Falling out of time
David Grossman








In Falling Out of Time, David Grossman has created a genre-defying drama-part play, part prose, pure poetry-to tell the story of bereaved parents setting out to reach their lost children. It begins in a small village, in a kitchen, where a man announces to his wife that he is leaving, embarking on a journey in search of their dead son.The man-called simply the "Walking Man" — paces in ever-widening circles around the town. One after another, all manner of townsfolk fall into step with him (the Net Mender, the Midwife, the Elderly Maths Teacher, even the Duke), each enduring his or her own loss. The walkers raise questions of grief and bereavement: Can death be overcome by an intensity of speech or memory? Is it possible, even for a fleeting moment, to call to the dead and free them from their death? Grossman's answer to such questions is a hymn to these characters, who ultimately find solace and hope in their communal act of breaching death's hermetic separateness. For the reader, the solace is in their clamorous vitality, and in the gift of Grossman's storytelling — a realm where loss is not merely an absence, but a life force of its own.






David Grossman




Falling out of time





Falling out of time





Part I


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 grief.

(pause)

The smell

from your body

when your anguish

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.

It is easier to go

than to stay.

I have bitten my flesh

for five years

so as not to go, not

there,

there is

no there!

MAN:

There will be,

if we go

there.

TOWN CHRONICLER: She looks away from him. They are distant, as though he is no longer here, on this side. He takes a deep breath, inhaling the small kitchen and the entire house, and her — her face, her body. Then he straightens up. As he walks past, his hand rests briefly on her waist, barely touching. He leaves the house and shuts the door behind him.

And stops: the sky is low and black, the broad-chested night pushes him back to the house. He looks at the closed door. His feet hesitate, probing. He walks — strange — orbiting himself in a small circle. Slowly, carefully, again and again, one circle after another. His arms spread out, the circles grow wider, he walks around the small yard, and now he circles the house—

WALKING MAN:

Here I will fall

now I will fall—

I do not fall.

Now, here,

the heart

will stop—

It does not stop.

Here is shadow

and fog—

now,

now

I will fall—

TOWN CHRONICLER: The night air is damp and cool. Clouds roll over the big swamps in the east, covering the stub of moon. Again and again he circles the house, as if hoping his motion will rouse her and enthuse her.

WALKING MAN:

Your icy voice

ensnarls

my feet. How will I walk

without your warmth, without the light

of your eyes?

How will I walk

if you withhold

your grace?

TOWN CHRONICLER: His gaze always fixed on the shuttered blinds, he circles the house again and again, but gradually moves farther away. He opens up, spreads out, walking farther, farther, his circles growing larger and wider. He walks there — there is no there, of course there isn’t, but what if you go there? What if a man walks there?

WALKING MAN:

I am not alone, I am not

alone, I whisper

like an oath,

and his breath

through my mouth

clouds the mirror.

I am not alone,

with him I am

not alone—

TOWN CHRONICLER: He gradually encircles the whole village, then he does so again. He walks by houses, yards, wells, and fields, past barns and paddocks and woodpiles. Dogs bark at him and quickly retreat with a whimper, and he walks.

WALKING MAN:

I am not alone. With him

I am not one,

I am alone

with him in all

my thickets, my labyrinths.

He pulses in me, lives

with me, one

with me, with him

I share the vast expanse his death

created in me—

and he surges

and he wanes with me,

unquiet

unquiet

roaming

embittering

redeeming

shackling

healing

purifying,

not letting go,

not letting go,

this

lonely

dead

child.

TOWN CHRONICLER: Night after night after night. Things are happening in your town, my lord, and I fear I will not have the time to record them all for you.

Right now, at midnight, at the old wharf by the lake, something stirs inside a skein of fishing nets. A head pokes out and glances around. A tiny, supple body pulls itself out of the skein and sits up breathlessly. It is a person, undoubtedly. Frightened eyes gleam white in the filthy face as they scan the hilltops surrounding the town. The gaping mouth turns to look, like a dark third eye.

Now I see: it is the net-mender. You may recall, Your Highness, that years ago, on one of your visits to the harbor, you enjoyed her sharp tongue when she argued with you over the needle tax you had levied, in your benevolence, at the time. A cheerful, curly-haired boy was tied to her chest in a brightly colored sling. He played a game of peekaboo with you, and you gave him a gold coin. I do not know what became of him. From time to time I see her roaming the streets near the harbor, grunting, muttering unintelligible words to herself, encumbered by a tangled web of fishing nets that makes one wonder whether there is a human being inside at all.

She suddenly leaps up as if snakebitten. Her hands rise and she points far away. She groans—

If you are awake, my lord, and would be so kind as to look out of your window, you, too, will see: a small luminance of sorts encircles the town. A man walks there, up and down the hills.

WALKING MAN:

One step,

another step, another

step,

walking and

walking to you.

I am

an unleashed question,

an open shout

My son

If only

I could

move

you

just

one

step.

TOWN CHRONICLER: And on the third night watch, in a side alley on the outskirts of town, in a little house with one room, a centaur sits at a table. That is what the townsfolk call him, Your Highness, and I promise to try to find out why very shortly. His massive head, adorned with snowy-white curls, droops onto his chest. His spectacles have slid down to the edge of his nose, and his snores shake the house. I glance right and left: no one. I rise up on my toes and peer inside. The room is dusky, but I can discern that it is overflowing: strange mounds and heaps that might be dirt or garbage, or piles of old furniture, surround the man and at times reach the ceiling. It is hard to see how he can move in this room.

A dirty blanket is spread out on the desk before him. A few empty beer bottles, pens, pencils, a school notebook, all scattered around. The notebook is open; its pages have thin blue lines. As best I can tell from here, they are all empty.

“Scram before I wring your balls,” the centaur growls without opening his eyes, and I flee for my life.

Only when I reach the fence outside the home of the woman from whom I have exiled myself does my heart recover.

TOWN CHRONICLER’S WIFE:

The passing time

is painful. I have lost

the art

of moving simply,

naturally, within it.

I am swept back

against its flow. Angry, vindictive,

it pierces me

all the time, all the

time

with its

spikes.

TOWN CHRONICLER: The next evening, in a hut in a slum on the outskirts of town, a young woman — trained as a midwife — gets up abruptly from her kneeling position by a tub of water and stands with her hands dripping. As far as I can see, there is no laboring woman in the room, nor a baby. Only a man’s trousers and shirt float in the tub. The woman freezes. Her neck is a stalk, her face long and gentle. Somewhat rigidly, she turns and walks to the window. Outside it is cold and stormy, and since the chimney emits no smoke — allowing me to peer through it — I assume it is very cold inside, too.

Her gaze probes the faraway hilltops on the horizon. She is silent, but her fingers rend her mouth apart as if in a scream, until I hold my breath as well. When she finally sighs, her shoulders collapse, as though her strength has suddenly left her.

Her husband — barrel-chested, with a reddish shaved skull and three thick folds on the back of his neck — who all this time has sat in the corner cobbling a pair of riding boots, punctuating and vowelizing her silence with the rapid blows of his hammer, hisses through the nails in his mouth:

COBBLER: Poisoning your soul again?

MIDWIFE: Y-y-yesterday she w-w-would have been f-f-five.

COBBLER: I’ve told you a hundred times not to think about these things! Enough, it’s over!

MIDWIFE: I lit a candle by her p-p-picture and you said n-n-nothing. Don’t you ever think about her?

COBBLER: What is there to think? How much of a life did she even have? A year?

MIDWIFE: And a h-h-half.

TOWN CHRONICLER: The cobbler slams the boot heel with his hammer as hard as he can, curses, and with peculiar lust sucks the blood that spurts from his finger.

Heavy with thought, I leave. The town is asleep; its streets are empty. At the edge of the old wharf I stop and wait. The leaden clouds almost touch the water. Daybreak will soon come.

As she did last night, the mute net-mender thrusts her head out of the skein. She looks around, searching, as if a voice had called her. I hide behind a lamppost. She suddenly leaps and runs down the pier with unbelievable speed, past skeletons of boats and rusty anchors, her long nets dragging behind her, floating.

On the wooden bridge she stops. I can hear her breath whistling. Who knows what is plaguing this miserable creature’s mind? She grabs the railing and rocks it wildly. How much force and fury that little frame contains! I carefully move closer and crouch behind an overturned boat. The lake is turbulent tonight, and it sprays my glasses with droplets. In such moments, Your Highness, I practically curse my blind obedience to your orders. It is hard to see from here, but it seems as though someone is trying to force the mute to turn back and look at the hills, and she fights him and grunts and spits, squirming as her tiny, supple body is tossed from side to side. I write quickly in the dark my hand is trembling I apologize for the handwriting Your Highness perhaps she is about to throw herself into the lake and then what will I do it’s been so many years since I’ve touched anyone and her head at once pulls sharply back maybe there really is someone in the dark breaking her neck—

Her mouth gapes, teeth exposed, and suddenly all is quiet. How such silence and the lake as if the waves do not

MUTE WOMAN IN NET:

Two human specks,

a mother and her child,

we glided through the world

for six whole years.

TOWN CHRONICLER: Astonished, she plunges once again into the mess of nets. I am exceedingly cold, Your Highness. Such phenomena disquiet me. The lake coming back to life so suddenly, and the boats once again knocking into one another and creaking in mockery. You will ridicule me, too, my lord, but I am willing to swear that I saw a slim band of light coming out of her mouth. Perhaps just a moonlight apparition. But there is no moon tonight. And the fact that for one moment, when she sang, she was almost beautiful … I am merely reporting. Her voice was clear. I might even venture to say: heavenly. But what do I know? I am tired. This is all so confusing. Perhaps I should take a nap in one of the boats

Wait—

Like a quick little animal she burrows into her nets and is gone. According to the records in my possession she has not uttered a single word for upward of nine years.

And now, Your Highness, it is finally dawn.

DUKE:

Dawn!

From within the loathsome night,

from the theater

of its nightmares, I once again

extract and

collect myself piece

by piece, a monarch-mosaic:

here is my hand

outstretched for bread,

and its fresh smell

and warm body,

but first, first

my eye

goes to the window,

drawn to two birds in a puddle,

to a dawn rising

sanguine. Look,

my lord, you are blessed:

here on a platter

is a newborn day,

its teeth not yet emerged—

But for a week now, far away

on the hilltops, a man

like an open razor blade walks

and cuts, his head

in the sky.

WALKING MAN:

And yet

I shall move you,

my rootless child,

my cold,

fruitless child.

Every day it gets

harder, every day you grow

more hardened, more

and more taxing.

TOWN CHRONICLER: Every time the midwife leaves the room, the cobbler jumps up to the window. His eyes dart over the hills, his lips seem to chew up insults and curses. Hammer in hand.

He notices me in his yard now, behind an empty chicken coop. He does not come out or banish me; he doesn’t even threaten me with his hammer. I carefully show him my notebook and pen. I believe I see him nod.

MIDWIFE:

Opposite my bed

on the w-w-wall

is an ancient round

c-c-clock.

It is old and weak,

with hands s-s-stuck

on the same hour

and the same m-m-minute

for more than a y-y-year—

TOWN CHRONICLER: Her voice, soft and flat, comes from the next room. The cobbler moves away from the window. He walks backward. Backward? Strange: as if sleepwalking, he probes around until his back touches the wall. Both arms slowly rise on either side. His shaved red head slams against the wall to the beat of the words from the other room.

MIDWIFE:

And only

the thin s-s-second

hand keeps fluttering

p-p-pouncing all the time

all the time that’s

left, all the time

that was given,

p-p-pounces and lurches

back

unw-w-wavering,

storming

fighting

to pass

to cross

or just

t-t- to be,

to be one sheer full simple second no more no less

just that, God,

just be.

DUKE:

And here, in the palace,

in the private chamber,

a whistling kettle and steaming

coffee. I am serene and slow

and limp, undoubtedly:

an exemplary duke—

no.

No.

A man not-himself

has awoken from this night—

all hollow bones,

hah, the gravity

of tragedy. (You thought

you were safe, m’lord, you thought you were

immune. Your troops

cover the land, a thousand hussars

on a thousand horses, and you in

shattered shards.) But he rises,

he rises to his day,

silently puts on the slough

of his name, inwardly

fans the dim embers, does his best

to convince himself that he still remembers

what it was like to

just

be;

how to stare, for example,

how to stare? How

does a person just stare

innocently, how does he

for one instant forget

what is seared inside him

by affliction?

In short—

an impostor of sorts, a sham,

pretending to be an everyman

whose eye

is drawn to the open window, whose hand

reaches simply

for bread—

Amid all this, I suddenly

plummet,

plunge,

a mere

shadow

of he who walks there

alone, of he who,

with heavy steps,

chisels the verdict

on my land:

all that is,

all that is

(oh, my child,

my sweet, my lost one) —

all that is

will now

echo

what is not.

TOWN CHRONICLER: “It’s like a murmur,” the centaur explains when I pass by his window the next evening. “A murmur, or a sort of dry rustle inside your head, and it never stops.”

