Tell Read Online Free Page A

still had the use of both eyes. He wondered how to go about locating him. Wary of looking to the future in the midst of war, they’d never exchanged addresses. Friendship could take a turn over there and be snapped apart as soon as it had begun.
    All of this was tiring to think about. Kenan looked through the windows of the back veranda again. The clothes on the line were so twisted in the shadows, their individual shapes were unrecognizable. He hated disorder. As if to punctuate his thoughts, a blast of wind shook the windowpanes. He retreated, and once more made his way across the house.
    This time, he lifted the new jacket off its hook and pressed it to his chest. His right hand explored the inner lining while he estimated the warmth and weight of it. The jacket smelled of newness, though it had been hanging there for several weeks. Using his right arm to hold it in position, he slid his dead arm down into the left sleeve, the way he’d been taught by the nursing sisters in the English hospital. With that done, he pushed his right arm into place. He buttoned with one hand and pulled the toggles over a double strip of cloth that hid the buttons down the front. He reached back and pulled the hood up over his head. The hood was coarse and new to his fingertips, the weight of cloth evenly distributed over his shoulders. The jacket could not have been a better fit. He tugged at the hood in such a way that only half his face could be seen through the opening. The dead eye was covered.
    He walked through the house again, but this time, for the first time, he opened the side door and stepped out. His heartbeat was erratic. He placed a foot on the outdoor step and understood that his exit had been rehearsed a thousand thousand times. He left the door unlocked behind him.
    He thought he should stand on the stoop at the back and wheel in the line, one-handed, so that he could make an attempt at untangling the clothes. But he did not want to risk beingseen. Someone might look out an upper window of a neighbouring house, get a glimpse of the man who stayed inside, the man crazed by war. Was that what the town thought of him?
He went a bit strange. He was a bit funny in the head after he came home. Poor Tress, who has to put up with him.
    He made his way toward the street, veered right and walked away. The town map opened in his mind. Leaves scuttered at his feet. He had once loved the sound; now it surprised and startled him. At the end of the boardwalk, he stepped down into hardened ruts in the road. He kept his head lowered. He knew he could turn back at any moment. He began to take long strides, making up for the many months of short, repetitive steps in the house. The worn path was there at the eastern edge of town, just as he knew it would be. He followed the path, kept close to the bay, wide of the old gasworks, sharply away from a rotting, unused pier. There was no one around. Not in this wind.
    He had not been seen.
    Relief attached itself to the old danger. Relief and danger, these were familiar edges he knew how to move between. He sucked in air stirred by the wind to which he’d listened all day. His lungs filled with cold. He registered the mix of scents: weeds at the edge of the bay; still, deep water; brittle and fallen leaves; damp and hardening earth. Portents of winter. Scents of such pleasure, they knocked him back in surprise.
    He was afraid that he would break down in some threatening way. Or that he might turn back. Everything was new-old, in the way a person might stand in an open doorway at the turn of season and raise his head and breathe deeply, knowing that in this familiar place, change had come.
    Because he was walking, Kenan instinctively allowed his good eye to close. He stumbled, recovered and swore to himself. This was not the meandering of a half-blind man through the rooms of his own house.
    Cues entered his good eye and slid into body memory—a branch, a tree, a shape. The path dwindled. He’d