Mr. Potter Read Online Free Page B

shoes that were made of a very good leather from the skin of a cow who had been born and raised and then killed with care in the English countryside and how nice the cow’s skin now looked after it had been made into something pleasing (a pair of shoes), and into something that offered protection (a pair of shoes), and into something to cause envy (a pair of shoes); a pair of shoes did not come easily to Mr. Potter. And looking down at her feet, her eyes went across the floor and up the thin wall and the wall stopped some distance from the ceiling and May wondered what was the point of that, but it had a good reason, everything in the world had a good reason to back it up, and the room might have swirled and its entire contents spun around, caught up in the violence of a sudden turn in the world’s events, and inside that would be May and all her life right up to the moment she met Zoltan, and her life even after she became Mrs. Weizenger.
    And Dr. Weizenger heard his name “Zoltan” as his wife now called it out, only he thought she said “Samuel,” the name he had been called when he was a boy in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and he remembered
the peace of being himself, the peace of being an ordinary human being, in a position to grant the right to exist or the right to make disappear (this would be an insect, children are always allowed to have power over such things), in a position to judge beauty or its opposite (this would be the color of the noonday sky, children everywhere are allowed to have the power to judge such things); and when he had been a boy in a city in that prosperous place called Europe (and Mr. Potter knew the planet Mars as well as he knew the place called Europe), there were streets and in the streets were little houses placed tightly together, intimately, so intimately that this intimacy produced its opposite, and Dr. Weizenger did not know the names of the people who lived next to him. Dr. Weizenger went to a school, and he had a friend, he had many friends but now he could not remember their names, only the shape of their noses and the shape of their mouths and the color of their eyes and those things: the shape of their noses, the shape of their mouths, the color of their eyes was all that was left; everything else receded as if he was on a train (he had been on many trains, leaving to return, leaving, never to return) and it was pulling away from the platform of the train station, pulling away from a place that had been a destination and now was a place of departure. But this place now with Mr. Potter was a stationary place, Mr. Potter and all he came from had made it so, they
had been there for centuries, Mr. Potter and all he came from would not go away; the shape of their noses, the shape of their mouths, the color of their eyes would not go away. And Potter, thought Dr. Weizenger, the name of the man who had just driven them to their new destination, was a name so low, named after the service he offered, a potter, a man named after the sweat of his brow, so thought Dr. Weizenger; but “Zoltan,” came May’s voice, the voice of his nurse, the word that was his name, said by his wife.
    And Dr. Weizenger heard his wife’s voice and said to himself, Let a minute pass before I make a response to that, and then he said to himself, Let a second pass before I make a response to that. He told himself, silently, that he would allow a pause before he would make a response to this voice coming from this person who was in the same room with him: his entire world as it had been constituted in the past, the past before he came to Antigua, the past that took place before the hurried exit from one place to the next, their names prominent on atlases made after the sixteenth century: Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Shanghai; and houses and streets and rivers and quays and boats and embarkments and arrivals and endless days of rain and never-ending days of sunshine, and milk