A Blessing on the Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

together.With the clattering of her teeth and the whistling sighs her quivering chest forces from her lungs, she sounds like a train disappearing down a ghostly track and I doubt that she will live much longer.
    “You mustn’t trouble yourself, Pan Skibelski.” She holds up a nervous arm in protest. It shakes wildly in the space between us. “We are intruders here. We have no rights.”
    “Nonsense,” I say, taking freshly laundered sheets from the linen cupboard in the hall. “I was spying on you. It’s I who had no right and you who must forgive me.”
    She cries again and I pretend not to notice. Instead, I busy myself with the bedclothes, tucking in the corners of the sheets, fluffing the blanket in the air before me, like a magician snapping his magic cape. It settles down onto the bed and I do the same with the goose-down comforter, a gift for my Hadassah’s dowry, which inexplicably disappeared at the time of her wedding. “Ah, so this is where you’ve been hiding,” I say to it, finding it lurking furtively in the bottom of an oaken wardrobe filled with blankets, pillows, and towels.
    I leave the soiled sheets in the laundry basket at the end of the hall. In the bathroom, I fill the sink with steaming hot water, watching my reflection disappear behind the wall of mist that soon coats the mirror’s glass. I drop six white hand towels into the water and then remove them and wring them out, burning my hands. I drape each one over a bare forearm, three on each side. The sensation is not unpleasant. The towels lightly singe the hair on my arms. I carry along a pewter basin into which I will drop each towel after it is spent. In myvest and shirtsleeves, I remind myself of a waiter in a posh restaurant on Warsaw’s Marszalkowska Street.
    Quietly, I open the door to her room. She is curled up in the rocking chair, still, her eyes red, her cheeks drawn, sucking on a thumb encrusted with her own filth.
    “You mustn’t,” I say, removing her hand from her mouth. I rub it with the hot cloth, wiping the dirt away. “Feels good, doesn’t it?” Her body loses some of its tension, and she allows me to move the cloth across her arms. I kneel before her. She places one foot on my shoulder, and I clean the grime from her shins.
    Her crying has stopped and her breathing is longer, deeper, more regular. My hot towel scurries across her bony shoulders and her spindly neck and then into the intricate crevices of her faintly smiling mouth.
    Crossing her arms, she reaches for the hem of her soiled shift, and with one move, raises her hipbone from the seat of the chair, pulling the garment off over her head. I lift a new handcloth from my forearm and quickly smooth it over her flat belly and her equally flat chest.
    Her shivering returns and so I drape my jacket about her thin shoulders, while I look through my daughter’s things for a clean chemise. Half asleep in the middle of the room, Ola stands with her arms in the air. I draw the clean garment over her. She yawns happily as I position her in her bed, then rolls over and is immediately asleep, her body curled into a question mark.
    It is night outside. Incredible that so much time has passed. I gathermy things from the room, my coat with its bullet holes, the half dozen white towels, all cold now with a heavy dampness, and I douse the light and shut the door, returning the water bowl to its place beneath the bathroom sink.
    In the nursery, I hang my coat on the back of a miniature chair, lay the towels out to dry across the proscenium arch of a toy theatre. I untie my tie, unlock my cuff links, unbutton and remove my shirt. My big belly is white and round in the starlight. A forest of grey hairs grows across the soft mounds of my chest. I undo my belt and my pants sink of their own weight to my ankles. My arms and legs are long and thin, like sticks. I sit on Sabina’s little bed, remove my underpants and consider my sex. It shrivels and recoils flaccidly into its