Back in kitchen, Sophie paces muttering to herself before she resumes her tasks. A curse. A punishment. Upon her has fallen the ungrateful task to which Ezra Blind’s mother was not equal. Out of her womb another Ezra. But when she is done cursing and praying to God to prevent her wrath from falling on this innocent child—rather let another Ezra Blind come to her bed that she might strangle him if it must be—when she is done cursing and praying, she knows Joshua is not an evil reincarnation of his father. Knows, even if Jonathan does look a bit like Uncle Joske who became a bum...As for Toby, she knows she has spoiled and indulged her daughter. She is terrified she’ll end up being raped while riding on a white horse dressed in her Sunday best, like in that awful Swedish movie. But she knows all this is nonsense. She knows Toby is all right, knows—
─────
The notebook lies open on its first blank page—blank but for the speck of a mosquito-like insect, late survivor into autumn, that had dropped onto the sheet and stands trembling on its bent legs, near transparent, paler than its shadow. Obviously you can’t write with an insect on the page. Try blowing it off, shake the notebook, try with a deft flick of the finger—the moribund little ogre won’t be brushed off, it clings on, rooted fast, tiny claws invisible to the naked eye, gripping the porous pulp of the paper. There is only one solution, slide a hand under the hard cover, raise it and slam down firmly. Hold it pressed down tight. Another ten counts. It happened so fast it didn’t feel a thing and you know it. As soon as it’s dry and set into the paper properly you can start writing. Well done. The blow has fixed the insect in a very graceful figure, legs hanging as in flight, one stretched out, slightly longer than the other, wings folded angel-wise. A nice golden brownish color like old prints.
•
...coming into consciousness, a lifelong struggle. For countless departures, few arrivals—mostly false. The beginning can be dated from the momentous, if unrecorded, event when for the first time a child’s hand wrote Sophia Alexandra Landsmann (actually, Landsmann Sophia Alexandra, as is customary for Hungarians) on the cover of her class notebook; or one of the first times the child’s hand wrote the name for without time there cannot be memory. A child writing its name on a class copybook marks the beginning of a struggle, not of coming into consciousness. The coming and going, not marked. No first time, no difference between coming and going. No count: drops from a faucet leaking in a deserted house. The struggle is in time and against time, that much is certain. The object is not so clear. To set up the start and finish lines. Chart a course. To salvage from the morass of memory and the diffusion of the present—what?
• • •
She remembers her happy love affair in New York.
•
His raining tongue laps under her eyelids herds of woolly mammoth, bison, leaping reindeer, a tusked wild boar. Her head fills till it’s so heavy it rolls away by itself.
•
How would you define our relation? he asks. Technically we are lovers, she says after a while.
And nontechnically? (She cannot think of the term that would cover everything.)
•
She has gotten quite used to the way he leaps about and walks on top of the furniture. I don’t ordinarily behave like this, he says, tossing up the blankets in the air with his feet. Don’t, she says in her sleep, you’re letting out all the water. And in protest has curled into a ball. Don’t you have any more covers? He has heaped on her everything in the closet. He teases her with a hairbrush. But she knows it’s not him, grabs his wrist and pulls him in. They realize all this is very silly. They will get up and read the newspaper.
•
The day hangs suspended—a dull golden weave on which an impressionist master’s brush has sketched, placed at random, the familiar furnishings of a New York City apartment: the whiskey bottle, jar of instant coffee, cans of soup and spices on the shelf, a torn bag of sugar, ashtrays, magazines and a bowl of fruit on the floor. A tropical garden painted on the air. At this moment the mind, which has sunk deep into the trunk, a migrating organ, passing through the clapping valves of the heart and the belly toward the bowels; the mind, especially lucid, observes with surprised amusement an old riddle unfolding into a simple demonstration. Irrespective of will or will-lessness, the arm plunges into space, the hand reaches out to seize a pear and as gratuitously arrested, lies still on the fruit. Movement and rest, irrespective of will or will-lessness. The mind, sunk comfortably in the liver, finds a wonderful significance in this. It would like to make a note of it; but does not, in fact, any more than a fat man submerged in
