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“I dreamed that you deflowered me,” she said, smiling in her sleep.
“And what will you do now?” he asked. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do about Ezra and the children? I suppose I’m not the person with whom you want to discuss this...” His voice pursued in the dark.
Outside it’s snowing and night; naked under the blanket, January of another year...
Lying motionless, she reflected how strange it was to have beheld him in fact outside her, moving about the room, her lover and yet a stranger who had been her own dream; odd, delightful, ridiculous, lovely and illicit, to awake in the morning of a particular day to the hum of street noises, to look out on the water tanks and soot on the window sill, with his head on the pillow beside her.
But their last hours are not to be described—the sensation of his weight descending, the impropriety of the mattress tilting when he sat beside her the last time. The freshness of winter in the sleeve of his coat, snow and just-peeled oranges, perhaps her last sensation. Fragrance of spices from another world in his sleeve, his cool hand on her throat.
He shrugs, rises smoking.
“Was,” he says, standing before the dark window. “Was what was.”
“What was?” she wants to ask, but she can barely whisper.
He sits smoking on the window sill, watching for daybreak.
“Go on,” he says, his face dark in the blinding light, “you were telling me your dream.”
“I told you. I was sitting strapped in my seat in the plane. I wondered if the engines went dead. Then I felt a sudden drop; it was endless like a movie still, the sensation you get after taking sleeping pills—everything stops, it really stops and the lights have been left on.”
“That’s a good one. Death is just...” his voice trails off.
“What? Death is just a bad high? Is that what you said? The last part of the dream is really funny. The scene changed, everything was clear. It was in a square in Prague: women beating rugs over the railings; the Emperor had sent a man to give the Jews a name; everybody was singing like in a comic opera—I realized it was really on a stage. The dust from the carpets filled the square but the women continued singing in passionate sopranos. I heard the messenger call out the name Staubman and I was sure it was me.”
“Are you asleep?” he asks.
She is not sure whether she is making any sound. He is sitting on the edge of the bed. He has just come in, his cool hand on her bare shoulder, the freshness of winter in his sleeve.
“Why is everything so strange?” she asks. “Why?”
“Because you’re dead,” he says simply, his voice quiet and comforting. “Dead, dearest.” And rising with sudden energy he strides to his desk. “Sleep, Sophie,” he says, his voice far away, and writes: Day is breaking.
THIS PLACE must be the morgue. Yes, that’s why Ezra is sitting with police blankets over his winter coat. It is Ezra, the crying face, I know by the way he sniffles and blows his nose. Muttering to himself, Na ja. So ist es. It’s cold like the night he sat up with me in the hospital after the miscarriage when they couldn’t turn the air conditioner off. In the most expensive private room in the hospital, just after we were married, the only room available that night. He blows his nose in a handkerchief the size of a towel, one of the old batch from his father, and he’s got the battered old briefcase on the ground beside him. Some things never get lost. —Na ja, he repeats. Then with finality: Ecce homo.
—Mulier, I want to correct him. But he means himself.
—Na ja, he starts again, his nose very full. Now she is jenseits. She got there before either of us.
There are two huddled under the blankets. Master and disciple. Naturally he had to bring someone along. There must always be at least three people for Ezra. Terrible to be alone with me, alive or dead. Nicholas is with him; he’s grown a beard. A ghoulish, goat-faced Jesus-after-the-deposition lights up in the flare of a match. He chuckles and coughs. Ezra is showing him the present he bought for our fifteenth wedding anniversary. Eternal watch. Self-winding. Has day of month. —Paid five hundred marks, he says. Won’t need it. Jenseits.
His crammed briefcase bulges open. I see the titles of the old periodicals: Acephalos, Empedocles, Chimera, Exodus, Second Coming. He has brought with him material he needs for a paper on the woman messiah in Auguste Comte. Due the day after tomorrow at the conference in Amsterdam. He will write it tonight. But it’s dark. They light matches. —I understand why it’s cold, but why does it have to be dark? Ezra complains. They give up lighting matches.
Nicholas begins to recite in ancient Greek. You recall? he asks wistfully. He wonders if it was my hour to die. He continues to quote lines from Hippolytus’ speech in Euripides’ Phaedra. For my benefit? He knows Ezra doesn’t understand. They are the passages he read to me the first time we were alone together. —Missed her true moment. Her kairos. He concludes solemnly.
Ezra puffs rhythmically on his pipe, thinking aloud to himself. —Wouldn’t stand in my way if
