Then one day in their old age ceased to speak to each other. It was as if they had no longer anything to say to each other, as if they had run out of thoughts, and so their minds became secretive and inward. They each had dreams of what they might have done differently but they concealed these dreams from each other. He would sometimes read the newspaper and she would sew and they wouldn’t speak. And in a strange way they felt comfortable with each other, their silence was not bristling and hostile, it was a silence of emptiness. It was as if they were waiting for the grave into which they would be lowered. Nothing particular had happened to cause this, they hadn’t had a major quarrel. They were like clocks which had run down.
When someone came to visit them, which was rare, they spoke to the visitor but wouldn’t speak directly to each other. The visitors noticed this and stayed away in order not to embarrass them. They didn’t know what to make of it all since they themselves couldn’t imagine a world without speech. Who could imagine it?
It was a most peculiar situation and yet after a while it became natural to the two of them. They would brush past each other on their way to a room and ignore each other as if each were a wardrobe or a chair or a table. They had in fact become like pieces of walking breathing furniture. And they did not feel this as an emptiness or a tragedy. The world had long become opaque to them. It had gone past the stage of significance or even of being a game. It simply was and they simply were. Perhaps after all they were closer to being plants. They almost ceased being aware of each other. And in a sense they gained a kind of freedom from this silence, though it was not a fruitful or creative silence. It was a silence of surrender. Speech had made them tired and they simply ceased being tired. This silence would have gone on for a long time except for a strange trivial accident, if accident it was. The old man always wore a jacket with three buttons on it. It was a grey jacket and he had worn it for thirty years. It was frayed in places and it had been repaired here and there. One day the old woman noticed that one of the buttons was hanging by a thread. For some reason this disturbed her and she wished to sew the button on again. The trouble was however that her husband wore the woollen jacket to bed as it was winter time and he never took it off. He even left his shirt on and sometimes his tie. Every day and every night she would see this button which was a black one hanging by the single thread and it became an obsession with her. She was afraid that the button would fall off and she would never be able to find it again. She would follow him about looking down at the floor or at the ground to make sure that it hadn’t fallen. She almost spoke to him in order to point out the danger to the button. But in fact he seemed completely unconscious that the button was about to fall off. He had always been like that, not caring what condition his clothes were in. Often in the past she had to tell him to wear a fresh suit when he went out visiting. For he really genuinely didn’t care how he was dressed. The button, black and round, became an obsession. She could see it in her dreams. It expanded and filled her consciousness. And sublimely ignorant of her thoughts he went about, not caring what happened to the button. She grew angry and simmered quietly. Why on earth couldn’t he pay attention to important things like that? If he had only two buttons instead of three he would look untidy and people would think that she wasn’t looking after him. But even that was not what bothered her. What really bothered her like a toothache was the lack of symmetry. It was the lowest of the three buttons and he would look silly walking about with the lower part of his jacket spread wide. The black button became as large as a globe. It became a whole earth, round and fatal and trivial. It hung from a single thread and at any moment the thread might snap. The button would fall to the ground and she would never see it again. There would never again be found a button exactly like that one. Also, her sight wasn’t very good and if the button fell she would probably never find it again. Sometimes she had the greatest difficulty in not stretching forward and seizing hold of the button and tearing it off so that she could keep it and sew it on later in the summer months when he might shed the jacket. In the morning she would look for the button in case it had fallen off in the bed at night. And sublimely indifferent to what was happening to him, her husband would continue in his sloppiness, making the silence untidy and incomplete. What could one say about him except that he was insensitive, that he did not understand her feelings, that no matter how hard she looked at the button he didn’t seem to notice,
