To Mervas Read Online Free PDF

and every bone in mine. The seconds got stuck in its path, bone shards, sharp as spears. His crying was hoarse but loud, somehow finding its strength, its source, somewhere inside his small infant body.
    In the beginning, when I asked if he was in pain, no one could give me a straight answer. They said he wasn’t supposed to be in pain. That there was no obvious reason he would be in pain. That they’d done everything they could so he wouldn’t feel any pain.
    â€œIf that’s the case, why is he crying?” I asked.
    But with time, I learned not to ask. I learned to sit next to his crying, to watch over it and hold his tormented little face under my gaze so that he’d be sure to know I’d never leave him, ever. I wanted his pain to become my pain, wanted to share this unbearable, difficult, unfair thing with him, it was to become my fate too; I’d make room for it in my life.
    â€œI think I know why he’s crying,” I said once, during morning rounds.
    â€œIs that so,” the ward doctor said, turning away from his colleagues for a moment to look at me.
    â€œI think he’s mourning his life,” I said. “He’s crying out of grief.”
    An awkward silence followed, and I immediately regretted what I’d said.
    â€œWell, that’s possible,” the doctor said. “I guess you could look at it that way.”
    The boy had brown hair and brown eyes. A nod, a greeting from the nonexistent father. Actually, it was a beautiful little face, in my eyes perfect. But with time this face more and more came to be obliterated. Little by little, it drowned in its own absence. During the first months, when I sat and more or less stamped his face within me, it was as if I understood that I had to bear witness to its existence, that I had to recognize its every detail and every last expression because later I would have to live with only the memory of having seen it, the memory of its existence. And then I would know that beneath the expressionless, vacant mask that illness had set on him, another face lay hidden, a wonderfully beautiful, living face had existed but was invisible.
    Eventually, they operated on the boy and he stopped crying. The twitching in his arm also disappeared. Now he was a still and silent bundle. My child was a still and silent bundle with human eyes, and I could finally bring him home.
    I often think about the boy these days. Ever since Kosti’s letter, he has occupied my thoughts. I think I was afraid of remembering before. But that didn’t protect me; it probably made me even more scared. I was walking around as if asleep, and all the animals on the savannah know that sleepwalkers are easy prey. I know that the boy is one of the roadsleading into the dark city, one of the roads that dissolve in there. I’m now walking down that path trying to recall my time with him, to remember how it was when I took him home. I was a mother then, because I gave up everything else in my life for him; I can see that now, afterward.
    But he wasn’t like other toddlers, my child. He never learned to sit or stand, never laughed or flailed his arms around when I leaned over him in his crib. He just was; he lived only through that strangely solitary gaze. His presence was without gesture or sign; it was more like a condition, a state of soul. And I allowed myself to disappear into it. I lived with him in a space that cannot be measured in minutes or years. It was a kind of eternity, like timelessness inside time itself. Sometimes, I can discern the shadow specter that used to be me, moving around in this apartment where I still live, moving around the child who was trapped inside his own body and refused to participate in life. I still have a few objects and a couple of photographs to confirm the actual existence of that period of time. But I don’t know; it’s as if they’re not proof enough.
    Incomprehensibly slowly, the boy did change.