Not willingly, Your Highness, does he give his testimony. Only after I show him the royal edict with your seal and portrait does he realize that he has no choice but to collaborate.

CENTAUR: “Veritably”? You need to know what’s going on with me? You’re telling me the duke could give two shits about what is veritably buzzing around in my head? Okay, then, gird your gonads and do some chronicling. Write down that it’s, let’s say, like dry leaves. What are you ogling at like an idiot? Leaves! But dry ones, right? Crumbling. Dead. Did you get that? And someone keeps stepping on them, over and over again … So? Is that veritable enough for you? Will the duke be pleased? Will his face glisten with delight?

TOWN CHRONICLER: My own honor, my lord, is easily put aside. But I am absolutely unwilling to allow your representative to be humiliated this way, and so I immediately turn to leave—

CENTAUR: What’s that? Without a kiss? Get back here right now! I believe, pencil pusher, that your edict explicitly requests “all the information required for the authorities, without omitting a single detail”! True or false? Well then, open up your little notebook right this minute and start chronicling:

“Someone keeps treading on them, on the dry leaves”—write this! — “walking around and around in a circle, dragging his feet …” Now make a note of this: khrrrsss khrrrsss. Like that, yes, with three s’s at the end. I bet that little detail will clarify the situation for the duke veritably! That will get it up for him in no time! Are you getting the picture, lap-clerk? Has anyone ever told you your face looks like a waif’s?

TOWN CHRONICLER: While I pretend to be writing down this foolish drivel, I periodically stand on my tiptoes to steal a glance at the heaps crammed into his room. I make a quick list: wooden cradle, pram, tiny bed, lots of deflated soccer balls, colorful little chairs, rocking horse, toy boat, rusty cars from an electric train, cowboy hat, Indian feather chain, endless pages of drawings and doodles … Incidentally, this whole assemblage is covered with fly droppings and cobwebs. It all seems withered and brittle, and every object looks as though it might crumble at the slightest touch, if not a mere look. The creature in the window keeps on prattling, cursing, and slandering. I persist. Gym shoes, skates and sandals, books, books everywhere, a small school desk, pencil cases, a green chamber pot, a little bicycle with training wheels … He can blather on all he wants with his filthy curses. I nod at him once in a while. Even twenty notebooks would not suffice. This place contains an entire museum of childhood — or perhaps the museum of one child. Rubber fins and swim goggles, wool teddy bears, furry lions and tigers—

He’s stopped talking. He peers over his glasses at me. He might suspect something. A little accordion, backpack, tin soldiers, paintbrushes, not good, I am disquieted, those bloodshot eyes. I’ll stop soon. Hey, board games! Beloved Monopoly, Snakes and Ladders, decks of cards, props for the budding magician, Boy Scout uniform, goody bags from birthday parties, bow and arrow — how can you even breathe in this room?

CENTAUR: You can’t. And now, if you value your life, hireling, get lost and don’t come back. Off you go! Pronto!

TOWN CHRONICLER: Picture albums, masks, toy gun, pacifiers, whistles, flashlight—

CENTAUR: Scram, you leech! Otherwise I’ll come out to you—

WOMAN WHO STAYED AT HOME:

Five years after my son

died, his father went out

to meet him.

I did not go with him.

I did not go. I did not go so much

that I foundered. I sat

cross-legged, displaced. I listened

to a voice that reached me

from afar: he

walks, he walks. I did

not go.

I did not.

Not

there.

My heart beat:

he walks. My blood

pounded: he walks.

Spoons and forks clattered, mirrors

glittered, signaled: see

him, see him, day and night, he

walks. I would go with him

to the end

of the world. Not there,

not

there.

DUKE:

… he might be an insurgent; I am

uncertain. My scouts say

he poses a danger:

the coolness of the unruly, of a

stubborn, wayward man.

But his eyes — they report—

shine with the pale blue light

of a child’s gaze.

MIDWIFE:

You will n-n-never know,

my d-d-daughter, that every man

is an island,

that you c-c-cannot know another

from within. A son’s own

mother cannot

be him, even for an instant,

cannot sustain

him, self-sustain herself

in him—

TOWN CHRONICLER: The town streets are thick with fog. The midwife is at her window, her eyes on the hills, her lips almost kissing the pane as she whispers feverishly. Fragmented vapors appear on the glass like hieroglyphics and quickly vanish, sometimes before I can write them down. From my post — this time behind the crumbling well in the yard — I notice her husband sitting on his stool, watching her longingly, hammer in hand.

MIDWIFE:

Nor will m-m-my self adhere

to your self any longer,

nor will my self

to myself adhere. It has all come apart. They say

there are things in the world. They say things

are c-c-connected. I look in the f-f-faces

of those who say, and see

holes

and crumbs,

specks

of limbs.

CENTAUR: He keeps stepping on the leaves in my mind, trampling them, day and night, always the same rhythm, never changing, fifteen years it’s been, since then, even when I sleep, when I shit, yes, write that down, it should be written somewhere, and there are whispers, too, all the time, like this: Hmmm … hmmm … And then he lunges like a swarm of wasps, buzzzzzzzz, drilling through my brain: it happened, it happened, it happened to him, it’s forever, it’s forever, and he won’t, he’ll never—

Ummm, look, lackey, this is just inside me, right? You can’t hear it, can you?

TOWN CHRONICLER: After I left him this evening, I turned around for another glance or two. His large, pale face in the window grew gloomier as I walked away. His long eyelashes moved with incredible slowness. A slim band of light suddenly glowed from the lakeside and quivered over the dark sky. I ran to see—

WOMAN IN NET:

Two human specks,

a mother and her child,

we glided through the world

for six whole years,

which were unto me

but a few days,

and we were

a nursery rhyme,

threaded with tales

and miracles—

Until ever so lightly,

a breeze

a breath

a flutter

a zephyr

rustled

the leaves—

And sealed our fates:

you here,

he there,

over and done with,

shattered

to pieces.

TOWN CHRONICLER: Now she notices me and falls silent. The entire pier lies between us, but she reaches out as though I were standing right beside her.

WOMAN IN NET:

I was cut

with scissors

from the picture,

solitary ice

of absence

came to singe

my limbs.

I was touched,

I was blighted

by the frost

of randomness.

TOWN CHRONICLER: She forcibly shuts her mouth with both hands. Her great black eyes fill with terror. If you ask me, Your Highness, the poor woman has not the slightest comprehension of the words that leave her lips! Incidentally, I think she truly believes that if I only came and touched her, this false spell would be lifted. But it has been almost thirteen years since I touched another person. Now I must hurry, Your Honor: it is almost midnight, and I cannot be late for my wife.

TOWN CHRONICLER’S WIFE:

A clear corpuscle

glowed inside me, a golden

granule gleamed. I knew that

it was me, my soul,

my core, it was the purpose

of my being. Born

with me, I thought, and so

would die with me—

I did not know that I might live

long after it, that I would be

diaspora,

deciduous.

A liar, too—

the kind who easily,

no eyelid batted,

dared to speak of:

me.

WOMAN WHO STAYED AT HOME:

I sank my teeth

into my flesh. I did not

go. I dwindled

like a candle.

Only he still lay

awake in me: now seeing,

now remembering, now crossing

through a hell. Now quiet

with his son. Or

laughing. Tasting

crumbs of happiness

with him—

Do not breathe,

or think

of what he sees, what he recalls,

what ails

his heart — wounded inside him.

Inside me

an extinguished eye lit up,

the eye of a half-devoured beast

in its predator’s mouth.

What does he see

there, I asked, I screamed, I slammed

my head against the wall, and how

swept up, how peeled away, and how

far has he gone

toward the darkness?

WALKING MAN:

I seem to understand

only things

inside time. People,

for example, or thoughts, or sorrow,

joy, horses, dogs,

words, love. Things that grow

old, that renew,

that change. The way I miss you

is trapped in time as well. Grief

ages with the years, and there are days

when it is new, fresh.

So, too, the fury at all that was robbed

from you. But you are

no longer.

You are outside

of time.

How can I explain

to you, for even the reason is

captured in time. A man from far away

once told me that in his language

they say of one who dies in war,

he “fell.”

And that is you: fallen

out of time,

while the time

in which I abide

passes you by:

a figure

on a pier,

alone,

on a night

whose blackness

has seeped wholly out.

I see you

but I do not touch.

I do not feel you

with my probes of time.

CENTAUR: Take you, for example, Town Chronicler, or whatever it is you call yourself. You’re a real sight for sore eyes, you are. Get a load of that bowler hat, boss! And the tie, and the satchel, and the pencil mustache—mwah! It’s just a shame you look so bedraggled and filthy, like some kind of tramp. And also — I’m sorry — but you reek like a fresh pile of droppings. Other than that, though—

All right, all right, no need to get in a huff! What are you talking about? Insulting a civil servant? Hah! Lighten up, pencil pusher, I’m just joking around. Besides, you should know that it’s all from jealousy. Yes, write that down in the biggest letters you can make: The centaur is jealous of the clerk!

No, you tell me: Isn’t it incredibly fortunate that you, as part of your job, and undoubtedly in return for a handsome salary, can spend as much time as you want peering into other people’s hells, without dipping so much as your pale little pinkie inside them? Think about it! What could be more titillating than someone else’s hell? And besides, I’m sure you’ll agree that secondhand pain is far better than firsthand. Healthier for the user and also more “artistic” in the sublime — I mean, the castrated — sense of the word. Take you, for example: it’s been at least a week now since you’ve been coming here, just by chance, walking past my window three or four times a day — yesterday it was five, but who’s counting — hurrying about your business, lost in thought, when suddenly: Bam! A screeching halt! A surprised blink! What do we have here? Why, it’s a centaur! And a bereaved one, at that! Two for the price of one! I’d better quickly put on an expression of tender sorrow and commiseration, and in a flash I’ll dip my silver-plated quill in its black ink, and one-two-three, I’ll ask about the son, ask about the son, ask about the son! And if the subject’s answers are not satisfactory, I won’t give up, no, I won’t give up, I’ll come back in an hour or two, and tomorrow morning again, and I’ll ask about the son again, and I won’t relent even if the subject grits his teeth and bites his tongue until it hurts, and please tell me what he was like as a baby, what he liked to eat, what he built with Legos, which lullabies you sang to him … Well, listen up, you black-inked tick: even the inquisition’s tax assessors didn’t torture people like this! And then all of a sudden, psshh! The town clock strikes, ding-dong, see you later, thank you very much, it’s been a pleasure, the quill goes back in its case, the notebook in its folder, and the pencil pusher is on his way home, open parenthesis, what does he care that I’m sitting here bleeding, ripped apart, slaughtered to pieces, close parenthesis, clerko hums a happy tune and ponders the leg of lamb waiting for him in the oven, and probably the legs of some lady or other … What? Hey? Did I grab you by the what’s-it or didn’t I?

TOWN CHRONICLER: Enough is enough, Your Highness! I have reached the end of my tether! From here on out, your town chronicler adamantly refuses to meet with this despicable creature. You may kill me, my lord, but I shall not go back to him!

WALKING MAN:

I heard the voice

of a woman

coming from the town:

That every man is

an island,

that you c-c-cannot

know

another

from within—

I persist in trying: I resuscitate,

awaken, endlessly clone

cells of yours that still

live in me, the final imprints

of being that have not yet

faded from the tips of my sensations—

the touch of your child-skin,

your voice still thin

and secretive, yet lashing out already

with a sharp salvo of irony, an impression

of your torso moving,

passing quickly,

sliding (how happy I was

when they said

you walked like me).

The corner of your mouth

tugs with a fragile flash

of doubt—

I continue, I preserve,

I treasure

and revive the child

you were, the man

you will not be.

You may laugh: What is this, Dad,

one-human-subject research?

I shrug my shoulders: No, it is a

life’s

work.

Look, I suddenly exclaim,

I will create you,

or at least

one life-twitch

of you, and why not,

damn it, why

give up?

I’ve done it once before,

and now I want

you

so

much

more.

WOMAN WHO STAYED AT HOME:

I drew

all the blinds. I dimmed

all the lights. My skin grew covered

with wounds and blisters. Dark

silence, dark

silence, days

and nights I was

inside it, an overdue

embryo, ossified,

conceived by the tragedy

in its senescence.

Until I emerged

from my torpor, and a voice

was conjured up from deep

inside me: I am

losing

my son

once again.

TOWN CHRONICLER: Under a streetlamp that glows with a yellowish light stands an elderly man writing in chalk on the wall of a house. A white halo of hair hovers around his head, his walrus mustache is silver, and my soul alights when I realize it is my teacher, my math teacher from elementary school, a likable man who suffered a tragedy years ago, I cannot recall what, and disappeared. I thought he was dead, yet here he is, in the middle of the night, standing by a wall befouled with lurid pictures, writing columns of numbers and exercises in tiny, neat handwriting. When he notices me he does not seem alarmed at all: on the contrary, he gives me a toothless grin, as though he has been expecting me for a long time, and gestures with his crooked finger for me to approach the wall.

ELDERLY MATH TEACHER:

Two plus two

equals four.

