The Visible World Read Online Free PDF

in the girlish bend of an elbow or the inward tilt of a knee. In the demure, almost coquettish turn of a chin. They began to try to guess in advance.
    She was in the ninth casket in the row of eleven. It was obvious right away that she had been buried alive, my father said. Unlike all the others, who seemed more or less at rest, with their arms and legs laid straight out and their chins tucked almost thoughtfully into their throats, she was all rage and fury. Her caramel-colored skull, with its few pitiful wisps of hair, had bent straight back on the spine, so that she appeared to be arching up on her head. Her mouth was still open, caught in mid-scream. Worst of all, though, were her hands, or what remained of them, which lay palm-up by her neck like birds’ feet, still clawing at what had long ago given way.
    A tiny bell sounded from the stairwell, and they turned and left the abbess in her coffin, walking past the rows of sleeping dead and the tumbled skulls and Franz Trenck in his glass-topped coffin, then up the narrow stairs to the street where they found the sun already fallen behind the body of the church and night coming on.

6
    AMERICA WAS MY FOREGROUND, FAMILIAR AND KNOWN : the crowds, the voices, Captain Kangaroo and Mister Magoo, the great trains clattering and tilting west, pulling out of the seam in the summer wall as my father and I sat waiting in the DeSoto on Old Orchard Road. Behind it, though, for as long as I can remember, was the Old World, its shape and feel and smell, like the pattern of wallpaper coming through the paint.
    My father loved America, loved the West—the idea of it, the grandness and the absurdity of it. It was a vicarious sort of thing. To my knowledge, for example, he never watched a baseball game in his life, yet the thought that millions of men cared passionately for it, that they had memorized names and batting averages, somehow gave him pleasure. The time we drove west, my mother in her sunglasses and deep blue scarf looking like Audrey Hepburn in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s,
he was nearly stunned into speechlessness by the vastness of it all: the sheer immensity of the sky, the buzz of a bluebottle under that huge lid of sun, the oceanic valleys stretching to the horizon. The little two-lanes and the sleepy motels thrilled him; every menu was an adventure, and he’d study the gravy-stained paper through his reading glasses as if it were a letter from some distant land, which I suppose it was.
    I have a memory of him standing in the open door of some small motel room in New Mexico, leaning against the doorframe, smoking. Swallows or bats are dipping under the telephone wires. It’s dusk, and the land on the other side of the road opens into endless space—bluing, vast, lunar. It’s as if the room, the motel, the gas station down the way could tip into it at any moment and snake like a necklace into a well. My mother lies on the bed under the light, her legs crossed at the ankle, reading a magazine.
    “My God, Ivana, you should come and see this,” my father says. “I could fit half of Czechoslovakia into the space between the road and those cliffs out there.”
    “I’m sure you could,” says my mother.
     
    The West, my father liked to say, especially after he’d had a glass or two of wine in the evenings when we had friends over, was the great solvent of history. It dissolved the pain, retained the shell: “Paris, Texas; Rome, Arkansas...Just try and imagine it the other way around,” he’d say. “Chicago, Italy? Dallas, Austria? Unthinkable.” No, the funnel was securely in place. Everything was running one way. Eventually all of Europe, all the popes and plagues, the whole bloody carnival, would be a diner somewhere off the highway in Oklahoma.
    “Here he goes,” someone would say.
    “Think of it,” my father would say. “The Little Museum of Memory. The Heaven of Exiles. Entertainment for the whole family.”
     
    On a train out of Grand Central one March day,