Eddie Signwriter by Adam Schwartzman Read Free Book Online

done, perhaps even without knowing it.
    “What?” he asked. “They haven’t been lucky?”
    “No,” the teacher said, “they have been lucky, but not by accident. Their wills are so strong that their own luck is a choice.”
    He thought he saw what the teacher was trying to say to him and it seemed all right to him then. Not that he knew too much aboutgreat people in history—about Napoleon and Churchill and Martin Luther King. Though he did know for sure that he wasn’t going to be one of them. And so the fact that many things seemed to happen accidentally in his life was no argument against the teacher’s. But it set him thinking, and the next time he was at the teacher’s house he told the teacher about something that had happened when he was younger and living in Botswana. Not to him, but to a neighbour who was murdered by South African soldiers, who came across the border looking for somebody from the ANC but threw a grenade into the wrong person’s yard, and killed a man’s wife, and how afterwards they all came and saw the cotton dress flapping round the body like a chocolate wrapper, and the rest of the woman’s flesh hanging in a thorn tree.
    And he asked the teacher, “What kind of luck was that, to be the wife of the wrong person?” And was there something not great enough about her that this is what happened to her? And he told the teacher about something he often felt was true: that things didn’t have to happen for a reason, that they happen for nothing, as that woman was dead for nothing.
    The teacher was quiet for a while, and then he said, “Do you think about that a lot?”
    He said, “Not until last week,” although that was not true. He lied because he thought the teacher was sorry for him and he didn’t want him to be.
    “That’s bad,” the teacher said, and he thought that was the end of it. But then the teacher added, “especially for her.” And he was surprised by that, because it seemed that the teacher was laughing and inviting him to laugh with him at what happened to this woman, as children laugh about cruelty, and he didn’t know the teacher to be that way.
    But he didn’t laugh. He said: “It was very bad. I felt sorry for her.”
    The teacher said, “Not the destiny she would have preferred for herself.”
    “I don’t know what she thought about herself,” he said, and although he tried not to show it, he was confused, because he didn’tknow what the teacher meant when he said the word
destiny
like that, as if the whole idea were a joke that the teacher was contemptuous of himself.
    And he thought the teacher noticed his confusion, because he turned his head away suddenly, as if struck by an unconnected thought. When the teacher turned back to him he was himself again.
    “A person has to learn to live with their life,” the teacher said, and that this was the advice he was giving him. The teacher said, “Try to own what happens. Try to have a view on things.”
    But maybe he didn’t have any ideas about how things should be, he said. Or maybe he hadn’t yet come across a view that made much sense to him, and didn’t have one of his own, unless having no view itself constitutes a view.
    He said, “Maybe it’s easier to let things happen to you. That’s what they’re going to do anyway. It’s easier than being worried all the time.”
    “Do
you feel
worried?” the teacher asked.
    He told the teacher that he didn’t, that in fact he felt nothing.
    “You don’t have goals?” the teacher asked, “Ambitions?” and there was that mocking tone again in his voice.
    “Of what?”
    “Of how you’d like your life to turn out,” the teacher suggested.
    He shrugged.
    The teacher did not respond.
    It seemed to him then that what he had said to the teacher had saddened and exhausted him. First the teacher looked at him and then he looked away again. The teacher was very still. He could see his breathing. He sensed at first that the teacher was making up