Repeat after me:

three plus three equals

six. Ten plus ten — twenty.

You’re late again, my boy;

tomorrow you’ll have to bring

your parents.

TOWN CHRONICLER: But sir, don’t you remember me?

ELDERLY MATH TEACHER:

Excuse me, sir, excuse me.

The darkness, and my eyesight …

You are the town chronicler,

of course.

So: with regard to the question

that was posed, or about

to be posed,

I have so little to say,

and I myself

must wonder: after all,

for twenty-six years

this has been

the singular

greatest fact

of my life.

Yet surprisingly,

and embarrassingly,

I know nothing

about it.

“But what is it like?”

people ask,

and I, too, not infrequently,

ask myself:

Like a block of concrete?

An iron ingot?

An impassable dam?

Like basalt rock?

Or rather — like the layers

of an onion?

But no, I must apologize,

for it is none of those.

And do not think, sir,

that I am evading

the question:

I truly know nothing about it.

Just that it is here.

A fact. And heavily

it slumps

on all my days. And

sucks my life out.

And that is all.

Please forgive me,

more than that

I truly

do

not

know.

TOWN CHRONICLER: He turned his back on me and resumed writing numbers on the wall in his miniature handwriting. I stood watching him for several more minutes, drawing strange comfort from the ease and swiftness of his motions. Then suddenly I remembered what it was that had befallen him, amazed that I could have forgotten. I almost went up to him and said: Sir, such and such happened to me as well, and you never taught me what to do.

MIDWIFE:

A b-b-baby, one baby,

were he to emerge

from a womb into

my w-w-waiting hands,

my empty midwife’s

hands, still c-c-covered

with the dew of birth, still tied

at the navel, bleating—

except that

I do not know

whether at that moment

he might not c-c-crumble

in my hands

to dust—

But w-w-what

is that?

Your m-m-mouth,

what have you

done?!

COBBLER: It’s nothing. I don’t—

MIDWIFE:

Your m-m-mouth,

the m-m-mouth,

open

your mouth!

COBBLER: No, leave it, don’t touch, they give me all my power.

MIDWIFE:

And I never

n-n-noticed … How?

I th-th-thought

it was only when you

worked that you … And how

did you eat that w-w-way?

How anything?

T-t-take them out, please,

I beg you, take them

all out—

COBBLER: No, I can’t, who’ll protect me so I—

MIDWIFE: Take them out!

COBBLER: So I don’t bite me—

MIDWIFE:

Y-y-yes, more,

remove them, spit them, there are

more, and another,

yes, give them into my hand …

There are more, dear God,

it’s sharp … there’s blood,

your whole m-m-mouth

is sores and

rust.

TOWN CHRONICLER: She opens the window and throws them out. I hear metallic clangs as they fall around me. The cobbler stands there amazed, his hand on his cheek and his tongue roaming his mouth, probing the emptiness.

COBBLER: There were ten of ’em. The little ones and the big ones and the crooked ones, and a thick one with no head, what was like a thumb, I called it. They’ve been like parts of me. One for each of her tiny-tiny fingers I used to kiss.

TOWN CHRONICLER: That evening, the walking man hears heavy footsteps behind him, and there is the cobbler, slightly hunched, and he grunts out a question: Happen to need some shoes? The man says he doesn’t need anything, only to walk undisturbed. The cobbler looks at the man’s blistered feet and says he has, right there in his backpack, tools and a stretch of leather, and he can easily sew a fine pair of shoes. The man does not reply, and they keep walking a while longer. Finally, the cobbler asks if he may walk behind the man this way, and the man doesn’t answer, nor does he stop walking, just shrugs his shoulders as if to say: Do as you please, but I walk alone.

Now they are two, Your Highness. You can see them from your window. At the fore, the tall, thin man with unkempt hair and beard, and a few steps behind him, the cobbler, his arms hanging at his sides. Every so often he turns his head back to see the slender, upright woman in the hut window.

MIDWIFE:

But if

not,

if the b-b-baby does not

crumble to dust, if he stays

warm and s-s-solid,

wailing,

crying,

perhaps

the whole w-w-world

will return

to be mended

in my two hands?

WOMAN WHO LEFT HOME:

Five years after my son

died, his father

went out

to meet him.

I did not go

with him.

Atop a belfry

in the heart of the county seat

a hundred miles from home,

I walk alone now

in circles, around

a ferrous spire, slowly

slowly, around

and around, nights,

days,

in my tiny circle,

facing him,

while he

on the hilltops,

facing me, days,

nights,

orbits his

own circle.

CENTAUR: But if I don’t write it I won’t understand.

TOWN CHRONICLER: This, as though in passing, is what the centaur mutters at your chronicler, my lord, as I walk past his window in the evening hour — as I walk at your command, and under profound and turbulent protest.

CENTAUR: I cannot understand this thing that happened, nor can I fathom the person I am now, after it happened. And what’s worse, pencil pusher, is that if I do not write it, I cannot understand who he is now either — my son.

TOWN CHRONICLER: Nor do I understand what he is saying. And he, of course, does not explain. Only pricks up his nose in a proud and bombastic display of insult and turns his back on me as far as his ungainly body will allow. But he follows me from the corner of his eye, and as soon as I grow weary of his performance and turn to leave—

CENTAUR: That’s how it is with me, clerko, that’s how I’m built. No getting around it. I can’t understand anything until I write it. Really understand, I mean. Veritably! What are you looking at? Again with that waif face? I’m talking about actually writing, not just regurgitating what a thousand people before me have chewed up and vomited, like you are so fond of doing, eh, keeper of the notebook? Snooping, snipping, jotting down every single fart with your precious handwriting, eh? Well then, write this, please, in big letters, giant ones: I must re-create it in the form of a story! Do you get that? It, you idiot! The thing that happened! What’s not to understand? It! The sonofabitch thing that happened to me and my boy. Yes — mix it into a story is what I need to do, have to do. And it must have plots! And imagination! And hallucinations and freedom and dreams! Fire! A bubbling cauldron!

TOWN CHRONICLER: Large beads of sweat roll down the channels of his nose. His face is a crimson tempest. I feverishly write completely transfixed by him not looking at the page my hand rushing on its own

CENTAUR: That’s the only way I can somehow get close to it, to that goddamn it, without it killing me, you know? I have to dance around in front of it, I have to move, not freeze like a mouse who sees a snake. I have to feel, even just for a minute, just half a second, the last free place I may still have inside me, the fraction of a spark that still somehow glows inside, which that lousy it couldn’t extinguish. Ugh! I have no other way. You have to get that: I have no other way. And maybe there is no other way, huh? I don’t know, and you wouldn’t understand, so at least write it down, quick: I want to knead it — yes, it, the thing that happened, the thing that struck like lightning and burned everything I had, including the words, goddamn it and its memory, the bastard burned the words that could have described it for me. And I have to mix it up with some part of me. I must, from deep inside me, and then exhale into it with my pathetic breath so I can try and make it a bit — how can I explain this to you — a bit mine, mine … Because a part of me, of mine, already belongs to it, deep inside it, in its damn prison, so there might be an opening, we might be able to haggle … What? Write it down, you criminal! Don’t stop writing. You stand there staring at me? Now that I’ve finally managed to get out a single word about it, and breathe … I have to create characters. That’s what I want, what I need. I must, it’s always like that with me. Characters that flow into the story, swarm it, that can maybe air out my cell a little and surprise it — and me. Yes, I want them to betray me, betray it, the motherfucker. I want them to jump it from this side and the other and from every direction and back to front and upside down, let them ram it up the ass for all I care, just as long as they make it budge even one millimeter, that’s enough, so that at least it moves a little on my page, so it twitches,

and just makes it not

so

so impossible

to

anything.

TOWN CHRONICLER: He stops. There is terror in his eyes, as though the ground is falling away beneath his feet and he is plunging down as I watch. He lifts one arm feebly, as if to grab me. Only now, Your Highness, do I begin to grasp what has been right in front of my eyes this whole time: the notebook, the pens on the desk, the empty pages—

I stare at the bulky, crude creature. This was not something I had ever imagined.

CENTAUR: Now get out of here. I beg you, leave. But come back, yes? You’ll come back? When? Tomorrow?

TOWN CHRONICLER: The next day, in a dusty drawer in the town archives, I locate his file. He was not lying: until a few years ago, he used to write stories. Poems, too, and ballads and one epic. I noticed that the experts generally wrinkled their noses, although he did garner the occasional accolade: “As with the biblical Joseph,” one critic rhapsodized, “lust erupts from his fingertips.”

The rumors circulating about him, and about his peculiar nickname, are also in his file. All sorts of tall tales, Your Highness, which I simply shudder to hear! I am almost tempted to write them down for amusement’s sake, but when I encounter the sardonic look emanating from your portrait on the royal edict in my hand, I know I could never embarrass you by quoting such primitive nonsense in an official document of the duchy.

WOMAN ATOP THE BELFRY:

Sometimes people

climb the tower, tourists or

bird-watchers or bell lovers,

and mostly, those who come to watch

our war, waged eternally

in the valley beyond the hills.

They stand for hours, drinking, spitting,

looking through binoculars, gambling

on the results. They drink again, and scream

hurrah at the top of their lungs if

a soldier down there, some poor man—

too far

to tell

if ours or theirs—

manages with great effort

to raise his sword.

You were there, too,

my son. What

did you do there,

why would you

be there?

Between their hurrahs,

the drinks and the winks, they look

at me, point fingers, laugh,

sometimes pinch.

What do they see? A woman

from the village, from by the swamps,

with a village face and heavyset legs,

a long silver braid, barely moving, walking

slowly,

slowly,

three or four steps

an hour, a madwoman.

They can laugh.

Laugh all they want. I walk

around the spire slowly, one step,

another, and another step. My eyes

on him alone,

on the hilltops,

with them around me, and he

and I,

and me

and him,

and our

son

strung

between us.

WALKING MAN:

A ray reaches out from me

into me, touches

cracks and niches,

tenses:

Where are you?

On which of all the roads

will you reveal yourself,

in which of my orbs be divined?

A soccer game?

Making sauce for a steak?

Doing your homework,

head in hand?

Skipping pebbles

across the water?

I have known for a long time:

it is you

who decides

how to appear in me

and when. You,

not I, who chooses

how to speak

to me. But your vocabulary,

my son — I sense it—

diminishes as

the years go by.

Or at least does not

evolve: soccer,

steak, homework, pebbles.

You had so much more

(all your life, my precious, a vast array),

yet you seem to insist,

entrench yourself

in diminishment:

steak, ball, pebbles, homework,

another two or three

small moments to which you turn,

return.

Dawn on a riverbed, up north,

the story I read to you there,

the alcove in the strange gray

rock in which you nested,

curled.

You were

so small,

and the blue of your eyes,

and the sun, and the minnows

that leaped in the water as though they, too,

wished to hear the story, and the laughter

we laughed together.

Just that, just those, again

and again,

those memories, and

the others

gradually fade …

Tell me, are you purposely

robbing me

of solace?

And then I think, Perhaps

this is how you slowly habituate

me to the ebbing

of pain? Perhaps,

with remarkable tenderness,

with your persistent

wisdom,

you are preparing me

slowly

for it—

I mean,

for the separation?

CENTAUR: You’re back. Finally. I was beginning to think you’d never … that I’d scared you off. Look, I was thinking: You and I, we’re an odd couple, aren’t we? Think about it: I’ve been unable to write for years, haven’t produced even one word, and you — it turns out — can write, or rather transcribe, as much as you feel like. Whole notebooks, scrolls! But only what other people tell you, apparently. Only quotes, right? Other people’s chewed-up cud. All you do is jot it down with a pen stroke here, a scribble there … Am I right? Not even a single word that’s really yours? Yeah? Not even one letter? That’s what I thought. What can I say, we’re quite a pair. Write this down then, please. Quickly, before it gets away:

And inside my head there’s a constant war comma the wasps

keep humming colon what good would it do if you wrote

question mark what would you add

to the world if you imagined question

mark and if you really

must comma then just write

facts comma what

else is there to say

question mark write them

down and shut up

forever colon at

such and such time comma in

this and that place comma my son

comma my only child comma aged

eleven and a half

period the boy

is gone

period

TOWN CHRONICLER: And with these last words, using both hands and terrible force, he pounded the table, and his face contorted so painfully that for a moment I thought, Your Highness, that he had struck his own body.

MIDWIFE:

Dear God, such pain

cuts suddenly deep down

in my stomach, my girl—

if only I knew that th-th-there, too,

when you arrived,

when you finished

dying,

you were welcomed with loving arms

and a warm, fragrant t-t-towel,

and someone,

or something, in whose bosom

you found peace

in those first moments.

TOWN CHRONICLER: Next to the train station, in the dark, by a lopsided house, stands the elderly teacher. His silver head leans in against the wall of the house to whisper a secret. With a commanding gesture, as though once again having been waiting for me, he invites me to sit on the sidewalk by his feet. Two plus two equals four, I murmur after him, and instantly feel relief. Three plus three is six. Four plus four — eight. My presence seems to fill him with life: he scribbles exercises on the wall, his eyes aglimmer. Five plus five is ten, I sing along joyfully, craning my neck back to see him standing over me. His coattails fly as he leaps from one exercise to the next. My voice grows soft and thin. I imagine that my feet do not reach the road and I can swing them. Ten plus ten twenty, I cheer, and from the second-story window someone empties a chamber pot of wastewater on us and yells: People are trying to sleep!

