Stella carried the deep basket, the streets were empty, a few luminous clouds blew hastily across the horizon beneath a smoke-black overcast thousands of feet higher. She took her mother’s arm in a gesture, warmly, of confidence.
“I will have those lemons, please.” The bald-headed man dropped them in, flapped his apron at a pink-nosed dog. Flies hung over the blue meat.
“Potatoes.” They rolled among the lemons in dust. The silly girl spilled the money on the counter, it grew darker.
“Apples.” From the trees, the branches, sprinkled with water, green leaves. The basket began to fill, the vendor limped.
Live fowl in a dirty cage were silent, claws gripping the rods caked with lime, eyes blinking at each movement.
“Melons, your father likes melons.” They were scarred and green and made the basket heavier. The grocer’s boy peeped out from behind a hogshead of cheese, red tongue wagging, bare feet scuffing the sawdust.
The mother and girl began to cross the street.
ERNST
Behind them one of the chickens began to scream, and a speck appeared in the sky.
“I think I must stop and buy some flowers.” A few loiterers got out of their way, the old woman considered her list.
“You don’t want to make yourself tired, Mother.”
The day was peculiarly uninteresting, a deliberately cold day with all the summer bugs taken to cover, a few shrubs turned under and splashed dismally with a final blue, all open windows shaded, sleepers uncomfortable, a few omnibuses swaying to and fro, empty, unhurried.
“I think I’ll get …,” said the mother, but spoke nothing more, looking with the utmost distaste upon her desolate native avenue, facades smothered with an uneven hand, scant twigs swept into the drains, not a single mortal. That was all.
The policeman’s call faded into nonsense, into unutterable confusion as the speck fell quickly from the sky, two small leathered heads trapped in smoking holes, the engine, no larger than the torso of a man, blasting, whistling, coughing stupidly. It swooped over mother and girl, flapped its fins once, and crashed, typically English, on the other side of the Platz. Paper and wood burned quickly, consumed the flyers, leaving the isinglass still intact over their eyes. In so falling with its mechanical defect, the plane sent a splinter flying into the mother’s breast that knocked her down.
The policeman kept pushing Stella by the shoulder while the half-dressed crowd asked again and again, “What happened to the old trumpet?” What happened was that they stumbled out into the street and came upon an old dead woman, kicked around, bent, black. “What are you pushing me for?” The sweet grass burned back in the passageway of the street, the old medium was so wrapped in smoke that the father’s second voice, this mother, was choked, mute, with cinders in the cleft of her chin and above the open lips.
“Gavrilo,” Stella murmured, “what have you done?”
The birds twittered in angelic surmise, reeled high and low, fed, nested, called beyond the curtains in gentle mockery, and the days passed by with the temperate clime of summer stones. The marble dust fell in rest; leaded curtains, lately drawn, hung padded and full across the sunlight, keepers of the room. The seascapes were gone, no shadows were on the walls, silver flukes that seemed arisen from the past hushed their soft seashell voices and at every dead night or noon, she missed the chiming of the bells. Her mourning was a cold wave, a dry flickering of fingers in departure, a gesture resting softly in her throat that barely disturbed the gentle shift of light passing on its way. It was always dusk, rising, waking, falling with indolence, resounding carefully in her sleep, reporting the solitude of each day past. Stella thought the bier was close by. That perpetual afternoon clawed about her knees, each day the spirit grew more dim, sheltered behind the heavy lost mask of falling air, the thick south receding.
Those ships that had once rolled in on the breakers were cold and thin and had traveled far beyond her sorrow. The mother’s hands were crossed, the wrinkles had strangely deepened until the face was gone, the flowers were turning a cold earthen brown. Her black collar was aslant on the neck, her own mother’s ring before her was tucked into a hasty satin crevice by her side, wrapped in paper. They sprinkled water about trying to keep the air fresh, and the trimmings began to tarnish. In the evening the face changed color. Sweetness arose from the little pillows; she wore no stockings or shoes and the hair, brittle and thin, clipped together, was hard to manage. The eyelids swelled and no one visited.
Stella waited, awake on the chair, listening to the hushed footsteps, her face in the constant pose of a circus boy, misshapen, cold, her isolation unmoved with memory, numb with summer. The mourning of the virgin, as if she were swept close, now, for the first time, to the mother’s sagging breast for her first dance, was heightened in a smile as the orchestra rose up and they glided over the empty avenue, the old woman in starched collar leading, tripping. Those dry unyielding fingers brushed her on, poised, embarrassed by the face that never moved. She did not stop, seeing many other eyeless dancers, lured through her first impression of this season, clear and rare, but she waited, sitting, hour on hour. Those fingers rustled in the dark. She heard the perpetual scratching feet of insects who walked over the coffin lid with their blue wings, their dotted eyes, and an old bishop mumbled as he ran his fingers over the rectangle of edges closed with wax. They tried to curl the hair, but the iron was too hot and burned. Her nostrils, rather than dilated in grief, were drawn closely, dispassionately together, making two small smudges on the apex of her nose.
Sometimes she thought she had waved. She saw the ship’s poop inching its way farther into the distance on the flat water, a few unrecognized faces staring back, and smelled for a moment the odor of fish. The sea rolled noiselessly away, and walking back, all the paths choked with marble dust, the air smelled of linen, of dead trees. And all Stella’s forebears had finally made this journey — the ocean was filled with ships that never met. No matter how much powder they sprinkled on the mother’s face, the iron grey color would lie stiffly under the skin the following morning. At night they placed a lamp beside her chair, and in the first light took it away again, its flame brushing the stiff folds of her dress, shining weakly as the smooth disturbed crests of the waves, almost extinct. Each morning she sat just as straight, as if she did not know they had prowled all about her during the midnight hours, beyond the globe of the lamp. She would never see them sailing back, and this most distant visitor, lying in state nearby, asleep day and night, so changed by the assumption of the black role, seemed waiting to bring her to the land of desire, where her weeping would cover all the hill above the plain. Stella’s face became gradually unwashed, her arms grew thin, the fingers stiff, her mouth dry, trying to recall this person’s name. The attendants and sudden last visitors perspired. The old woman grew damp as if she fretted.