Then he turned and hurried back. Joe stood beside his suitcase and looked back. He saw a crowd of children coming, chasing each other, sweating in the cold sunlight. Suddenly he heard a girl (who was also wearing a robe that showed her bare back) shouting in the language of his country, “Maria! Maria! I’m choking to death!” She gasped painfully, suddenly spat out a mouthful of fresh blood, and squatted down. A large group of children, all ten or older, surrounded her.
Joe suddenly felt unsafe, because he saw many of the children holding daggers in their hands. A few watched him with shining eyes. He lifted his suitcase and casually turned into a shop beside the road. It sold silver ornaments and utensils.
The wolf quickly disappeared from Maria’s design. Maria whistled, trying to call it back. She heard the loud noise Daniel made digging in the yard.
Mother and son bathed in the sunlight, attempting to return to an earlier time. Afterward they went to Joe’s study and saw that all of his bookshelves were overturned. They entered, stepping on the books, and sat among the chaotic piles, talking about what things had been like when Joe was at home. Daniel casually picked up a book, browsed lazily through it, and told Maria about his father’s frame of mind when he’d purchased it.
“How do you know this?” Maria asked, knitting her eyebrows.
“This isn’t difficult, it’s written in the book. Father is like you, a perfectionist.”
Maria thought of Joe talking about business while immersed in his own stories, and nodded her head.
“Mama, why are there so many people who talk inside the walls of our house? I remember from when I was little, they came in one group after another. Are all these people our relatives?”
“Yes, this is a house built on its original foundations. Do you like these people?”
“Sometimes I do feel happy. Especially at the boarding school, when I couldn’t sleep at night, so I talked to myself with my eyes still open. When I spoke children answered me from inside the walls. Are there children who passed away among our relatives?”
“Many. Your father is about to meet a wolf.”
Daniel put the book in his hand in front of his nose and sniffed it, saying, “This is the wolf. It won’t abandon its pursuit. I have seen it twice before.”
Maria asked him if he remembered when they drank tea in the rose garden, and Father spoke with them from the balcony of the study. Maria called this conversation “exchanges in the air.”
Daniel answered that he would never, ever forget, because that was the time he saw a ladder suspended in the air stretching down from the balcony.
“Only Father could have the skill to make the balcony send out a ladder, hanging straight up in the air without leaning on anything.”
“A man like him can also disappear from us entirely, and run off alone to the ancient East.”
After Maria finished this sentence, she felt a familiar disturbance emerging from inside her body. The checkered skirt she wore stretched tight. Her gaze was fixed on the wooden gate at the other side of the yard. A woman wearing a black skirt stood at the gate. This slender woman from an Eastern country always hung around here. Daniel was also looking at the middle-aged woman, his youthful blue eyes aflame with lust. The book in Daniel’s hand fell to the ground, its pages trembling as if wounded. Maria saw an antiquated landscape illustration inside, a picture of a beach. On the beach a fishing net was spread open to dry in the sun. Maria reached to pick up the book but it was electrified. Her hand was struck back. A rending scream made her blood congeal. It was Daniel screaming, his face red from the pressure.
“Daniel, you’re not well?”
“No, this is delight,” he murmured, and walked out the door.
Looking down from the balcony, Maria saw Daniel, covering half his face with a straw hat, brush past the woman’s body and run out. She could hear his elastic steps ringing on the road. The woman seemed to have no awareness of Daniel. She was there waiting for someone. Maria pitied her son. She shut the door leading to the balcony, drew the curtains, and stayed alone in the shadows thinking deeply. She wanted to whistle, and so she started to whistle, gently, a little like a cricket in the dark. Underfoot the mess of spread-out books started to shake their pages, becoming fan-shaped, but there was no wind in the house. Maria knew these were the original source of Joe’s square, from which his stories extended, becoming a limitless web of stories. Now he had abandoned all this and become the story himself.
In the electromagnetic field of the books Maria began to recollect her life with Joe. She remembered that Joe was afraid of her grandfather, even after Grandfather had been dead many years. Since the house had been built on an ancient foundation, her grandfather’s image occasionally appeared on the walls, most often at noon, when there was sun. Maria, in order not to frighten Joe, pretended not to see it, but she knew Joe saw. He didn’t dodge away, but rather stared intently at the wall. Maria understood that he longed for this kind of fear. In her adolescence, her grandfather always sat inside the house and seldom went out. One time Maria bolted in and saw Grandfather dancing to soft music, his legs, stiff from arthritis, now flexible. His arms spread wide, embracing an imagined woman. “Grandfather, who are you dancing with?” “With her,” he answered briefly, falling into an armchair in disappointment, painfully panting. Maria knew this “her” wasn’t her grandmother, because Grandmother didn’t dance. Of course it wasn’t some other woman either, because Grandfather never met women socially. Who was she then? For several decades Maria thought about this question. Now that Joe had left, Maria felt it had a prospect of solution. After her grandfather was buried she’d searched the house from top to bottom for that recording, but she could not find it. Perhaps there was no recording after all? That music? Was it no more than their hallucination?
Joe had heard the music when he arrived at her home. Grandfather seemed pleased with Joe, but he couldn’t say so. Instead he said he hoped Maria would stay away from this kind of man. Maria asked him why. He said there was no why. He also said he hoped she wouldn’t live at home after she married. “The origin of our family line is too ancient.” Young, energetic Maria didn’t understand what her grandfather was saying. And it wasn’t long before he passed away.
One night, when she and Joe were tired from lovemaking, she fell into a deep sleep. But at midnight she was roused by that music playing in the darkened house.
“Joe, are you dancing?” Maria felt suddenly confused and upset.
“No, I was watching, darling. Your family is so magical. I was wondering, am I your family’s lost son?”
So many years later, this “lost son” had left the home once again. At the moment Maria felt gratified and a little worried. After all, she and Joe had never gone to such a place before. But she also reflected that earlier, before Joe had even arrived, she hadn’t known he existed. Maria stood up from among the books, the haze in her heart dispersing little by little. It was almost as if she really had returned to former days.
“Oh, sir, you came so soon. We’ve had no time free the past few days.” A young boy wearing a long gown walked from the interior of the shop over to where Joe stood, sizing him up from head to toe.
Joe’s surprise can be imagined: he spoke the language of Joe’s country.
The boy started to laugh, and led him toward the interior, saying: “My father is one of your people. He always talks with me about your affairs. Father is very lonely.”
In the back there was an enormous, dark room. The boy lit a small oil lamp. Joe saw a spacious carved bed hung with linen mosquito netting. Someone apparently lay inside the netting. In a soft voice Joe asked the boy whether it was his father in there. The boy stuck closely to Joe, his nude back rubbing against him, as if he were afraid of something.