The Visible World Read Online Free

someone had left by the wayside. The white circles where their branches had been lopped off made them look spotted. They were bleeding dark trails of sap from every cut—the air was rich with it. Large brown-and-purple butterflies I recalled from one of my childhood books moved in and out of the trees along the edge of the field; a small group fanned at the graying edge of a puddle a horse had left in the road. In my book, I remembered, the cardboard cutouts of the butterflies had slid in and out of invisible slots in the stems of flowers, opening and closing their wings as I opened and closed the book.
    Back in the village I found the house—fourth down from the pond—without too much trouble. I had an old photograph, taken before the war. It hadn’t changed. I looked at it for a while, with its slate roof and stuccoed walls. At the end of a goat-eaten yard was an old barn, half stone, half brick. A sheep with bits of leaves and sawdust in its wool was lying in its shade. No one seemed to be at home, and after a minute or two, when the sheep hadn’t moved and the strangely familiar face of a six- or eight-year-old girl had not appeared in the double windows to stare at me—as I had half believed and feared it might—I went on my way. If there had been someone to warn, someone to tell of the things to come, I might have stayed.
     
    She had been the third child born, and the first to survive. There had been a brother who came after her, she told me, though he had lived only a few hours, like a moth, and had been buried in a down-filled box hardly larger than a loaf of bread. My mother remembered that morning—the morning they buried her little brother—as one of the most precious moments of her childhood. She couldn’t tell me why. Sometimes there are things you love and can’t explain, she said.
    A cold morning. A fresh wind roughed the grass along the road; the flowers shook their heads and nodded. Her father, she said, held her hand as they walked, his calloused palm as hard and warm as a piece of wood left in the sun. On the way, she remembered, he told her a wonderful story about a
trpaslík
—an elf—who knew the path to a stone door, no taller than a hammer, that led to the other world. The one below the pond. From there, her father told her, you could look up and see
this
life, see everything—the trees, the separating clouds, the fishermen pulling at their earlobes or folding up their wooden stools—all this, just slightly distorted, like a face behind poorly made glass or a pane of new ice. These glimpses of our world were very precious to those who lived below; they could gaze at a dog’s pink tongue lapping at the edge of the sky for hours, and on those rare afternoons when the children leaped from the clouds, spearing down toward the silted roofs of their world clothed in white sheaths of bubbles, they would gather in great swaying crowds, their clothes fluttering about them, and weep.
    I begged her to tell me what happened after that, how the story ended, but she had forgotten. It didn’t matter. There were some things my mother wouldn’t tell me—I was used to that. But the story bothered me. I wondered what the pond people did in the winter when the sky above their heads stiffened and their world went dark; how they could see or play, and whether they had great watery fires to keep them warm.
    And so, for some time after my mother told me her father’s half-story, whenever I found myself alone with one of my parents’ friends, I would ask them—Mrs. Jakubcová, for example. Mrs. Jakubcová had never had any children of her own. She had calves as big and smooth as bowling pins, and she always sat on the sofa with her legs to one side as if glued at the knees, and smelled sweet and sad, like a dusty pastry. One day I asked her about the people who lived under the pond, and while I was at it, why the young man had played the piano instead of calling for a doctor, and who the men in the crypt