Brainfire Read Online Free PDF Page A

least twenty-five times to a politician before he begins to understand what you’re talking about.”
    He’s lying, she thought. I am old, I am being lied to and patronized — and yet he knows, he knows I can see, that he is like a sheet of thin glass to me .
    â€œHe said the formalities will be taken care of when we get to Moscow.”
    â€œMoscow?”
    â€œDidn’t you know? That’s where they keep all the rubber stamps.” He was trying to make a joke, she saw that. But his smile was thin and his gray eyes uncharacteristically opaque—as if a vital part of him were elsewhere, not on this train, not in this compartment, but removed to some great distance. She pressed her hands together: there was a faint spark of pain.
    â€œAnyway,” he said, “why in the name of heaven do you want to go to Israel so badly? It doesn’t snow in Israel, you know. What will you do all day? The sun will burn you to death.”
    He had risen, walked to the window; he was looking out at the workmen laboring miserably in the drifts. He shook his head back and forth.
    â€œAh. I promise you. You’ll miss all this gorgeous snow, Mrs. Blum.”
    She closed her eyes once more: it was odd how sleep came back on her, rather like a tide. No matter how rested she felt, regardless of how long she had slept, there was always a drowsiness on the margins of her mind—like clouds, she thought, clouds rolling in from hills. A small comfort, a small death. When she stared into the clouds she surrendered her hold on the things around her, as if they were beads breaking apart on a string, scattering, rolling this way and that—
    An increased dosage
    Startled, opening her eyes, she looked at Domareski. But he hadn’t said anything. He wasn’t even looking at her. She struggled into a sitting position. An increased dosage? What did that mean? Why had she picked up on that? Now Domareski turned to look at her and there was a slight expression of sadness on his face. An increased dosage of what? She watched him a moment as he came back from the window. He sat on the edge of the bunk and picked up a leather wallet from the table. He opened it, flicking through the snapshots in the plastic covers.
    â€œI think I know your family almost as well as you,” he said. She watched the snapshots move as he flipped them past her—and the colors jumped at her, faces transformed by sunlight, photographs incandescent with captured light: they were not still, stiff, posed; they rippled, they were animated, figures coming off the surface at her. She took the wallet from him and she thought: My life. My whole life. Without this there is nothing else. The boy, Stanislav—no, he wasn’t a boy anymore, he wasn’t the child Aaron had held in his arms, he was forty now—but he would always be the boy. The slim girl he had married, the girl with the dark liquid eyes and the captivating name of Yael, the sound as of some soft bird skimming the surface of tranquil water—Yael; and the grandchildren—a sturdy boy who looked as Aaron had once looked, a girl as slim as her mother. The longing to touch them was painful to her. She had imagined and rehearsed it an infinity of times, seeing them run toward her, seeing all that shyness and strangeness break down in loving; she had felt her face pressed against them, their hair, their hands, how they would feel to touch. She knew them: in all their mannerisms, their delights, in all their moods and concerns and daydreams and ambitions, she knew them. And the longing, in its intensity, was worse than ever. It was a weight in her heart.
    â€œYou understand,” she said to Domareski.
    He said nothing. He nodded his head. He laid his hand upon the back of her wrist.
    â€œI’m a prisoner in this country,” she said. “I’m a prisoner.”
    He stared at her now and she caught it again: An increased dosage, that’s all .