Bobcat and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

it in the Kierkegaard Library. It was a chapter in an old green-cloth book that was so small I could palm it. The book had been written in 1945 by a man named Delores Tretsky, and it hadn’t been signed out since 1956. I began to leaf through it, and then crouched down to read. I read for a full hour; I thought it beautiful. I had not once in all my life stopped for even a moment to consider grammar, to wonder how it rose out of history like a wing unfurling.
    I had intended to write my own paper, to synthesize, as Stasselova had suggested, my own ideas with the author’s, but I simply had nothing to contribute. It seemed even rude to combine this work with my own pale, unemotional ideas. So I lifted a chapter, only occasionally dimming some passages that were too fine, too blinding.
    “THIS IS AN EXTRAORDINARY paper,” he said. He was holding his coffee cup over it, and I saw that coffee had already spilled on the page to form a small, murky pond.
    “Thank you,” I said.
    “It seems quite sophisticated. You must not have come here straight out of high school.”
    “I did,” I said.
    “Oh. Well, good for you.”
    “Thanks.”
    “You seem fully immersed in a study of oppression. Any reason for this?”
    “Well, I do live in the world.”
    “Yes, that’s right. And you say here—a shocking line—that a language must sometimes be repressed, and replaced, for the larger good. You believe this?”
    “Yes.”
    “You think that the Eastern-bloc countries should be forced to speak, as you say here, the mother tongue?”
    Some parts of the paper I had just copied down verbatim, without really understanding, and now I was stuck with them. Now they were my opinions. “Yes,” I said.
    “You know I am from that region.”
    “Is that right?”
    “From Poland.”
    “Whereabouts in Poland?” I asked conversationally.
    “I was born on the edge of it, in the dark forest land along its northeastern border, before the Soviet Union took it over completely, burning our towns. As children we were forced to speak Russian, even in our homes, even when we said good night to our mothers as we fell asleep.”
    This was turning into a little piece of bad luck.
    “When did you write this?” he asked.
    “Last week.”
    “It reads like it was written fifty years ago. It reads like Soviet propaganda.”
    “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
    “Did somebody help you?”
    “Actually, yes. Certainly that’s all right?”
    “Of course, if done properly. Who was it that helped you, a book or a person?”
    “My roommate helped me,” I said.
    “Your roommate. What is her name?”
    “Solveig.”
    “Solveig what?”
    “Solveig Juliusson.”
    “Is she a linguistics scholar?”
    “No, just very bright.”
    “Maybe I can talk to Solveig myself?”
    “Unfortunately, you can’t.”
    “Why not?”
    “It’s complicated,” I said.
    “In what way?”
    “Well, she’s stopped eating. She’s very thin. Her parents were worried, so they took her home.”
    “Where does she live?”
    “I don’t know.”
    We both sat silent. Luckily, I had experience lying in my adolescence and knew it was possible to win even though both parties were aware of the lie. The exercise was not a search for truth but rather a test of exterior reserve.
    “I’m sure she’ll be returning soon,” I said. “I’ll have her call you.”
    Stasselova smiled. “Tell her to eat up,” he said, his sarcasm curled inside his concern.
    “Okay,” I said. I got up and hoisted my bag over my shoulder. As I stood, I could see the upper edge of the sun falling down off the hill on which St. Gustav was built. I’d never seen the sun from this angle before, from above as it fell, as it so obviously lit up another part of the world, perhaps even flaming up the sights of Stasselova’s precious, oppressed Poland, its dark contested forests and burning cities, its dreamy and violent borders.
    MY ROOMMATE SOLVEIG WAS permanently tan. She went twice