Then I look down. I lean forward to rest my spread hands on the broad sill and, thrusting myself partway out the window, stare down at the tableau intended for no one else’s sight but mine. I am perfectly aware that what I am looking at I must never forget, so that if my scrutiny is unemotional it is nonetheless slow and intense. I am also aware that I am making no sound, though I am momentarily moving my lips as if for speech, and that I am comfortable but quite unable to feel the slightest sensation of my own breathing.
What stands directly below my window is a large box-like wooden wagon that rides on two high wheels with wooden spokes and iron rims and is equipped not with the usual shafts for horse or donkey but with a wooden crossbar clearly intended for human use. The splintered and high-sided old vehicle remains horizontal below my window. I observe the gray wood, the heavy wooden hubs of the wheels, a wisp of dry hay caught in a joint. And what I see, what fills my mind, is the sharp-seamed and extremely narrow tin coffin which the cart contains and which is angular and unadorned except for a long single strip of fading white flowers — carnations, perhaps, or roses — stretched as on a piece of cord from the head of the tin coffin to its angled foot. The wood that absorbs the light, the cheap bright metal that reflects it, the string of near-dead collapsing flowers that divides the lid of the coffin from head to foot, instead of lying conventionally in a rich full bunch above the breast of the dead person concealed within — these are the details that make me realize that eventually the coffin must be carted away and that death is the true poverty.
But there is something still more unusual about the sight below. Feeling my brow tightening in a single crease, it is then that I see that the poor tin coffin rests not on the bottom of the old cart but rather floats in perhaps a foot of dark water. Yes, I see now that the cart is partially filled with water in which the coffin is gently rocking. And then I understand. I stare at the shining tin coffin and at the standing water and listen to my own breath and understand the reason for the water in the old wooden cart: originally the coffin was packed in ice, a great quantity of ice, which has melted.
Am I the person to pull the slow cart out of the courtyard and, lodging my stomach against the wooden bar and hearing the coffin bumping like a small boat against the wood at my back, drag this inexplicably grief-ridden assemblage to whatever resting place awaits it?
I do not know. I stand in the window. I hear the buzzing of a single fly.
When I finished reporting this dream to Ursula, who had listened with more than her usual lassitude, she made two quite toneless comments while rising, as she did so, to leave the room. She said that obviously the coffin contained the body not of a man but a woman, and that this was the telltale dream of the only son.
I sat alone for an hour, two hours, hearing the fly and contemplating Ursula’s remarks.
I stood in the twilight of our smoothly plastered white hallway, alert yet immobilized on my way from parlor to den or den to living room, where I had lighted a fire in the fireplace some minutes before. And in this stationary moment, caught in one of the trivial paths of domesticity in the light of late afternoon, suddenly I understood completely the nature of the atmosphere in which I was so keenly suspended. What else could it be if not the air of private catastrophe? The silence was gathering into a secret voice. The light inside the house was soft and clear with the muted quality of the frozen snow outside.
So, I told myself, our separation was no longer impending but now was upon me or even ahead of me, like a road that changes direction until suddenly it doubles back upon itself. Yes, our separation was now a fact. It was all in the silence and muted light. And just as I had expected I felt nothing, I anticipated no approaching pain, but was aware only of the perception of the event rather than of the event itself. I was aware of the silence. I was aware of the faded light.
It was possible that she had departed without farewells. Perhaps she had decided to spare me a final admonition, a final smile. Perhaps she had not wanted me watching as she tied the sash of her fur coat and drew on her driving gloves. Perhaps I had slumped into the folds of my newspaper, slipping away, dreaming of the goose that long ago had struck repeatedly at my bare childish calf, and so dozed through Ursula’s disappearance from the long life of our marriage. Or perhaps she was even now taking her place in the front seat of her car alone or beside a new companion, and even now was preparing to play out all my speculations, all the texture of this fading day, in the unmistakable sound of a car engine.
I turned, I saw Peter’s meerschaum pipe in an ash tray where Ursula had decided to leave it. In passing I thought the pipe was covered with a skin of dust, as if it were lying in Peter’s empty house instead of ours, and in that moment and even as I was walking down the hallway toward the kitchen, I remembered what had occurred to me at the time of his death: that grief is only another form of derangement and that my innocent childhood had been filled with it.
I saw the two cold Dutch ovens, I heard my footsteps on the tiles, I saw the snow beyond the kitchen window, I saw the bright knives in their rack. Carefully, with eyebrows raised, with hands steady, I poured the schnapps into the little glass and held it up to the light. I felt that my face was expressionless, I knew that my actions were deliberate. I poured and then drank the schnapps. I leaned my cheek against the white tiles, each of which bore its glazed blue abstraction of an ancient Norse ship on a sea that might have been drawn by a child. I drank and waited for the sight and perhaps sound of Ursula’s car. But there was nothing. The tiles grew warm beneath my cheek.
I put down my glass. I saw the glass sitting alone on the flat expanse of thick white tiles, I saw how the light revealed the invisible film of liquor that still coated the inside of the glass and that smelled so beautifully like yellow kerosene.
I turned, I waited. Then carefully I raised my fingers to the heavy mask of flesh that was my face. But then 1 lowered my hands, trembled, detected the first far-off indications of a sound which, in the next moment, defined itself as the sound of water in motion, running, increasing in volume somewhere on the floor above. I exhaled. I wiped my spectacles. I refilled the glass with schnapps. Because now I knew that the sound I heard was that of Ursula in the shower, and I distinctly heard the muffled torrents of steaming water that were already turning her wet skin pink and filling the shower stall with clouds of steam rich in the scent of Ursula’s lilac soap. I tasted the schnapps. The little glass was wet in my fingers. Now I knew exactly what was lying in wait for me somewhere ahead on the cold calendar.
“I care very little about your ‘victim,’ Allert. She was much too young to engage my serious attention. But I do care about what you did. And if they acquitted you unjustly and only because you happened to have at your side a handsome wife, I can say nothing but that your next trial will be different. Very different.” By the time she had completed her last sentence I was through the doorway and feeling my way up the darkened stairs.
‘‘Go to her, Peter,” I said in the dark silence in which the two of us were lounging, “go to her and fill an old friend with enjoyment.”
“That is another poor joke,” he said, rising like a familiar and benevolent specter in the light of the fire, “but a good idea.”
“Ja, ja, ja,” I said to myself as I heard him fumbling his way toward the stairs.
“Allert,” she said, thrusting her soft face close to mine, “have you any idea of what you are doing? I suppose you do not. But you are destroying my romance with Peter. How dare you destroy the sweetness and secrecy of my romance with Peter? How can you be so vulgar as to read my mail?”