Green eyes — her father stares at the photograph in silence, as if asking a question whose answer he must await forever. Curly hair, suntanned skin — hair made blond by the summer sun and swimming pool — the still plump cheeks of a teenager, the smile like a declaration of complacency or defiance, and the chin so like yours. She was very thin the last time I saw her, but still pretty, tall, with curls falling into her face and that gleam in her green eyes and the same crazy laugh I remember from the times we set out on some risky adventure. But by then she’d become so pale, and she spoke with a slur I’d never noticed before, and although she was married and had a child, she kept telling me the same kinds of crazy things she had told me when we started going out with boys in the summer. For instance, that she met a man on a train, and within a few minutes they’d locked themselves in the bathroom for a quick fuck. We were in a cafeteria, and she was smoking too much and glancing around, nervous, making a great effort to contain herself. I could see that she enjoyed being with me, but also that she wanted to leave, to get something she needed, something that made her bite her fingernails and chainsmoke, and we both also saw that despite our mutual affection and memories we weren’t alike anymore, we didn’t have things to talk about and just sat there sometimes in silence, then she would turn and look outside or put out a just-lit cigarette in the ashtray, crushing it violently. We agreed that the following summer we’d go back home together, but I couldn’t because I had too much work, and she didn’t go anyway, and I never saw her again. Not until after her parents had lost track of her completely. By the time my doctor cousin learned what hospital she was in, it was too late. An ambulance had picked her up in the street. He told me she was so wasted he could recognize only her green eyes.
YOUR ARMS ARE AROUND ME, hugging me tight, as you do when you’re asleep and have a bad dream, you snuggle your icy feet between mine, shivering from the same cold you felt as a little girl, an ancient cold of long winters and houses without heat, cold retained in the rooms of this house as faithfully as the photos of the dead, as the most vivid memories older than reason but already brushed by melancholy and the inkling of inevitable loss: a child’s sudden fear of growing up, the cruel knowledge, which comes from nowhere, that your parents will grow old and die. Also the fear that clutched you in its pincers those nights after your mother’s death, when you didn’t dare go from your bedroom to the bathroom lest you see her in the shadowy hallway in her nightgown, her hair all wild, the way she looked when you came home and were there only a few days before she had to go back to the hospital. You closed your eyes and feared that when you opened them she would be standing at the foot of your bed, asking you something wordlessly, and if you felt you were falling asleep you feared that she would appear in a dream, and you would jerk awake with anguish, thinking you heard the sound of doors opening, or footsteps, and again you felt the raw pain of her death and of being so alone, and shamefully afraid she would come back as a ghost.
FROM BELOW COME THE sounds of conversations and footsteps, a car starting, a telephone ringing, male voices issuing instructions, large objects being shoved around or set down. They’re moving furniture to make room for the coffin. But you don’t want to give in to that thought, you resist imagining the face of your dead aunt, ravaged not only by cancer but also by the old age your mother never knew, a delicate woman young forever because the images you have of the time she was ill are nearly erased and because you happen to have no photographs from her last years. That’s how I see her too, assiduous spy that I am, researcher of your memory, which I want to be as much mine as your present life is. I can’t imagine the woman your mother would be now had she not died: seventy-some years, heavyset, probably with dyed hair. I see her as you do, as you sometimes dream of her, a young woman who still has the smile of a girl, the shadow of which I sometimes intuit on your lips, just as I can see her gaze in your eyes, and that from her — like a ring spreading on the surface of time — comes your inclination to melancholy, your way of building illusions about anything new, the care with which you arrange the objects around you, your devotion to this house in which you and she both were girls, to this oasis with the desertlike hills in the background, this place where she wanted to rest forever and be with her own, with those who gradually have been joining her in the small cemetery with the earthen walls: first her niece, who died even younger than your mother, forever safe from time in the photograph on the television, and tonight her sister, another name added to the tablet in the family pantheon, which you will see tomorrow morning during the burial, and think — maybe for the first time, and without my knowing, without your wanting to say it to me—“When I die, I want you to bury me with them.”
oh you, who knew so well
THEY DISAPPEAR ONE DAY, they are lost, erased forever, as if they had died, as if they had died so many years ago that they are no longer in anyone’s memory and there is no sign they were ever in this world. Someone comes along, suddenly enters your life, is part of it for a few hours, a day, the duration of a journey, becomes a presence so insistent that it’s difficult to recall a time he wasn’t there. Whatever exists, even for an hour or two, seems permanent. In Tangiers, in the dark office of a cloth merchant, in a Madrid restaurant, in the dining car of a train, one man tells another fragments from the novel of his life, and the hours of the telling and of the conversation seem to contain more time than will fit within ordinary hours: someone speaks, someone listens, and for each the other’s voice and face take on the familiarity of a person he has always known. Yet an hour or day later, he isn’t there, will never be there, not because he died, although he might have, and his presence for those to whom he was so close dissolves into nothing. For fourteen years, beginning July 30, 1908, Franz Kafka punctually went to his office in the Society for Prevention of Workplace Accidents in Prague, and then one day in the summer of 1922 he left at the customary hour and never returned, because of illness. His disappearance was as inconspicuous as the way he had sat for so many years at his neat desk, where in one of his locked drawers he kept the letters Milena Jesenska wrote him. For some time afterward an old overcoat that he kept there for rainy days hung in the closet, then it too disappeared, and with it the peculiar odor that had identified his presence in the office for fourteen years.