I get up and stand next to the teacher. We are both wet and shamefaced, as though caught in a foolish prison escape. The teacher looks suddenly small and shriveled like a baby. If only I could touch, I would take him in my arms and rock him and hum until he fell asleep. Instead I open my notebook, and in the most official voice I can muster, I ask him for details.

ELDERLY MATH TEACHER:

The questioners persist:

And has it no fissures?

No cracks

or crevices?

No.

And can you

touch it?

It has no touch.

But tell us: Is it full or

hollow, this great fact

of your life? Is it slack

or taut?

No, no,

I respond awkwardly, it’s

here, it’s

here!

But you’ve already said that!

Yes, it’s odd how little

I have to say

on the matter. Surprising

and disappointing, I know,

but it, namely that,

meaning the death

of my son, of Michael,

twenty-six years ago

in a foolish accident

(a prank gone awry,

a bathtub, a razor,

veins slashed

in the course of a game),

it seemingly swallows up

the words and the wisdom,

all the keys.

Only one thing remains

steadfast:

it is here.

Whether I come or go,

whether rise or lie—

it is here.

When I am alone

or sitting in the square,

or teaching a class—

it is here,

filling me up entirely

until nothing is left and

there is no room,

sometimes, for myself.

Yes, that is certainly something I wanted

to say (and perhaps it should be noted):

that I have no room

for myself. Or just

for a breath. Yes,

that’s the thing:

one

good

breath,

a deep

breath,

whole

and pure,

without the convulsion

of horror

in its depths—

But of the thing itself

(as I have said)—

nothing,

not one word.

WALKING MAN:

When I have a flash of memory—

you sitting over your homework in the kitchen,

or smiling on the beach, in an old photograph,

or just asleep in bed—

I instantly awaken

what came the moment before.

Or what will come the moment after.

Before my memory caught you;

after the photographer froze you.

Then I knead you:

so your features broaden

into a smile,

then slowly focus

in contemplation.

So your eyes light up suddenly,

change colors

in the light,

brim with fury

or amazement

or intrigue.

Thus you shall walk in your room,

this way and that, in the cool of the day,

small waves

of grace,

naïveté and youth

move beneath your skin,

your fair hair skips

on your forehead.

And now you will turn to me and say:

But, Dad, you don’t understand—

Or in your sleep, beneath a sheet,

your chest will rise and fall,

rise,

and fall,

and rise again.

(Ah,

I have asked too much.

I will be punished.)

And yet,

my son,

you do move,

you do move

in me.

CENTAUR:

Sometimes I play games

on it, the goddamn it,

activities: “Death is

deathful.” I wink at it,

like it’s a little game

we play: “Death will deathify,

or is it deathened? Deatherized?

Deathered?” I patiently recite,

Over and over, rephrasing, finessing:

“We were deathened, you will be

deatherized, they will be

deathed.”

What else can I do—

neither write

nor live. At least

language

remains, at least

it is still

somewhat free,

unraveled.

TOWN CHRONICLER: Tell me about the cradle.

CENTAUR: What’s that? What did you say?

TOWN CHRONICLER: The cradle. In the big pile, behind you.

CENTAUR: I hope with all my heart, you miserable clerk, that my ears deceive me.

TOWN CHRONICLER: It has two ducks painted on the side.

CENTAUR: It’s a real shame, clerk. You’ve ruined the moment.

TOWN CHRONICLER: His shoulders start to swell. His cheeks, too. My gamble has failed. He struggles to move himself away from the desk and stand up. I have to get out of here, quickly. I’ve never seen him not behind his desk. In fact, until this moment I have not seen him stand. I remember what I read about him in the town archives. This is the time to flee, but my legs disobey me. He grows larger and larger in front of me. He will get up, that is clear, get up and uproot the house with him and split the roof. The toys and the clothes and the other remnants of childhood will crumble to dust and scatter every which way. It’s a shame. Such a shame. I was almost beginning to like him. He groans; his face trembles. I hear, from there inside with him, in the room, loud taps and a strange creak, like a large, sharp fingernail scratching a tile. I close my eyes and tell myself it’s only the desk; it’s just the desk making that sound. A thought flies through my mind: He will get up from his chair and pluck me into his room and devour me. And another thought: That desk has hooves.

CENTAUR: Damn, damn! Not even stand up? Shit. Shit!

TOWN CHRONICLER: His head plunges onto his chest and he weeps. I swear, he weeps. I’d best be gone. Otherwise I will embarrass him. I will wait one more moment and then leave. His shoulders heave. Quick, truncated shudders. He covers his face with his hands. I count the cracks and grooves in the sidewalk. Correct a few mistakes in the notebook. Then, having no choice, I begin to listen to the different layers of his sobbing until I hear one I know well. If I were to cry, this is likely how I would cry. I listen. From the minute the thing happened to my daughter, I forbade myself any self-pity whatsoever. This requires, of course, a certain degree of self-control and constant guardedness. At night, too. I cannot forbid the centaur to cry, however. That is his private affair, even if for some reason he insists on weeping in my voice. I try to guess what my wife would do in this situation. I rise up on my tiptoes. My hand hovers over his head. This is a hand that has no right to touch a person. Pathetic, impure, the hand of a coward. I take a deep breath and shut my eyes and caress his curls. “There, there,” I say.

He falls silent. Silence descends on the whole town. I dare not move. Thus, with my hand resting on the centaur’s head, I suddenly hear, very close, right in the place where my hand touches the large, sweaty head, the voice of the man who walks the hills.

WALKING MAN:

In the first year

after, alone at home,

I sometimes called your name,

your childhood

nickname.

With strength I did not possess,

in madness, with dauntless

peril to body and soul,

I would imbue that short,

yearned-for

word

with magic dust:

domesticity,

serenity,

routine.

Then utter a calculated, casual:

“Uwi?”

If I said it just right, I hoped

(I dreamed, I schemed),

you could not refrain

from responding

to the simplicity,

which transcends

worlds and borders—

I would say “Uwi” and you would

slide down and come true

in a blink, the echo

of my call,

a minor tide

trickling from the there

into the here. And that would be

your answer,

natural and practical,

as exhalation

answers inhalation,

a tribute

to the miracle of

powerful routine.

Oh, I would say to you,

watch a game with me? Or

shall we take a walk

together now?

How did it happen, my child,

that of all my words,

there is one

that will never,

ever

be answered?

TOWN CHRONICLER: “But where is there?” asks my wife the next day as we take our evening walk — she down the street, me following her, hidden by the shadows. “Where is this there he’s going to? Who even believes that such a place exists?”

As she ambles, she throws these words into the air. I feel almost weak-kneed from the surprise. I look around to see if anyone has heard her, but fortunately it is only she and I on the street at this hour.

“Maybe there has been here all this time?” she continues, and the matter-of-fact cadence of her voice unsettles me even more: she might as well be conversing casually in our kitchen.

“And maybe we’ve been there, too, just a bit, since it happened to us?” She straightens up and a new momentum seems to drive her steps. “Maybe there has always been here, and we just didn’t know it?”

A cool breeze blows. She wraps a scarf around her neck, leaving her beautiful shoulders bare. She does that for me. Today is my birthday, Your Highness, and she knows how much I love her shoulders.

“And if that is the case”—she takes a deep breath—“then maybe, maybe she is here with us, every single moment?”

The powerful stab of the words makes us both stop.

“Just imagine,” she whispers.

We keep walking. She up front, I in the shadows of houses and through darkened yards, shaken.

ELDERLY MATH TEACHER:

“A father should not outlive his child.”

The clear-eyed logic of this rule

is rooted not only

in human life, but also,

as we know,

in the science of optics, where

(in the spirit of the great Spinoza,

the lens grinder)

we find an extremely daring

axiom: “The object

(‘the life of the son’)

must never be located

in the universe

at a distance

from which the father

(‘the observing subject’)

may encompass all of him

with one gaze

from beginning to end.”

For otherwise

(and here I interject),

the observing subject

would become

at once

a lump

of lignite

(known also as:

coal).

TOWN CHRONICLER: Now, from day to day, the wayfarer’s walk grows more vigorous. At times it seems, Your Highness, that a nameless power hovers over the town, envelops it, and — like a person sucking an egg through a hole in the shell — it draws these people and others toward it, from kitchens and squares and wharves and beds. (And — if there is truth to the shocking, dizzying rumors, Your Highness — even from palace rooms?)

The woman atop the belfry — once in a while I look up and see her there among the clouds, her silver hair unbraided, flying — she, too, must sometimes cling to the spire with both arms or else be swept up in the invisible storm. Now, for instance, her mouth is agape, and I do not know whether she is shouting out in the silence or eagerly swallowing words as they float past.

WALKING MAN:

Like a fetus hatching

from its mother’s womb and body,

his death made me the father

I had never been—

it bored

a hole in me, a wound,

a space, but also filled me

with his ubiety,

which churns in me now

with an affluence

of being I have never

felt before.

His death

has qualified me

to conceive him.

His death

makes me

an empty slough

of father — and of

mother: it bares

my breast for

no one there to suckle.

And on the walls

of my womb,

which on that day was hewn,

his death — with fleeing captive’s fingernails—

notches off the score of days

without him.

Thus, with lucent chisel,

his death

engraves its news on me:

the bereaved

will always

woman be.

TOWN CHRONICLER: The next night, my wife and I take our daily walk again. Between the houses we catch an occasional glimpse of the small procession ambling over the hilltops on the horizon.

TOWN CHRONICLER’S WIFE: In recent days I think I see, over their heads, in the air, some sort of reddish flicker, a chain of embers hovering above …

TOWN CHRONICLER: As usual, she sets our pace. When she pauses, I stop, too. Sometimes, when she is lost in thought, I must enter a yard and huddle behind a fence, praying I won’t encounter a dog. At this moment she watches the strange embers at length, and I, as always, watch her. The faint moonlight falls on her face. She was so beautiful once. She is now, too.

When we finally arrive at her home, she opens the door. But tonight she lingers at the doorway, turns, and looks straight into the dark, as though guessing exactly where I am hiding. I feel the home current wafting toward me, warm and fragrant. She hugs her body and sighs softly. I may be wrong, but perhaps it is her way of telling me that she would like to fall upon me now, screaming, teeth bared, and beat me furiously with her fists, tear my skin off with her nails.

She slowly shuts the door. Retreats into her home. I look up to the hills.

WALKING MAN:

And he himself,

he is dead,

I know now.

I now can say — though

always in a whisper—“The boy

is dead.”

I understand, almost,

the meaning of the sounds:

the boy is dead. I recognize

these words as holding truth:

he is dead. I know.

Yes, I admit it: he is dead.

But his death — it swells,

abates,

fulminates.

Unquiet,

unquiet

is his death.

So unquiet.

ELDERLY MATH TEACHER: … Based on my observations, I believe, my boy, that only a certain type of person is likely to notice it — the blaze. That, between me and myself, is what I call those mysterious embers.

TOWN CHRONICLER: I met him again by chance tonight, at three o’clock in the morning. This time he was not writing exercises on the wall. Tired, defeated almost, he sat down in the dark on the street bench where I was napping. After we shared a moment of embarrassment, and after I reminded him that I had been his pupil in the first grade, and that it was in his class that I had met the woman who would eventually become my wife, we climbed up onto the bench together and stood there watching the phenomenon.

ELDERLY MATH TEACHER: My heart tells me, my boy, that from the moment a person notices the blaze, he is destined to get up and go to it.

TOWN CHRONICLER: As he spoke, his large feet shuddered and shook the wooden bench. My own small feet were suddenly filled with motion. I talked to him silently. I said there was a time in the world when my daughter was not in it at all. She was not yet. Nor was there the happiness she brought me, nor all these torments. I wanted him to look at me with his lost, confused gaze in which everything was possible. I wanted him to call me to a house wall again and test me on addition-subtraction for all eternity. I thought: Perhaps he also longs to be an innocent young teacher again? Perhaps I could ask my wife here, and together we could build a little class that would suffer no sorrow? I had already begun to hum “two and two are four” when he suddenly leaped off the bench — I was amazed to see how agile he still was — and stood looking at his twitching feet. Then he spread his hands before me in apology and turned to leave, mumbling to himself:

ELDERLY MATH TEACHER:

Here I will fall,

now will I fall?

I do not fall.

Here is shadow

and fog,

frost

rises

from a darkened pit—

now,

now

I will fall—

TOWN CHRONICLER’S WIFE:

Now, here,

the heart

will stop—

it does not stop—

here is shadow

and fog—

now?

Now will I fall?

