Memory Wall: Stories by Anthony Doerr Read Free Book Online Page A

Vredehoek everything looks hazy and tenuous. Cars loom up out of the white and disappear again. Alma sleeps till noon. When she wakes she comes tottering out with her wig in proper alignment, her eyes bright. “Good morning,” she says.
    Pheko is startled. “Good morning, Mrs. Alma.”
    He serves her oatmeal, raisins, and tea. “Pheko,” she says, enunciating his name as if tasting it. “You’re Pheko.” She says his name several more times.
    “Would you like to sit indoors today, Mrs. Alma? It’s awfully damp out there.”
    “Yes, I’ll stay inside. Thank you.”
    They sit in the kitchen. Alma shovels big spoonfuls of oatmeal into her mouth. The television burbles out news about rising tensions, farm attacks, violence outside a health clinic.
    “Now my husband,” Alma says suddenly, not quite speaking to Pheko but to the kitchen at large, “his passion was always rocks. Rocks and the dead things in them. Always off to do, as he put it, some grave-robbing. Mine was less obvious. I did care about houses. I was an estate agent before many women were estate agents.”
    Pheko sets a hand on top of his head. Except for a mild unsteadiness in her voice, Alma sounds much as she did a decade ago. The television drones. Fog presses against the balcony windows.
    “There were times when I was happy and times when I was not,” continues Alma. “Like anyone. To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.” She looks at Pheko then, though not quite directly at him. As if a guest floats behind him and to his left. Fog seeps through the garden. The trees disappear. The lounge chairs disappear. “Don’t you think?”
    Pheko closes his eyes, opens them.
    “Are you happy?”
    “Me, Mrs. Alma?”
    “You should have a family.”
    “I do have a family. Remember? I have a son. He is five years old now.”
    “Five years old,” says Alma.
    “His name is Temba.”
    “I see.” She drives her spoon into what’s left of the oatmeal and lets go and watches its handle slowly fall down to touch the rim of the bowl. “Come with me.”
    Pheko follows her up the stairs into the guest bedroom. For a full minute she stands beside him, both of them facing her wall of papers and cartridges. She crouches, moving here and there along the wall. Her lips move silently. On the wall in frontof Pheko is a postcard of a little island ringed by a turquoise sea. Two years ago Alma worked every day on this wall, posting things, concentrating. How many meals did Pheko bring her up in this room?
    She reaches for the photo of Harold and fingers its corner a moment. “Sometimes,” she says, “I have trouble remembering things.”
    Behind her, out the window, the fog cycles and cycles. The sky is invisible. The neighbor’s rooftops are gone. The garden is gone. Everything is white. “I know, Mrs. Alma,” Pheko says.
    V APOR L IGHTS
    It’s 9:30 p.m. and the wind is shrieking against the ten thousand haphazard houses in Site C. As soon as he walks in the door, Pheko can tell by the way Miss Amanda has her lips pinched under her teeth that Temba has become ill. A foot away, he can feel the heat radiating off the boy’s body. “Little lamb,” whispers Pheko.
    The queue at the twenty-four-hour clinic is already long, longer than Pheko has ever seen it. Mothers and children sit on upturned onion crates or sleep on blankets. Behind them a bus-length mural depicts Jesus stretching supernaturally long arms across a wall. Dried leaves and plastic bags scuttle down the road.
    Two separate times over the next few hours Pheko has to get out of line because Temba has soiled his clothes. He cleans his son, wraps him in a towel, and returns to wait outside the clinic. The vapor lights on their towers above Site C rock back and forth like some aggregation of distant moons. Scraps of paper and skeins of dust fly through the air beneath them.
    By 2 a.m. Pheko and Temba are still