Various Miracles Read Online Free Page A

things in the flat are supplied, and that this particular coffee cup was made of a sort of tinted glass in a pattern which can be found in any cheap chain store in France. Suddenly, or so she told me later, there was a cracking sound, and her cup lay in a thousand pieces in the saucer.
    It had simply exploded. She wondered at first if she had been shot at with an air rifle. There was another apartment building opposite under construction, and at any time of the day workmen could be seen standing on the roof. But clearly it would have required an extraordinary marksman to pick off a cup of coffee like that from such a distance. And when she sifted through the slivers of glass, which she did with extreme care, she found no sign of a pellet.
    The incident unnerved her. She put on her blouse when she went out on the balcony later in the day, but I noticed she kept a cup of coffee in the middle of the table as though daring a second explosion to occur.
    I knew, though I’m not a scientist, that occasionally tempered glass fractures spontaneously. It’s thought to come about by a combination of heat, light and pressure. It happens sometimes to the windshields of automobiles, though it is extremely rare and not entirely understood.
    I told all this to my wife. “I still don’t understand how it could have happened,” she said. I explained again, knowing my explanation was vague and lacking in precision. I was anxious to reassure her. I reached down and put my arms around her, and that was how my accident occurred. She turned to look at me, and as she did so, the back of her earrings tore the skin of my face.
    It was surprising how long the tear was, about four inches in all, and it was deeper than just a scratch, although the blood oozed out slowly, as though with reluctance. We both realized I would require stitches.
    The doctor in the Montpellier clinic spoke almost perfect English, but with a peculiar tonelessness, rather like one of those old-fashioned adding machines clicking away. “You will require a general anesthetic,” he told me. “You will be required to remain in the hospital overnight.”
    My wife was weeping. She kept saying, “If only I hadn’t turned my head just at that moment.”
    The doctor explained that since the hospital was full, I would have to share a room. Always, he said, gesturing neatly with both hands, always at vacation time there were accidents. A special government committee, in fact, had been established to look into this phenomenon of
accidents de la vacances
, and someone had suggested that perhaps it might be the simplest solution if vacations were eliminated entirely.
    I speak French fluently, having grown up in Montreal, but I have difficulty judging the tone of certain speakers. I don’t know when someone—the doctor, for example—is speaking ironically or sincerely; this has always seemed to me to be a serious handicap.
    While still under the anesthetic I was put into a room occupied by a young man who had been in a motorcycle accident. He had two broken legs and a shattered vertebra and was almost completely covered in white plaster. Only his face was uncovered, a young face with closed eyes and smooth skin. I put my hand on my own face which was numb beneath the dressing, and wondered for the first time if I would be left with a scar.
    My wife came to sit by my bed for a while. She was no longer crying. She had, in fact, been shopping and had boughta new pale-yellow cardigan with white flowers around the neck, very fresh and springlike. I was touched to see that she had removed her earrings. On her ear lobes there was nothing but a faint dimple, the tiny holes made, she once told me, by her own mother when she was fourteen years old.
    There seemed little to talk about, but she had bought a
Herald Tribune
, something she normally refuses to do. She scorns the
Herald Tribune
, its thinness and its effete news coverage. And it’s her belief that when you are in another country