TOWN CHRONICLER: And she walked! Walked away! Suddenly, out of the darkness, she appeared beside me on the street, then walked away without seeing me at all, moving behind the teacher as if sleepwalking. I quickly lay down on the bench and made myself as small as possible. I was very cold. I tried to fall asleep. I could not. I do not know what I shall do with myself today, and the sun has not even risen. The town is terrifyingly empty. I wander the streets. No one. I run to the wharf, dig through reeking piles of nets and dry seaweed — no one. Where will I go? There, on the hilltops, the small embers glow tonight as though each holds a beating heart. In a dark yard at the edge of the market stands an old gray donkey eating from a trough. I hold my face up to its mane and rub my nose in it. To my surprise, it is soft, softer even than the centaur’s hair. Perhaps things in the world have softened in my absence? The donkey stops chewing. He waits for me to talk. Of that thing that happened to her, to my daughter, I must never speak with any person — I explain to him — and if truth be told, I am forbidden even to mention her, although I don’t always stick to that, particularly since that man began circling the town. The donkey turns his head to me. His gaze is wise and skeptical. It’s true, I whisper, I’m not allowed to remember her. Just imagine! He twitches his ears in surprise. It was the duke, I say as I throw my arms around his neck. It was he who commanded me, in a royal edict, to exile myself from my home, to walk the streets day and night recording the townspeople’s stories of their children. And it was he who forbade me — by explicit order! — to remember her, my one. Yes, immediately after it happened, he sentenced me, after she drowned, I mean the daughter, Hanna, after she drowned in a lake right before my eyes, and I couldn’t, listen, there were tall waves, huge, and I couldn’t … What could I …

You don’t believe me. You’re moving your ears dubiously, even crossing them as if to dismiss the possibility … I know exactly what you’re thinking: The duke? Our kind and gentle duke? It cannot be! Everyone in town thinks so, and honestly, sometimes I think so myself. Perhaps you’ve heard that we used to be good friends, the duke and I. Soul mates. Yes, after all, I was his jester for twenty years, until the disaster befell me. His beloved jester … And to think that he, of all people, decreed such a terrible decree … How did it even occur to him?

My lips suddenly quiver, and the donkey cocks his head and studies them. I fear he might read in them words I would rather keep to myself, or those that I am forbidden by the edict to even utter, or remember, even the slightest hint or word or thought of the person she would be today, if she were. I may not imagine her at all, nor dream her image. Nor are longings, yearnings, and so forth permitted. Or sudden heart pangs, or churning contractions of the gut, nor any kind of crying, whether sobbing or the faintest sleepy whimper. A memory-amputee is what I am, donkey. Abstaining from my daughter. A prisoner in a tiny remote cell inside my spirit, until, as in the poem we once read together, the duke and I, “My life (which liked the sun and the moon) resembles something that has not occurred.”

COBBLER:

There is no longer anything in me

of myself that used to be.

Only motion remains.

That is all I can give you

today, my girl,

only motion

that might seep

into the stillness

where you lie.

Only that,

only thus will I know

today, my daughter,

how to be your father—

MIDWIFE:

I stood in the window

of my home, at night,

alone, slowly

diminishing.

As in a dream

I heard a distant

v-v-voice

speaking to me

in my tongue: Only that,

my daughter, only

thus will I know

today how to be

your father.

I knew: This was

the sign.

I left

my house,

turned

to the hills,

closed my eyes,

shut off my gaze,

allowed the blaze

to gather me in. Only thus

will I know today how

to be your father.

I hurried,

I ran to him,

to the heavy m-m-man,

so thick and slow,

who suddenly

spoke

in my tongue.

TOWN CHRONICLER: They walk on the hills and I follow them, constantly darting between them and the town. They groan and trip and stand, hold on to each other, carry those who sleep, falling asleep themselves. Nights, days, over and over they circle the town, through rain and cold and burning sun. Who knows how long they will walk and what will happen when they are roused from their madness? The duke, for example — who would have believed it — walking shoulder to shoulder with the net-mender, her fluttering nets occasionally wrapping themselves around him. And the elderly teacher, with his thin halo of hair, walking swiftly, as he is wont, hopping from one foot to the other and reaching his head out to either side with immense curiosity, even in sleep. And the cobbler and the midwife, hand in hand, eyes tightly closed, with stubborn resolve. And at the end of the small procession walks my wife, dragging her heavy feet, her breath labored, her head drooping on her chest, with no one to hold her hand.

DUKE:

Walking half asleep,

a dream fragment flickers:

the surface of a barren wilderness,

mist and cool breeze, and a wail

rolls over

the desert.

MIDWIFE:

Over there

a c-c-cliff

c-c-cut into round

smooth rocky mountain,

and in a dream

or half awake, I say to myself:

L-l-look, woman,

that is the thing, that is all,

the answer to the great, sacred riddle,

and there is nothing

more,

there is

nothing more.

COBBLER:

Barren brain-hill,

a terrible sight,

it pulsates perhaps

once

in a thousand years—

TOWN CHRONICLER’S WIFE:

It is the brain of the universe,

and it is cold, frozen. It is not

what emits the wail. It is

desolation, only desolation,

mute and deaf

and flat,

it has no wails,

no thoughts,

it has

no answers and

no love.

DUKE:

And you — pick up

a hoe and till a bed.

Plant in it a pillow, a lamp,

a letter, a picture of

a beloved face, perhaps also a kettle,

thick socks, gloves and a satchel,

a pencil or paintbrush, a book

or two, a pair of glasses, so that you

can see near

and see far.

TOWN CHRONICLER: Tell me about the rocking horse.

CENTAUR: You again? Won’t you ever shut up?

TOWN CHRONICLER: Tell me about the soccer ball, about the cowboy hat. About the birthdays, tell me about them. About the magician’s wand, the blue kite—

CENTAUR: You’re torturing me.

TOWN CHRONICLER: About the toy boat—

CENTAUR: Junk! Memory husks!

TOWN CHRONICLER: At least tell me something about the cradle.

CENTAUR: How about you tell me something about yourself for a change? You’ve been coming here for weeks, ten times a day, interrogating me, turning me inside out like a glove, and you yourself — nothing! Just a clerk! Following orders! Hiding behind your royal edict, which any idiot can see is a fake, with that ridiculous drawing of the duke wearing a crown. I mean, come on! You could have put a little more effort into it. A five-year-old can draw better than that!

Okay. I get it. I can be quiet, too. Here. Being quiet. A rock. A sphinx. You’re not looking so hot yourself either, you know, these last few days, but I am absolutely going off the deep end, yes, that’s not hard to see. This fight with it, goddamn it, is doing me in. I admit it. And this silly thing that happened to me with the desk? I bet you’ve heard the stories around town, right? For that reason alone you should have stopped bothering me with your nonsense. Don’t you have any mercy for a poor centaur? And a bereaved one, at that? Come on, look at me. No, I mean it. Climb up on this window, use both hands, don’t be afraid. What’s the worst thing I could do to you that you’re not already doing to yourself?

So? Nice, isn’t it? Aesthetically pleasing. Have you ever seen such grafting? Such a curse? Half writer, half desk? Well, there you have it. You can get down now. Finita la tragedia. What do you say? It’s quite a thing, isn’t it? Didn’t I tell you there was nothing as pleasurable as other people’s hell?

TOWN CHRONICLER: Your son once lay in that cradle.

CENTAUR: And now he has a different one.

TOWN CHRONICLER: Help me, Centaur. Those piles of yours are driving me mad.

CENTAUR: I’ll never leave this place.

TOWN CHRONICLER: Thirteen years ago I lost my daughter.

CENTAUR: These last few days, when you were being a real pain in the ass, I was beginning to think it might be something like that.

TOWN CHRONICLER: I can’t talk about her.

CENTAUR:

I built the cradle

with my own two hands. The day

he was born, from branches of oak. My wife

painted the two ducks.

She painted so beautifully.

She was a quiet,

gentle woman. She left me,

three years after

the boy did. If I could have,

I would have left me, too.

Adam — that was his name.

Adam. I placed him

in the cradle

after he was born. He lay there

with his eyes open, looked

at me, studied me with his gaze.

He was so serious! He always was,

his whole life. His whole

short life. Serious

and slightly lonely. Hardly

any friends. He liked stories.

We used to put on plays,

he and I,

with costumes and masks. You asked

about the cradle. My wife padded it

with soft fabric,

but he could only fall asleep

with me, on my chest. He would cling

to me.

I just remembered, you’ll laugh,

but there was a special sound

I used to make to put him

to sleep on me. A sort of quiet,

deep, trembling

moan. Hmmmm …

Hmmmm …

TOWN CHRONICLER: Excuse me, sir, would you mind if I also …

CENTAUR: Not at all … Hmmm …

TOWN CHRONICLER: Hmmm …

CENTAUR and TOWN CHRONICLER: Hmmm …

WALKING MAN:

Walking, walking,

neither awake nor

asleep, walking

and emptying

all my thoughts,

my passions,

my sadness, my fervor,

my secrets, my volition,

anything that is me.

Look at me, my son:

here I am not.

I am but a platform of life,

calling you to come

and be through me—

to occur, if only for a moment,

to once again be purified

by what is.

Come, do not hesitate,

be now,

I am gone,

the house is yours,

and it is furnished with every limb.

Flow into it, pool in it,

this blood is your blood now, the muscles,

your muscles. Come,

be present,

reach your arms

from world-end to — end,

rejoice from my throat, laugh, vibrate,

celebrate,

all is possible at this moment,

everything now is yes,

so love and burn and lust

and fuck.

My five hungry senses

are at your command like

five horses foaming at the mouth,

stomping, raring

to gallop to your never-end.

Do not stop, my boy,

your time is short, meted out,

my eyelids are trembling now,

soon I will come home,

soon my pupils will contract

in the light of confining logic. Quick,

taste it all, devour, be deep,

be sad,

determined, delighted, roar,

tremble with pleasure and power,

my pleasure is yours, my power, too—

enchant, shower your soul,

be the swing of a sower,

a cascade of grain and

golden coins streaming

like light—

be engorged like an udder,

and torrid as midday,

and rage, and rave,

tighten your hand into a fist until

arteries swell in your neck,

and be thrilled, like a heart, like a girl,

be agape, thin-skinned, alight

with the glory of

one-off wonders,

be a whole,

momentary fraction

of eternity.

And as you do so, pause suddenly, breathe, inhale, feel the air burn your lungs, lick your upper lip, taste the salt of healthy sweat, the tingle of life, and now say fully: I—

(Damn it, I realize now:

that pronoun is also

lost, it died

with you, leaving me

with only he and you

and us, and no one

will ever again

say I

in your voice.

That too. That, too.)

Just hurry, my boy,

dawn is rising, the magic

soon will melt, so you must love,

and, even if betrayed,

even if you taste the venom

of disdain, love

and be brave, but be cowardly, too,

be everything, touch defeat,

touch failure, hurt someone,

disappoint

and lie.

Quick, my boy, pass through all these,

there is no time to linger,

such illusions are so brief,

but you must touch, caress

a warm body, a woman,

bounteous breasts in your hands,

the head of a newborn child, unborn

to you.

Quick, quick, the first strip

of light—

see the world you never saw: New York,

Paris, Shanghai, so many faces

in this living

world—

No, no, stop—

it’s too late now,

come back

to rest,

quick,

to obscurity,

to oblivion,

just do not see

with my own eyes

what happened

to you.




Part II


WALKERS:

Our feet lift slowly

from the earth lightly

lightly we hover

between here and there

between lucidity

and sleep

the thread will soon

unravel

and we will glide

and look

at whatever is there

at whatever we dare

to see

only when walking

in a dream

TOWN CHRONICLER: Sleeping … They’ve been sleeping almost constantly for days, sleeping their minds away. Sleeping and walking, speaking to one another in their dream, each head leaning on another walker’s shoulder. I do not know who carries whom and what force drives them to walk—

DUKE:

Sometimes, alone

in my private chamber,

I take off both shoes and look

at my feet and think

it is

him.

ELDERLY MATH TEACHER:

I hit him. He was

a stubborn boy, and impudent,

with strange opinions

even as a child, and I — spare

the rod, spoil the child — I had to

beat him.

When he raised his hands to protect

his face, I hit him

in the stomach.

WALKING MAN:

But where are you, what are you,

just tell me that, my son.

I ask simply:

Where are you?

Ayeka?

Or like a pupil before his master

(for that is how I often see

you now),

please teach me — as I not long ago

taught you—

the world and all its secrets.

Forgive me if my question

sounds foolish and insipid, but

I must ask because

it has been eating

at my soul like a disease

these past five years:

What is death, my son?

What

is death?

MIDWIFE:

Great, definitive death,

my girl,

with b-b-boundless power. Eternal,

immortal d-d-death. And yours.

Your single, little death,

inside it.

COBBLER:

Actually, I wanted

to ask, What’s it like,

my girl, when you die?

And how are you there?

And who are you

there?

DUKE:

It is a perplexing thought, my son,

but perhaps you now know

far more than I do?

Perhaps a new and wondrous world

now carries you in flight,

and with a massive flap of wings

it spreads out

its infinity, just as

in our world here it long ago

lavished your soul with its abundance,

your pure, boyish soul. I feel

so young and ignorant before you.

