to the toilet, and would like to resume sleeping. But there is no joy in going back to bed when her sister lies there already sweating like a sow in the early heat.
My sister with thighs like pillars. She eats her potatoes as though she would make a revolution among them, as though they were the People. No, then what is this passion of hers? It is terrifying to see her cloudy eyes become sharp when my dinner is put on the table. I am afraid she will devour not only the dinner but me and my poor life too. Beside her laughter, mine is like the cheeping of a bird in the ivy. No, she never laughs. I never laugh. Her silence, though, is so much greater than mine that mine is like a wisp of smoke in a raincloud.