Listen to My Voice Read Online Free PDF Page B

slip – and taken you into his shop.
    ‘We’re in the tunnel,’ you kept saying. ‘Papa, Mamma, we’re in the tunnel. We made it!’
    For some time, you’d been obsessed with shelling, and with Germans beating on the door. When you saw me, you turned hostile, but you gave no sign of recognition. ‘What do you want from me?’ you asked. Only when I whispered in your ear that I was the person in charge of air defence did you give me your hand and follow me back to the house, as docile as a weary child.
    From that morning on, all our domestic emergencies involved your flights from the house and your heedless gestures. You washed your hands over the gas burner; if you felt like eating some marmalade, you didn’t open the jar, you broke it, and then you necessarily swallowed bits of glass, too; if you locked yourself in a room for protection, you shouted that we had to run to the shelter, because the alarm had already sounded; when Buck appeared at the door, you yelled, ‘The Gestapo are coming!’ – perhaps because of his extremely distant resemblance to an Alsatian – and then you’d run and hide, your face wet with tears.
    As far as you were concerned, I stopped being a hostile person and became a complete stranger; you never knew who I was. During those months, in order to survive and to help you to survive, I turned myself (like one of your favourite characters, Aladdin’s genie) into a multitude of different people.

    The game ended one windy December morning. Coming back from shopping, I found you on the ground in the yard, still wearing your nightgown. Your bare feet were covered with dirt, and Buck was whining by your side. Pursued by one of your ghosts, you’d run out of the house, probably tripped over some root, and struck your head against a tree. You were lying supine and smiling, one arm flung out over your head, as though doing the backstroke through the grass. A thin stream of blood marked your forehead, and beneath your eyelids, your eyes were finally at rest.

5
    NOT THAT MORNING, but three days later, you died in a ward of the hospital.
    Before dawn, while I was tossing and turning on my bed at home, the angel of death, armed with his fiery sword, swooped down on you. Buck must have sensed his passage, because when I got up, he wasn’t waiting for me, as usual, by the back door. Since he often disappeared, I wasn’t all that alarmed, but then, in the afternoon, someone called and said he’d read the phone number on Buck’s collar. A car had run him down not far from the hospital. Maybe he was on his way there to visit you, or maybe he thought you two should depart for the next world together. They told me his body had already been taken to the incinerator.

    Only about five people came to your burial, the neighbours and a couple of old friends, ancient ladies still capable of locomotion. The priest spoke like the owner of a car dealership, using conventional, slightly tired language to extol the excellence of his wares.
    The year was a few days from its end; as we left the cemetery, we were greeted by a burst of fireworks.
    A noisy group of kids was on the bus. They must have had a lot to drink already; one of them was wearing a Santa hat, and another was masked like a skull with living eyes.
    Once I was home, I did nothing but sleep. For three or four days, I slept heavily, dreamlessly. The house was cold, and the sudden gusts of wind made the shutters bang violently against the walls. Every now and then, that sharp, violent sound – it was like a gunshot – jolted me out of sleep.

    After I started moving around again, the great absence I felt every day wasn’t yours, but Buck’s. I still talked to him, went looking for him, put leftovers aside for him. I was strongly tempted to go to the dog pound and choose a replacement, but then I became submerged under the infinite amount of paperwork required by the conclusion of a life.
    I still couldn’t feel any grief at your not being there.