TOWN CHRONICLER: Every so often a tremor passes through them, all of them, one after the other, as though an invisible hand had slid a caress down the spine of the small procession, lingering lightly over the head of each and every one. In their sleep, they straighten up toward it like blind chicks hearing their mother’s voice, and their eyes glow through their lids.

MIDWIFE:

I see her

jumping,

dancing in the kitchen,

before she fell ill,

when she still

had the strength. And her f-f-father,

my man, my love,

my cobbler, kneels before her

and places his hands: shoes for her feet.

COBBLER:

Am I dreaming?

I hear my wife.

I swear

her words are

hardly broken

anymore!

MIDWIFE:

… he walks her

through the house in his

hand-shoes, and laughs

until the roof almost flies off,

and she hugs his neck

and squeals, she has only just

learned how to talk,

you remember,

just beginning to say

her first words,

Dad-dy,

Mom-my,

Lil-li-li-li-Lilli.

COBBLER:

Lilli,

my

Lilli.

WALKERS:

We walk. Impossible

to stop. My body

won’t allow it. My feet

are weak. And me, my breath

is short, yet still our body

will not stand. It pushes from inside, onward,

onward … It’s like

going to meet your sweetheart,

isn’t it, Mrs. Chronicler? Yes,

my lady of the nets, it’s like a lovers’ rendezvous.

WALKING MAN:

This void,

this absence,

death alone can render—

and it is not at all

a disappearance,

a cessation,

nothingness.

It has one final place,

a window opened

just a crack, where still

the absence breathes, still loosened,

palpitating, where one can still

touch the here,

still almost feel

the warming hand that touches

there.

It is the threshold,

one last line shared both by here

and there, the line to which

— no farther—

the living may draw near,

and where, perhaps, they still can sense

the very tip,

just one more hint,

the fading embers, slowly dying,

of the dead.

ELDERLY MATH TEACHER:

You have become your death

so much that sometimes I must wonder

(Forgive me, have I crossed a line?

Best to be quiet? To ask? You know,

my son, I am a gentlemen, yet find myself unsure

how to address you … May I use the second person?),

but tell me, speak it clearly,

show no pity:

if they were to allow you—they,

there—if you were given liberty

to choose—

would you come back?

Come back to this?

To me?

DUKE:

Or, as Rilke wrote of Eurydice,

are you, my child,

abundant with your own death,

which fills you

like a sweet and darkened fruit?

While I,

a bothersome Orpheus,

try to pull you

over here

against your will?

ELDERLY MATH TEACHER:

Just one more, if I may?

(Whom else can I ask

but you, my teacher

in these mysteries?)

Tell me just what is the thing

in us, the living,

whereby we can become

completely dead

within an instant,

in the blink of our own death?

And give up everything,

be given up on,

as though a primal law

that always lurked inside us

suddenly appears and rises

like a shadow from the depths: around it

still the ruins mount,

and comfortably it settles in,

a haughty landlord long in charge,

its stony glare — which does not miss

a thing, yet sees nothing—

declares with just

a hint of triumph

in its smile—

“Death, my friends, is what is true!”

WALKERS:

When we meet … What will we tell them

when we meet? I, gentlemen,

have already made up my mind:

I shall not tell him of his brother,

born after his time. In her room

we changed all the pictures.

We couldn’t bear it any longer.

I ended up giving his dog

to a boy on the street.

(silence)

WALKING MAN:

And after some time,

whatever I do, you

fossilize.

Then I must

carve you,

time and again,

out of the layers of stone

in which you are

cast. I must try very hard

to want it—

must carve myself for it, too,

must fight—

while my whole being

shouts: Let go, it’s best

this way. Let human nature

do as it will, you must

accept his fate, respect

his border—

But then I soon suspect

myself: perhaps deep down

I long for you

to fossilize?

To bleed no more.

To not be

so awake, so sharp,

white-hot and

everdead.

But no less painful

are the times when I succeed,

when my imagination

cleaves the hunk of stone until

it cracks, then crumbles,

falls around you,

and then suddenly

you are there:

naked,

breathtaking,

glowing in the palm of rock,

or merely standing,

limp

and incidental,

you look this way

and that, embarrassed, without knowing

that I watch you: present,

so present,

neither promising nor

disappointing, only

coolly beating with the pulse

of your calm being.

Just warm

enough.

And living.

Maddening.

WALKERS:

When we meet, if

we meet,

what shall I tell him?

What shall I tell her?

Do you think they know?

Know what? That they

are dead.

DUKE:

In August he died, and

when that month was over, I wondered:

How can I move

to September

while he remains

in August?

WALKERS:

Perhaps we’ll simply

face them, when we meet,

without a word? Perhaps

he’ll say that now he understands

I only hit him

for his own good? I might sing her

the song I sang when she was

just a baby. I want to get there

soon, dear God. I’m afraid

he’ll be a stranger

to me. Rock-a-bye, baby,

in the treetop, when the wind blows …

Just to be there

with her, just to be. I wish

I could take him

a bowl of tomato soup.

WALKING MAN: No, no … It can’t be, it can’t be—

WALKERS: It can’t be, it can’t be—

WALKING MAN: It can’t be that it happened to me, it can’t be that these words are true—

WALKERS: It can’t be, it can’t be—

WOMAN IN NET: That I saw them throwing my boy into a pit in the earth—

MIDWIFE: That I heard—thud-thud-thud—the sound of a hoe digging in the soil—

WALKERS: It cannot be that these words are true, they cannot be the truth—

WALKING MAN: It simply cannot be.

MIDWIFE: Burn! Burn the words! Burn this miserable talk!

WALKERS:

We look up, we know

just where to look, to the fire,

the small fire,

the constant flame,

day and night it walks

with us, we’re used to it.

I, my friends, call it: the blaze.

Forget it, those are just small embers,

not anymore, not anymore,

look at the fire, inside,

it’s alive, it’s like life—

Don’t move, wait, don’t anger it,

it’s opening,

peculiar, now

stretching out, slowly

slowly reaching hands, arms,

my God, what is this,

fingers—

WOMAN IN NET: In the earth! The earth is where his little body rots!

WALKERS:

The air trembled loudly, the arms

of fire bristled, froze briefly in a glowing,

burning crystal, then started once again

to spin, to flower in wild blossoms,

then up above exploded

in a rush of molten fire, waxed

and roiled, above our heads

the fingers spread, lines of fire

flooded, slashed through

shadows, images, and suddenly

like whips they lashed, leaped, caught—

caught whom — the words—

the words? The miserable words,

they devoured all the it-cannot-be,

they swallowed all of it in fire, everything

went up inflames, we shouted

bitterly, a black-and-yellow flame

shot up from deep inside us, then

we fled—

kept still—

we screamed—

we froze, while she—

her flames of lionesses,

dragons,

snakes, we promised

silence

yet we screamed, we vomited

a brew of words, horrendous

words, it cannot be,

it cannot be, and she—

keeps thickly rising, bustling,

rounds of fire chasing us, and

now inside us, eyes of red

and black, they open,

tracking us, tongues

burning, let her come and burn,

damn words, she blackened memories, and scenes

we have not dared to see for years, she ate them, gulped,

a huge fire, swallowing and scorching, lapping

in our gut,

we barked, we wailed

at the mad fire, take everything,

take all of it, burn it to ashes

while we suffocate in the smoke

of words, the furnace—

Weary,

empty, standing,

tripping, faces

blackened as she dies

down finally,

then silence,

silence, tiny flames

abating, sated,

shhhhh …

asleep

(pause)

What, what was that?

Was I dreaming? Sleeping?

Look at me! I’m breathing!

So light of limbs now suddenly, the body

floats on air … Tell me, madam, am I

dead? Alive?

Your face, my woman. Touch me,

touch. How strange,

it’s smooth, just like

it was

before—

Want—

I want—

I

want, we want

to wake up,

to wake out

of it, to wake into the light, I want

to dip, to bathe my everything

in light—

You—

All of you—

Who cannot hear — who do

not answer — lying heavy

on our hearts — drawing

out our blood — sucking every drop

of life from us — collecting

tax — a coldness tax—

from every moment of our laughter—

light — forgetfulness—

distraction — you who whisper

back each word we say from here

And why? — Have you considered that? — Why did you

become dead? — How could you be

incautious? — You weren’t careful like we were—

Why did you go and pick up that disease?

And war,

why did you go to war? —

And to the waves—

The razor—

And how is it that you

are dead, while we

managed to stay alive? — Have you ever wondered

what that means? — Perhaps it is not chance

that you are there while we are here? —

Might you have even done something that made you

be this w-w-way? —

You know what? We don’t even want to trouble ourselves

with these thoughts! — We don’t even want to

think of you! — We’ve thought of you

enough! — We’ve thought enough

of everything. Before it happened

I didn’t even know there were

so many thoughts! — Ahh, how many

years, dear God — how many tears—

So take — take — take your bundled bones—

and get out — get out of our lives—

Do you hear? Our lives! —

You,

All of you there—

Die now!

WOMAN ATOP THE BELFRY:

Quiet

has come.

The distant town

slammed shut

at once.

As though

there, too,

they all stopped

breathing.

WALKING MAN: But who am I?

COBBLER: Who are you?

WALKING MAN: I think I was looking for something here.

WOMAN ATOP THE BELFRY:

He left

and he came back,

he searched their faces

for all

that had been lost.

He ran

and circled

them,

and suddenly—

he fell.

WALKING MAN: Who am I?

ELDERLY MATH TEACHER: Pardon me, sir, do you happen to recall who I am?

COBBLER: Ma’am, any chance you remember—

MIDWIFE: There was a baby, and another baby, and another … Did they all come out of me?

WOMAN IN NET: There was a house, there were clothes—

DUKE: I played with horses, cavaliers—

TOWN CHRONICLER’S WIFE: And you, sir, who are you?

TOWN CHRONICLER: Me? I don’t … Excuse me, ma’am, I don’t know me.

WALKING MAN: Who am I?

WOMAN ATOP THE BELFRY (singing softly):

When I tell you yes,

you will embrace

the no,

embrace

the empty

space of him,

his hollow

fullness—

(pause)

There you are no longer

alone,

no longer

alone,

and you are not

just one there, and

never will be

only

one—

(silence)

WALKING MAN:

There

I touch him?

His inner self?

His gulf?

WOMAN ATOP THE BELFRY:

And he,

he also

touches you

from there,

and his touch—

WALKING MAN:

No one

has ever touched me

in that way?

WOMAN IN NET:

Two human specks

a mother

and

her child—

WALKING MAN:

What more must I do? My legs

can hardly carry me, my life thread

becomes thinner, a moment more

and I’ll be gone. And you were right,

my wife, righter than me—

there is no there, there is

no there,

and even if I walk

for all of time

I will not get there, not

alive. So many days

have passed

since I left home,

and all in vain, no purpose, but

the passion still remains inside me

like a curse,

walk onward,

walk—

WOMAN ATOP THE BELFRY:

How miserable to be

so right,

while you were wiser

and far bolder.

Get up,

go and be

like him as much as

one alive can be

like the dead — without dying.

Conceive him,

yet be your death, too,

almost.

Like him

be now, but only till

the shadow of his end

falls

on the shadow

of your being.

And there, my love,

among the shadows,

in the netherworld

of father-son,

there will come

peace — for him,

for you.

DUKE:

Listen to her, sir

(my subject,

though subjected now

to no one), listen:

faithful are the wounds

of she who loves. Do it, and if not—

then you have sealed my fate,

our fate,

and we are nothing—

all of us who walk—

but a ripple over death,

a feeble sign, unreadable,

in the dense rock, from which

a wise but uncourageous sculptor

carved the merest hint of us, courageous

but not genius, or genius but surely

not merciful.

Go,

upend time,

conceive him and then die

with him, and be reborn

out of his death.

WALKING MAN:

Only the passion remains

in me, like a curse,

a disease—

walk, walk more, and

more.

Perhaps at some last border

where my wisdom cannot reach,

I will set down

this heavy load and then

take one small step backward,

no more, one pace

across the world,

a concession,

a confession:

I am here,

he is

there,

and a timeless border

stands between us.

Thus to stand,

and then, slowly,

to know,

to fill with knowledge

as a wound fills up

with blood:

this is

to be

man.

WALKERS:

And at that moment,

with those words,

the world grew

dark: a shadow

struck us all.

A wall.

A wall stood in our way. A massive

wall of rock bisected,

cut the world

right through.

A wall. It wasn’t here before,

it simply wasn’t!

A thousand times we’ve circled

round the town,

up and down these hills

until we know each stone and crevice, and

suddenly — a wall.

Perhaps we did not notice?

Perhaps we passed it

in our sleep? It was not here,

it wasn’t! Then how? Then what?

From the sky? Or sprouted

from the ground?

Now it’s here, it’s here,

and maybe—

Could it be? Possible? But no,

my friends, no, science won’t allow

such an assumption! But perhaps

our longings will? Perhaps

despair allows it?

