Falling Out of Time by David Grossman Read Free Book Online Page A

ubiety,
    which churns in me now
    with an affluence
    of being I have never
    felt before.
    His death
    has qualified me
    to conceive him.
    His death
    makes me
    an empty slough
    of father—and of
    mother: it bares
    my breast for
    no one there to suckle.
    And on the walls
    of my womb,
    which on that day was hewn,
    his death—with fleeing captive’s fingernails—
    notches off the score of days
    without him.
    Thus, with lucent chisel,
    his death
    engraves its news on me:
    the bereaved
    will always
    woman be.
    TOWN CHRONICLER: The next night, my wife and I take our daily walk again. Between the houses we catch an occasional glimpse of the small procession ambling over the hilltops on the horizon.
    TOWN CHRONICLER’S WIFE: In recent days I think I see, over their heads, in the air, some sort of reddish flicker, a chain of embers hovering above …
    TOWN CHRONICLER: As usual, she sets our pace. When she pauses, I stop, too. Sometimes, when she is lost in thought, I must enter a yard and huddle behind a fence, praying I won’t encounter a dog. At this moment she watches the strange embers at length, and I, as always, watch her. The faint moonlight falls on her face. She was so beautiful once. She is now, too.
    When we finally arrive at her home, she opens the door. But tonight she lingers at the doorway, turns, and looks straight into the dark, as though guessing exactly where I am hiding. I feel the home current wafting toward me, warm and fragrant. She hugs her body and sighs softly. I may be wrong, but perhaps it is her way of telling me that she would like to fall upon me now, screaming, teeth bared, and beat me furiously with her fists, tear my skin off with her nails.
    She slowly shuts the door. Retreats into her home. I look up to the hills.
    WALKING MAN:
    And he himself,
    he is dead,
    I know now.
    I now can say—though
    always in a whisper—“The boy
    is dead.”
    I understand, almost,
    the meaning of the sounds:
    the boy is dead. I recognize
    these words as holding truth:
    he is dead. I know.
    Yes, I admit it: he is dead.
    But his death—it swells,
    abates,
    fulminates.
    Unquiet,
    unquiet
    is his death.
    So unquiet.
    ELDERLY MATH TEACHER:  … Based on my observations, I believe, my boy, that only a certain type of person is likely to notice it—the
blaze
. That, between me and myself, is what I call those mysterious embers.
    TOWN CHRONICLER: I met him again by chance tonight, at three o’clock in the morning. This time he was not writing exercises on the wall. Tired, defeated almost, he sat down in the dark on the street bench where I was napping. After we shared a moment of embarrassment, andafter I reminded him that I had been his pupil in the first grade, and that it was in his class that I had met the woman who would eventually become my wife, we climbed up onto the bench together and stood there watching the phenomenon.
    ELDERLY MATH TEACHER: My heart tells me, my boy, that from the moment a person notices the blaze, he is destined to get up and go to it.
    TOWN CHRONICLER: As he spoke, his large feet shuddered and shook the wooden bench. My own small feet were suddenly filled with motion. I talked to him silently. I said there was a time in the world when my daughter was not in it at all. She was not yet. Nor was there the happiness she brought me, nor all these torments. I wanted him to look at me with his lost, confused gaze in which everything was possible. I wanted him to call me to a house wall again and test me on addition-subtraction for all eternity. I thought: Perhaps he also longs to be an innocent young teacher again? Perhaps I could ask my wife here, and together we could build a little class that would suffer no sorrow? I had already begun to hum “two and two are four” when he suddenly leaped off thebench—I was amazed to see how agile he still was—and stood looking at his twitching feet. Then he spread his hands before me in apology and turned to leave, mumbling to himself:
    ELDERLY MATH