Back home, his mother died even before he finished his degree at the Technical University in Vienna — died of a stroke, he read in the telegram he received there. Even today the word makes him want to ask: a stroke with what weapon — a bad joke, but he knew the power of his father’s fists. Bruises like the ones his father surely gave his mother continue to change color in the coffin, he’d heard once from a friend who was studying medicine, in the ground they turn first green and then finally yellow, as though this metamorphosis of colors were standing in, if only briefly, for the sorts of development of which the person who’d been struck dead by violent hands was no longer capable. At the time, he’d been about to sit for his exams for his intermediate degree in weights and measures, and for this reason he did not attend the funeral, to which his father raised no objection. Somewhere he’d once learned or read that New York was built on stone, perhaps this is why he wants to stay here, for on rocky ground he can be quite sure of not following in anyone’s footsteps: neither those of his father, the Superior Customs Officer, nor those of his timorous mother.
28
Now it’s like this: The one hand knows that a man’s member doesn’t hurt when you squeeze it, even applying a fair bit of pressure, it’s just a muscle. Another hand has known for a long time that caution is required when pouring water over the kasha in the pot, because the water can splash up and possibly scald you. One hand grasps the handle of a drill in a factory eight hundred times a day. One hand washes the other, another gets slipped through a person’s hair, another drops a quarter into a gas meter. One hand pulls a sheet taut, another wipes crumbs from the table, a third flips a light switch. One pair of eyes sees dust motes rising in a beam of light, another peers into men’s wide-open mouths, another notices a little can of oil. Ears hear a door being slammed, sirens, someone coughing; feet slide into silk stockings, elbows are massaged, toenails are cut, filed, and polished, feet are so blistered they won’t fit in the shoes; gray, black, brown hair; rings under eyes; calluses; two weary breasts; almost a proper bald spot; toothache; tongue; a voice like silk. What under other circumstances might have been or become a family has now been torn so far asunder that being drawn and quartered by horses would be nothing in comparison. Nonetheless, one or the other of them — here, there or yonder — sometimes thinks the very same thought: Why was the baby so quiet all of a sudden?
INTERMEZZO
But if, for example, the child’s mother or father had thrust open the window in the middle of the night, had scooped a handful of snow from the sill, and put it under the baby’s shirt, perhaps the child would suddenly have started breathing again, possibly cried again as well, in any case its heart might have gone back to beating, its skin would have grown warm and the snow melted on its chest. Possibly something like divine inspiration was required, although where such inspiration might come from was something neither mother nor father knew. One glance out the night-dark window at the shimmering snow, or even just the creaking of the window frame contracting in the cold, a sound made by the cold window at precisely the moment the child fell silent, might have sufficed for inspiration, instead of the same sound occurring just half an hour afterward when it was too late. In secondary school, the child’s mother had learned that the Pythia had answered the question posed by Croesus, king of Lydia, with If you cross the Halys, you will destroy a great empire. But what the Pythia did with all the answers no one requested is something the infant’s mother wouldn’t have been able to say, nor the father either. Probably the eternal oracle sat eternally above the pneuma rising from the earth’s interior and watched as her own silence grew in size, attaining inhuman proportions. If an inspiration had come to these parents, the child’s survival would have become just that. The weave of life in its entirety — containing all knowledge of snow, all glances out the window, all listening to sounds made by the cold or damp wood — would have severed one truth from the other for all time. Only the blue tinge of the girl’s skin — above all around her mouth and chin — would have stayed with the parents, an uncomfortable memory. A memory that would have returned to them uninvited now and then, and neither would have mentioned it to the other, for fear of tempting fate. And so fate would have kept quiet, and this first moment when the child might have died would have passed without further ado.