Coldness

suddenly spreads

through our limbs. A cool shadow

cast upon us, slashing our world

like an ax,

like then, yes,

like the moment

of disaster—

And he,

the one,

the walking one,

the lonely,

nears the wall.

One step and then another. Fearful,

feet defeated, walking yet recoiling,

a grasshopper

beside it.

WOMAN IN NET: Enough! I’m going back.

DUKE: But we’re not there yet. And what if there is right here, now, my lady, just behind the wall?

WOMAN IN NET: You listen to me, m’lord: farther than this we won’t make it alive.

DUKE: Please, don’t go.

WOMAN IN NET: Just so I understand, m’lord — you asking me to stay?

DUKE: When you are here, I am not afraid.

WOMAN IN NET: Give me your hand, m’lord.

WALKERS:

And he, facing the wall,

head cocked, listening,

awaits an answer. Where,

where will he go, where will we go:

along the wall? Or just stand here

and wait?

For whom? For what?

And for how long?

And as it always is with him, we know,

the feet. A tremble rises

from the shins, the body

tenses, head slowly lifts up

and straightens, and he walks. He walks.

It’s good. This way is good. And everything

comes back to life along with him, one foot

lifts up, then steps back down, a step

and one more step,

one more, he walks,

walks and steps, steps

and strikes, he walks

in place—

in place? Yes, treading

in one place, a step,

another, one more step,

his eyes upon the wall, walking

without walking, walking,

dreaming, walking

with himself, from himself

to himself—

WALKING MAN:

Here I will fall

now I will fall—

I do not fall.

Now, here,

the heart will stop—

it does not stop—

TOWN CHRONICLER:

Here is shadow

and fog,

frost

rising

from a dark pit.

Now,

now I will fall—

WALKERS:

He does

not fall

and does not

fail, he walks, before the wall

he walks, a step,

another, one more step,

an hour goes by, another hour, sun sets

sun rises, weakened limbs. The shadows

of our bodies swallowed up

into the darkness as we walk,

we all walk

there—

And sometimes it does seem

that there is something moving in the wall.

It breathes. We do not say

a word. More than anything

we fear

the hope. Of what awaits beyond the wall

we do not dare to think. At dawn,

and twilight, too, our bodies elongate,

we grow into extremely slender

giants, silhouettes. And sometimes

deep inside there floats a golden speck,

fading from one, skipping to the other,

and this we do not speak of either. We walk in gloom.

Across the way, on gnarled rock,

a spider spins a web, spreads out his taut,

clear net. Then he creates a recess

and he burrows deep inside it—

Our faces

are sealed, our feet

strike, hit the earth,

the earth is also a wall.

The sky above as well, perhaps.

Walk, walk more, constantly

walk so as not to be crushed

between the walls. One step,

another, another step, our bleary eyes

see only humps of rocky stone,

scabs of brown and gray, and

a thin spiderweb waving

in the breeze—

Sunset pours its light upon the wall.

It almost draws attention for a moment. That light

of golden-red. Warm, appeasing

light. Since the day my daughter drowned, I gather up

each moment of beauty and grace, for her.

And I,

my friends,

ever since,

have looked

at things of beauty twice.

Oh, m’lord, I swear,

I’m just like you, except that

I don’t have the words you have

from education. But Lady of the Nets,

you move me so each time

you speak of your son. Well, m’lord,

that’s because poems suddenly

tumble out my mouth. It is the same

with me, my lady: poetry

is the language

of my grief.

Look—

there—

one green leaf.

Wondrous how it managed to sprout

here and survive in the naked,

arid rock. A fly lands on the leaf,

cleans its body,

scrubs and polishes

translucent wings—

We walk, alert, watching

the fly like a riddle—

vibrant, full of life, of lust;

it hovers and then

lands again, playful,

it should be more careful near the web.

But no—

the fool has touched the spiderweb,

brushed it with its wing,

now lost.

Disaster here, we know, instantly

now, disaster, its cold fingers

on our lips.

We walk fast, we walk

hard, threads bind.

The fly struggles, tries to take flight,

buzzes so loudly the sky might tear,

and its mouth opens wide:

What are you trying to say?

And what is it you know now,

that you did not know

when you were spawned?

A day or two later

at dusk, half asleep,

we notice that our stride

has changed. We walk, we step

so quickly, our skin bristles, what is it?

The earth, it seems, is softer?

Opening up to furrows

and dimples? Our feet understand

before we do, as they strike the earth,

deepening, dust rises,

backs straighten, eyes glimmer—

Each of us kneels down

upon the earth, digs into it with

hands and feet, with nails. Digs

quickly, like an animal,

and it trembles at our touch. Our hands

suddenly light, supple, fingers knead,

whole bodies dig in dirt and dust.

TOWN CHRONICLER:

My wife,

she, too.

Her lovely shoulders

moved, hovered.

An agile shape

danced in her

sorrow-heavy body,

slipped away, like moth

from dusty lamp …

She stopped. Wiped her forehead

with her hand.

I took my life

in my hands and smiled.

She smiled back! Up and down

I wiggled both my brows.

She smiled some more!

I went back to digging.

WALKERS:

The earth arches, curves itself

toward us, as if having waited

for a long time to be dug,

dug like this, for people such as us

to dig through it — we have a use now.

We sense how much it wanted

to be wallowed in, rejoiced in, laughed into—

tears and blood and sweat

are all we’ve piled into it always. When—

tell me — when has

someone laughed

into the earth?

The shadow

of the wall grows

longer over us, its blackness sharp

and cool. Teeth of iron

plow us with their umbra.

Vigorously, we fall

into earth’s lap, turn over

in her, inhale her warmth

and breath, and she — the mother

of all life, and so the mother

of all dead, she is bereaved-in-life,

warm and fluttering in our hands,

as though begging us to go on,

to dredge up from her womb

the sweet desires of youth entombed

in her, the sweetness

of childhood which, in her,

has turned

into dust.

CENTAUR:

Imprisoned

in my room,

on my cursed body-desk,

I finally have written. Like fingers

probing crumbled earth,

I wrote the story.

WALKERS:

As day fades,

we linger by the wall

among deep trenches:

scars that we inflicted on the earth.

From time to time

our trembling glances fall

into their depths,

but quickly

turn away.

And he, the walker, rises

from the dust and looks at us,

and now it seems, for the first time,

his eyes greet us with kind blue light.

He smiles warmly to us each, and also,

so it seems, to those

whom each of us carries inside.

Soundlessly, with lips alone,

he whispers: Thank you.

Then turns, removes his clothes,

and here now he is

naked. His body is

so white,

human.

And down he goes

into the pit

he dug, and lies

there on his back, and

puts his arms

along his sides, and shuts

his eyes.

We stand.

Time comes

and starts

to rush: the cobbler

and his midwife

help the teacher

to remove his shoes.

The woman in the nets

and her friend the duke,

hand in hand, fleet fingered—

she from within,

he from without—

untangle the shock

around her body.

The chronicler and his wife

quietly help each other

remove their torn clothes,

both excited,

agitated,

and suddenly

they look

so young.

Naked

we stand,

taking our leave

with a gaze. Each of us

alone again.

Each bent over

his crater,

each descending

to her grave.

Then,

like a predator,

fast and sharp,

the night

lunges.

CENTAUR:

Now at last I understand:

The father does not move

his child. I breathe life

not into my son.

It is myself whom I adjure,

with words,

with visions,

with the scarecrow figures

glued with straw

and mud, and with

a poor man’s wisdom,

lest I cease and turn to stone.

Lest I cease and turn

to stone.

In the cold white space

between the words,

it is my spirit

that is felled.

I alone flutter like prey

caught in the jaws

of finality.

For myself,

for my own soul, I fight

against that which diminishes,

which decimates

and dulls.

My whole life

now,

my whole life

on the tip

of a pen.

WALKING MAN:

It was

silent.

I lay

yoked

by loneliness:

the dolor

of a man

in earth.

The quiet voices

of the night

rolled in from afar,

clouds blew toward me

heavy, low, hiding the sky

from my eyes. The walls

of the pit drew close, closed in.

The earth is learning—

I sensed — measuring,

gauging: how it might

ingest me.

TOWN CHRONICLER’S WIFE:

We will be punished. I shivered

from the cold and fear. I thought:

People must not do

this sort of thing. I thought

about my beloved jester,

so miserable as he lies near me

in this bed of earth. And all the while

I felt the blood, blood dripping from me,

flowing into soil, reaching

all the way to him, seeping through his veins,

then coming back to me and melding.

Now it is our blood, and it is her blood now,

and both of us

conceive her

once again

from blood and earth.

I became dizzy,

and drowsy, and suddenly

it seemed so light,

as if time had also

loosened its bite.

I breathed. I slowly,

slowly breathed. I hadn’t

breathed like that since then.

I haven’t ever breathed like this.

My insides were exhaled,

then drawn back to me

like a gentle dance—

WALKING MAN:

Then I awoke

from frenzied dreams

that I could not remember.

The sky turned

lucent, the wall

towered up to split it.

I could not hear

my earthen neighbors, did not know

if they were here or gone.

Though I was cold, my fingertips

smoldered and hummed:

I will not be — they pulsed. They murmured

in ten voices, a cheerful choir:

I will

not be.

One day,

I will not beeee!

And from within the will-not-be

there rose the flavor

of my being. I knew

how much

I had been,

while I was. I knew

down to my fingertips.

It was wonderful

to know, to remember:

how very much

I’d been,

and how

I would

not be.

TOWN CHRONICLER:

I hope I forget your name,

my girl, the music of your name

inside my mouth, the sweetness that would spread

throughout my body.

You were so small,

yet so much in you to forget,

and not to want a thing that was once

yours,

nor even you

yourself—

DUKE: Who is that? I think I recognized my jester’s voice.

TOWN CHRONICLER: Indeed, my lord. It is I, your servant.

DUKE: My soul mate.

TOWN CHRONICLER: It’s been a long time since those days.

DUKE: More than thirteen years since you imposed this terrible exile upon yourself. Now tell me about your daughter.

TOWN CHRONICLER: I cannot, Your Honor. The day disaster struck, you ordered me to forget her.

DUKE: My beloved friend, you know better than anyone that such an order could never have entered my mind. Tell me about her.

TOWN CHRONICLER: No, no, my lord, I cannot. Your order still stands!

DUKE: Then, jester, I order you: Forget her to my ears!

TOWN CHRONICLER:

I forget her fine short hair.

I forget her pink, translucent fingers.

I forget she was my delicate, delightful girl.

I forget the way she—

the way you would get angry if I forgot

to separate the omelet from the salad on your plate.

And when I bathed you,

you would cheer and slap the water with both hands,

and I would lift you out and wrap your body

in a soft towel and ask:

Who is this strange creature inside?

CENTAUR: My friend the chronicler talked and talked. A wellspring of forgotten gleanings erupted from him. From my window I looked out on the horizon. Between two hills I saw the vast, empty plain where the pits were dug. Fragmentary droplets shone in the starlight. The many branches of a single, giant tree swayed slowly in the wind, as if to welcome or to bid farewell.

Then a shadow suddenly moved upon the plain. It was a woman extracting herself from the earth. She took a few slow, heavy steps. She stood hugging herself. Her head was slightly lowered.

TOWN CHRONICLER’S WIFE:

Who will sustain her,

who will embrace,

if our two bodies

do not

envelop

her?

CENTAUR: She looked around, studied the wall at length, then disappeared down into the earth, into the neighboring trench. After a minute or two I saw a notebook hurled out of it. It flew through the air for a moment, its white pages swelling and glimmering in the darkness, then vanished.

WALKING MAN:

I thought about the earthly

beings next to me. I thought

about my son. The earth

grew warm under my body.

I spoke to him in my heart.

At least we parted without anger—

I told him—

and without resentment.

You loved us, and were loved,

and you knew that you were loved.

I asked if I could make one more request.

I’d like to learn to separate

memory from the pain. Or at least in part,

however much is possible, so that all the past

will not be drenched with so much pain.

You see, that way I can remember more of you:

I will not fear the scalding of memory.

I also said: I must separate

from you.

Do not misunderstand me

(I felt the stab of pain

pass through him

right in my own flesh) — separate

only enough to allow

my chest to broaden

into one whole breath.

I smiled, because I remembered

that was what the teacher asked for.

The ocean sky rustled,

and a smile seemed to open up

above me. Someone may have understood,

or felt me. I breathed in

the full night. The sky

no longer weighed on me,

nor did the earth,

nor me myself.

Nor you.

You—

where are

you?

TOWN CHRONICLER’S WIFE:

Perhaps I need no longer reach

the very end of ways,

the final destination?

Perhaps this walk itself is both

the answer and the question?

Perhaps there is no there,

my girl, perhaps, too, no more

you?

But as I lie here, in the belly

of the earth, my pains abate

for one brief moment

and I feel and know

how life and death themselves

reach equilibrium inside me,

blissfully attuned (oh, but how

can my lips utter such vile words?!),

until like night and day, or

like the day of equinox,

when winter meets its summer,

the two mingle inside me,

granting wisdom and precision,

for which I paid a heavy price:

your life—

no, no!

