The Visible World Read Online Free Page B

he said. He closed the book with a gentle clap. “If I were you, I would stay away from sisters like that. And the gods too, maybe. Now go to sleep, quickly—until morning will do—or your mother will be angry with me.”
    I lay down on my pillow and he pulled the dinosaur blanket up to my chin and petted my hair once, and I let him because I knew that this was important to him. “I’ll tell your mother and father to come give you a kiss,” he said, reaching for his canes. “Now sleep.”
    And I slipped down as though pulled from below, and in my dreams that night the things I’d been told and the things I hadn’t mixed and blurred and Selene looked down over 63rd Road and SS troopers in their low, rounded helmets stood arrayed along the roof of Alexander’s department store watching as, far below, a silent herd of cows with yellow horns and brooms tied to their tails moved like a sea of humped, ridged backs through the unlit canyons toward Queens Boulevard, erasing themselves, while far, far above them in a dark apartment very close to the sky a young man sat in a wash of light as blue as ice and played the piano—beautifully, perfectly—until he fell asleep.

5
    MY MOTHER AND FATHER MET IN BRNO IN 1939, FOUR months after the occupation began, when my father wrote her a love letter he had composed for someone else for a fee of ten crowns. He did this regularly, he told me, and did quite well by it. It was nothing, he said: a few particulars, a handful of ripe clichés, and the thing was done. This time, however, when he delivered the letter for his client, things went badly. “Honza didn’t write this,” the young woman who would be my mother declared almost as soon as she began reading it. She laughed, then read aloud: “‘...in the empty rooms and courtyards of my heart’? Oh, God.” My father started to say something. “Stop,” she said. “Honza’s a sweet boy, but he wouldn’t know a metaphor if it ran him over in the street.” She looked at my father. “What kind of man writes love letters for other men?” she said. “A poor one,” my father said.
    They began to talk, and by the time he walked out of the pastry shop on Zapomenutá Street, where he had found her sitting with her girlfriends (the two of them had moved to a table near the back to talk privately), she had agreed to meet him the following day for a walk. There were reasons for this. He was handsome. He was not a fool. There was a kind of sad lightheartedness about him; he seemed not to care very much how he appeared to the world. And he had nerve. The day after they met, he found Honza in the locker room of the gymnasium after soccer practice (the schools had not been closed as yet) and gave him back the letter. He had decided to go out with the girl himself, he said. And when Honza, not entirely unreasonably, took offense at this turn of events, and with two of his friends gave my father a sound beating, my father, wiping the blood off his face with his sleeve, somehow managed to get up and pull a ten-crown coin out of his pocket. “Here,” he said, throwing it on the locker room floor. “A full refund.”
    They saw each other all that summer and fall. He would meet her outside the steel railroad station and the two of them would walk arm in arm up the street that used to be Masarykova ulice but was now Hermann Göring Strasse, then across the square and down the small, quiet streets to Špilberk, where they would lose themselves, along with all the other lovers, in the vast grounds of the castle. I can picture them there, lying on the grass, my mother looking up into the deepening blue, my father, propped up on an elbow next to her, recounting some small thing or other, smiling in that way of his, turning the story like a candlestick on a lathe.
    I like to think of the two of them there, wandering arm in arm up the paths and away from the town like newlyweds entering for the first time the house they would live in the rest of