To Mervas Read Online Free PDF Page A

wine. On the table was a bouquet of Easter lilies, and outside the kitchen window, the leaves were opening on the birch. At once, I became aware that it was spring, late spring. I sank down on a chair by the table and stared out at the birch, massive tears welling up inside me. A gray mountain of tears.
    â€œI’m like the boy,” I moaned. “I just cry and cry – ”
    I tried to laugh a little, but it wasn’t possible. Instead, my laugh turned into a bawl, a long bawl growing out of my mouth like a plant, the stem of a plant. I couldn’t breathe; it felt as if my bawling would suffocate me. It was a sea of sound filling every part of me; I ran from the table, threw myself on the balcony door, and tore it open. My sister was right behind me, yelling and pounding her fists against my back; she held me, and I felt the cramping subside; I could breathe again.
    â€œIt hurts so much,” I sobbed into my sister’s hair. “Everything hurts so much. I’m crashing to the ground. Every bone in my body is breaking.”
    We let go of each other quickly, my sister and I. We weren’t used tothat kind of intimacy; it made us uncomfortable.
    From then on, I slept at home most nights. I made myself watch television and read the paper, tried to pretend that this was me, that this was my life. Outside, summer was in full bloom, but I took no part in it. There is a particular kind of white-hot anguish, a daylight anguish that can scorch you, make you thin and transparent like rice paper. That’s how I felt that summer. Seeing a wasp could mortify me to the point that I ran all the way home and crawled into bed struggling with the white-hot feeling. I scarcely had the courage to live.
    Some days I couldn’t make myself visit the boy. I’d remain sitting in the kitchen or the hallway for hours, incapable of moving. Sometimes I called my sister.
    â€œI can’t make myself visit him,” I whispered into the phone.
    Then she’d come over and accompany me to the hospital. Or take me to the bus stop. If she set me in motion, I could keep going on my own.
    But there were other obstacles, obstacles that had to be overcome. There was the very smell of the hospital. You had to submit to it. When I’d lived there, I must have gotten used to it; I guess I’d reeked of it myself. But now, the distinctive odor bothered me. It filled me with its order and regime. It’s a very particular smell, and you can sense it most inside the bathrooms, an odd brew of cleanliness and decay, topped off with rubber and ointments. Shivering, I’d allow myself to be filled with it once more, even though I’d rather have escaped. But I’d make it through the corridors and up to the ward. Stopping at the nurses’ reception desk, I could already hear the boy crying in his room, his tired, cracked cries mixing with the music box endlessly chiming “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” I’d take a deep breath, and go in to see the nurse, if she was there.
    â€œDid he have a – ”
    â€œOh no, everything’s fine.”
    I didn’t want to utter the word seizure. It was one of those harmful words no one was allowed to say. The nurses knew about it too, they made deliberate and complex efforts to avoid saying it. But the doctors used the word dispassionately, as if they were trying to normalize it.
    â€œWe can’t say for sure if he’s been damaged by the latest series of seizures,” they’d say.
    What to them was simply a field of knowledge was for me nothing but suffering: penetrating anxiety, and deep terror. Most of the time it seemed as if they couldn’t see the great difference between them and me: to me, the boy’s condition would never be an interesting subject; it was a nightmare.
    Most difficult was his crying. It never ceased; it was a saw slowly cutting through time. It was sawing through the bones, every bone in his body,