A bitter,

loathsome bargain,

yet still, my girl—

allow me to say this or else

go mad — now, for the first time,

I know not only what

death is,

but also what is life,

and more than that,

I see—

TOWN CHRONICLER:

— how life and death

stand face-to-face,

cooing at each other.

How they touch,

braided with each other

at their naked roots.

How constantly they pour

and empty each into the other—

like a couple, like

two lovers—

the sap of

their existence.

TOWN CHRONICLER’S WIFE:

As they commingle,

so two rivers flow

into my confluence.

I did not know, not this way,

that life in all its fullness

is lived only there,

in borderland.

It is as though I never yet

have lived, as though all things

that happened to me

never really were, until

you—

WALKERS:

Morning broke. Thin red

clouds sailed through the sky.

We slowly rose

out of the tombs,

stood nude

outside the wall.

And once again we thought

we saw it tremble,

a wave, transparent,

passing up and all along it.

We could not speak; our breath

stood still: a wall

of rock

yet also

so alive.

MIDWIFE:

A face—

TOWN CHRONICLER’S WIFE:

There

in the wall,

in the stones,

I see

a face—

TOWN CHRONICLER:

No, my dear,

look here, at me. Here

is the face,

the warm, living body,

while there—

just a mirage

begat by yearnings.

TOWN CHRONICLER’S WIFE:

The face

of a young woman,

or a man,

or a boy—

DUKE:

And it moves

and it’s

supple

and alive.

MIDWIFE:

I must be dreaming, certainly.

My God, is that a young man?

Or a boy?

Perhaps a girl?

Girl, g-g-girl,

please look

at me …

COBBLER:

They are

imprinted

softly,

as in beeswax

or on leather—

ELDERLY MATH TEACHER:

Or in reverie?

Or in a dream? No,

no, I am not wrong:

it is a human face

I see.

WALKERS:

A child, we saw

a child’s face,

for an instant, the hint

of his forehead, sharp chin …

We trembled, as did the child.

Waves, shards of shapes

flowed in the stones,

bringing alive a relief

that writhes

and sways.

TOWN CHRONICLER:

Or so it seems

to hearts that crave?

That rave?

WALKERS:

Is it simply swelling

in the rock, or could it be

a child’s tiny nose?

A mouth opening wide

or grimacing? Or just

a fissure

in the cleft of rock?

A girl? Was it a girl

who loomed above him

and then vanished? Will she return?

A girlish flicker

hovered,

dissipated,

as if the little one had knocked

just for a moment on the doors

of actuality—

then startled.

As she fades, the boy’s face changes

right before our eyes. It turns

into the long, fine, gentle

features of a youth.

His profile turns toward us,

slow, with endless wonderment.

He looks straight at us,

two eyebrows

soft arches

in the stone. His eyes

black holes.

TOWN CHRONICLER:

Minute by minute they are losing

their minds. Look, people,

look: It’s a wall!

Slabs of rock!

The faces you behold

are merely

phantasms of light,

sleights of shade

and stone—

WALKERS:

But they are so

alive! They flicker

with the flash of smiles,

with questioning and sorrow,

as if those longing, desperate faces

wish to try out

every last expression

one more time,

to thereby taste

the potency

of plundered feelings.

Struck by our own hearts,

our souls wrestled,

struggled to break free,

out of their prison,

to pass from here

to there … Seized

by frenzy,

cranes in cages

were our souls,

while in the sky

a flock of birds

passed by,

migrating home.

TOWN CHRONICLER:

It is the longing, I am sure,

it is the longing that deranges

my own mind as well.

Listen to me, listen:

only our longing

sculpts our loved ones, living,

flickering.

Yes, there, look — there!

In the reliefs

of stone—

WALKERS:

And more than anything, the mouths.

Moving, moving constantly, gaping,

rending, twisting,

rounding … Perhaps

in supplication?

To whom?

Or imprecation?

Upon whom?

CENTAUR: Damn it all, if only I could be with them! If only I were there, not sitting here writing and writing! I would ram the wall and tear it down, I would break in and I would—

WALKERS:

And their bodies, are they

pushing, driving

at the wall? Fighting? Against whom?

And what? Or struggling

to thrust their way

back here?

TOWN CHRONICLER:

Or like a small child

waking, still addled,

draped in dream, beating

at his mother’s chest,

clinging,

beating, beating,

hugging …

WALKERS:

We saw an arm,

a slender shoulder, then a knee,

another, then two buds

sprouted, mounded,

a young girl’s sharp new breasts.

Above them was her face,

which slowly turned

into a smiling boy’s,

the pair of breasts became

two babies’ faces,

boy and girl.

Long hands were laid

and ten thin fingers

spread themselves around

the boyish face. His nose,

it seemed, pressed up against

the dimness of a window

as he tried to

penetrate the depths

of darkness

with his gaze.

Was he trying? Did they try

to call us? Or to warn us?

Perhaps we, too,

from there, seemed

merely faint outlines,

fighting our way

out of solid rock—

Terror,

terror fell upon us.

Soon it all will vanish.

We must run now,

sink our faces

in the wall, breach it,

pull them,

tear them

out—

We froze. We did

not move! If only

we could speak to them, we thought,

we’d tell them everything

we did not say when they

still lived. Or else

we’d shout at them

through the lips of the hole

rent in us, through which

our life

seeps out

in throbbing

surges.

CENTAUR: The walking man suddenly fell on his knees at the wall and whispered his son’s name. There was no voice in his whisper, only a gaping mouth and torn eyes. In my room, I felt a sharp blade fly over here from there and slice me in two. Through my swoon of pain I heard behind me, from within the piles of objects, the voice of a small child who said quietly, softly murmuring:

BOY:

There is

breath

there

is breath

inside the pain

there is

breath

CENTAUR: I stood up on my feet. I walked around the room. I picked up this or the other object and touched it, stroked it, brought it to my lips. Then I went back and stood at the window. I could see very well using a pair of binoculars I found in one of the piles: the walker’s whisper seemed to reap the other walkers. Like him, they, too, fell to their knees, the midwife and the cobbler, the elderly teacher, the net-mender and the duke, the town chronicler and his wife. And each and every one of them, each and every one of us, called out, whispered, to his child:

WALKERS:

Lilli—

Adam? My little

Lilli — Michael — Oh, my child,

my sweet, my lost one — Hanna,

Hanna, look here — Sorry, Michael,

for hitting you—

Adam, it’s

Dad — Uwi—

My speck of life—

We awoke

lying on the ground.

The wall

stood no longer.

Perhaps it had never been

there. Perhaps nothing

of what we saw

really was.

But then a strange thought

passed through

all of us,

elusive yet acute,

as if a hand

had stitched us

with a thread: perhaps

when the man

stood up

in his little kitchen

and said:

I have to go there,

perhaps at that same moment

something also shifted

there.

And when

the man began

to walk around himself

in circles

by his house—

they, too,

from there,

began to walk

here,

to the meeting point?

We pictured them

now slightly stooped,

waning,

slowly turning

back.

WALKING MAN:

And he

is dead.

I understand, almost,

the meaning of

the sounds: the boy

is dead.

I recognize

these words

as holding truth.

He is dead,

he is

dead. But

his death,

his death

is not

dead.

CENTAUR:

Yet still it breaks my heart,

my son,

to think

that I have—

that one could—

that I have found

the words.

April 2009–May 2011




Notes


The quote on this page is from e. e. cummings’s

poem “a clown’s smirk in the skull of a baboon.”

The quote on this page is based on Avraham

Huss’s Hebrew translation of “Orpheus,

Eurydice, Hermes,” by Rainer Maria Rilke.




A Note About the Author


David Grossman was born in Jerusalem, where he still lives. He is the best-selling author of several works of fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature, which have been translated into thirty-six languages. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the French Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Buxtehuder Bulle in Germany, Rome’s Premio per la Pace e L’Azione Umanitaria, the Premio Ischia International Award for Journalism, Israel’s Emet Prize, and the 2010 Frankfurt Peace Prize.




A Note About the Translator


Jessica Cohen was born in England, raised in Israel, and now lives in the United States. She translates contemporary Israeli fiction, nonfiction, and other creative works, among them David Grossman’s critically acclaimed To the End of the Land. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Financial Times, Tablet Magazine, Words Without Borders, and Two Lines.




About This Reading Group Guide


The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of Falling Out of Time, internationally acclaimed author David Grossman’s powerful, genre-defying exploration of grief and bereavement as experienced by residents of a small village.




About This Book

Part prose, part play, and pure poetry, David Grossman’s Falling Out of Time is a powerful exploration of mortality, mourning, and the long good-bye that follows the death of a loved one. As linguistically impressive as it is emotionally wrought, Grossman’s trim fable unpacks the complexities of grief as they are experienced on a personal and collective level, leading readers on a journey to define the universal, yet often indescribable, feeling of loss.

Set in a small seaside village, the characters of Falling Out of Time are bound by grief: all are parents who have experienced the death of a child, and all struggle with pain they are unable to articulate. The book opens in the home of two such characters, a man — simply described as Walking Man — and his wife, who are mourning the death of their son. Unable to bear the burden of his grief in the confines of his home, the man sets out on a journey to reach his dead son. He begins to walk around the village in ever-widening circles, reflecting on his sorrow as he paces. One by one, he is joined by a lively cross section of townspeople — from the Midwife to the Net-Mender to the Duke — each with his or her own story of loss to reflect upon. As they walk, questions about death and mortality are raised: Is there an afterlife? Is peace of mind attainable after such a loss? Is it possible, even for a fleeting moment, to trade places with the dead, to free them of their fate? The collectivity of the group serves as catharsis, ultimately turning these individuals’ private experiences of pain into a comforting hymn of hope. Elegantly economical and intensely moving, Grossman’s book is a singular exploration of how to live life in the face of tremendous loss.




Questions for Discussion

1. As Falling Out of Time opens, Walking Man and his wife are embroiled in a tense discussion about whether or not he should embark on his journey. Why does his wife protest the decision? How does her perspective on her husband’s journey change in the course of the book?

2. On this page, Walking Man’s wife asks him: “Will I ever again / see you / as you are, / rather than as / he is not?” How is the relationship between husband and wife changed by the loss of a child? How does it affect specific couples in the novel — the Town Chronicler and his wife, the Midwife and the Cobbler?

3. The Town Chronicler is initially introduced as a sort of omnipresent force who objectively catalogs the events of the town from a distance. Yet as the book progresses, his own melancholia is revealed. What initiates this change? What does this suggest about the presentation of self in professional versus private spheres?

4. Walking Man begins his journey by circling his own home — in hopes of getting his wife to join him — and gradually widens his path to cover greater swaths of the town. Why do you think the author chose to make his path circular rather than linear?

5. On this page, the Duke calls himself “an impostor of sorts, a sham / pretending to be an everyman.” Over the course of the narrative, how does the Duke’s admission of loss bring him closer to the townspeople? Does the shared experience of loss make him an “everyman”?

6. Explore the relationship between the Duke and the Town Chronicler. What did you make of the edict from the Duke? Did you believe that the Duke ordered the Town Chronicler not to mention his loss, or do you think that the Town Chronicler’s reticence developed as a coping mechanism?

7. The Centaur initially challenges the authority of the Town Chronicler, taunting him for his government role, but on this page, he describes him as a “friend.” How does this tension eventually lead to mutual respect? How does it help to unite the townspeople?

8. At the beginning of the narrative, the Town Chronicler observes that the mute net-mender has broken her nine-year silence and that her voice is “heavenly.” How does this description contrast with her physical description? When the Duke refers to her as “Lady of the Nets” on this page, is it done ironically or as a sign of respect?

9. Why do you think the Midwife stutters throughout? What leads her husband to think that “her words are / hardly broken / anymore!” on this page?

10. Falling Out of Time is a unique blend of prose, poetry, and drama. Why do you think the author chose to structure the narrative in such a way?

11. In the first section of the book, the dialogue moves from character to character, but in Part II, the townspeople’s voices are often considered collectively as “Walkers.” What does this say about the shared experience of grief? How does the similarity of their experiences bring a leveling effect to their society?

12. On this page, several characters struggle to remember who they are. What does this say about the shift in identity after the death of a child? How does memory interfere with their ability to redefine themselves?

13. Several characters express regrets about how they interacted with their children, or about how time was spent with a child. Whose admissions had the greatest impact on you?

14. Why do you think the author chose to represent the writer character as a Centaur? How does the Centaur’s struggle to write reflect the mourner’s communal struggle to communicate?

15. On this page, the Walkers state that “poetry / is the language / of my grief.” Do you agree? How is this reflected in the text?

16. On this page, the Centaur expresses his struggle to articulate death: “Death will deathify, / or is it deathened? Deatherized? / Deathered?” What does the Centaur’s “little game” say about the limitations — or flexibility — of language? How does the playful transformation of the word “death” limit or enhance its power for the speaker?

17. What does the appearance of the boy on this page signify? How do the townspeople react to hearing his voice? Explore the notion that “there / is breath / inside the pain.”