An Offering for the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

pontoon, waiting for the harbor ferry, which was supposed to take us to the other side. Dock workers were sailing with us. We did not say a word. It was damp and hazy. We were freezing. The ferry crushed and ground the white ice floes. On the opposite shore, we had to walk for a time amid bleak warehouses and across the desolate pavement of the docks until we found the steamer. I gave her the valise, and we shook hands. We did not embrace, no. Then she went up the gangway. How tiny she looked against the high wall of the ship. And I too stood down below, small and lost. She glanced back a few times. On deck, she was greeted by a crewman. That was the last I saw of her. I returned home without a thought my mind. At the letter box, I remembered that she had given me a postcard to mail. I pulled it out and read: "Dear Grandmother, On my last day at home ..." I read no further. I quickly thrust the card into the letter box. The lid slammed shut. I had to control myself to keep from bursting into tears. So many people were passing back and forth, all of them had something to do and somewhere to go. Why had this girl left her homeland? Hold on, I know. She did not care to wait.
    But she sailed very far away, and the woman sitting next to me could never have worn a burgundy frock.
    And again my eyes alight on the opal. It is the dead of night. A man stands at the second-story window of a cheap house. He stands in the dark. He can be seen only when the night wind pushes the foliage of the trees slightly aside, so that the moonlight falls upon his figure. He thinks: "Yes, I want to suggest it to her." But it is already too late for the suggestion; he should have come with it an hour earlier. At that time, two people, like thousands of other pairs of lovers in the same city, stood leaning in the shade of a house, and the world around them was an indifferent hubbub. Across the street, a construction site was fenced off with raw planks. A circus had glued its posters on the boards. There, in the glow of the street light, one could see a number of elephants involved in all sorts of mischief; each elephant's trunk held on to the next one's little tail.
    That was when he should have made the suggestion to her that he was now pondering: "Why do we not die together? For there is nothing beyond this but death."
    Yet her hands were much too hard for such a heavy ring to suit her.
    Suddenly, I forgot all that. Without a sound of lament, the hostess at my side vanished from my thoughts.
     
    At the other end of the table, a conversation had begun, forcing me to concentrate my entire being on it. They were discussing an event that had occurred at noon and was on everyone's mind. I too was familiar with it.
    At precisely twelve noon, two huge, unknown birds from the west had appeared above the city. Flying slowly, almost without moving their wings, and at not too high an altitude, they floated, seeking, across the houses, circled the tower of the city hall three times, and then vanished in the direction from which they had come. When it was over, people exchanged uncertain glances, wondering if they had fallen prey to a hallucination; and ever since, they had been talking and arguing about nothing else. Indeed, there were no two consistent statements about the event. The dimensions ascribed to the birds were nonsensical; their color was now white, now black; and extremely clever people maintained that the tops of the wings were white and the bottoms black. It was not even certain how long the whole incident had lasted. Everyone claimed to have held his breath for an eternity; but in reality, clocks had barely advanced. When they calculated it afterwards, not even a single minute was missing — either in the daily schedules of individual people or in the timetables of public transportation.
    As I have said, I too had seen the birds. I was standing at the staircase window in a large office building. It may also have been a government building or a