My Fathers' Ghost is Climbing in the Rain Read Free Page B

hunk of bread that some ants had started eating. Someone had left a change of clothes and an open empty handbag on my parents’ bed. The bed was unmade and the sheets retained the shape of a body that perhaps was my mother’s. Beside it, on my father’s night table, there was a book that I didn’t look at, some eyeglasses and two or three bottles of pills. When I saw them, I told myself that my father and I had something in common after all, that he and I were still tied to life by the invisible threads of pills and prescriptions and that those threads also now somehow united us. My old room was on the other side of the hallway. As I went into it, I thought everything must have shrunk: that the table was smaller than I rememberedit, that the chair beside it could be used only by a midget, that the windows were tiny and that there weren’t as many books as I remembered, and besides they’d been written by authors who no longer interested me. It seemed as if I’d been gone more than eight years, I thought as I lay on what had been my bed. I was cold but I didn’t want to cover myself with the bedspread, and I lay there, with one arm over my face, unable to sleep but also unwilling to stand up, thinking in circles about my father and about me and about a lost opportunity for him and for me and for all of us.

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    My mother came into the kitchen and found me contemplating the products in the refrigerator. Like those dreams in which everything is suspiciously familiar and at the same time shockingly strange, the products were the same but their containers had changed, and now the beans were in a can that reminded me of the old tomato can, the tomatoes came in a canister that reminded me of the cocoa and the cocoa came in bags that made me think of diapers and sleepless nights. My mother didn’t seem at all affected by my presence, but I was surprised to see her so thin and so fragile; when I stood up and she came over to hug me, I saw shehad a gaze that could turn the demons out of hell, and I wondered if that gaze wasn’t enough to cure my father, to alleviate the pain and suffering of all the patients in the hospital where he lay dying, because that gaze was the gaze of a will that can stand up to anything. What happened, I asked my mother, and she started to explain, slowly. When she finished, she went to her room to cry alone and I put some water and a fistful of rice into a pot and I stared through the window at the impenetrable jungle that had grown from the garden my mother and brother had tended so carefully, in the same place but in a different time.

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    My siblings were standing in the hallway when I arrived at the hospital. From a distance they seemed silent, although later I saw that they were talking or pretending to, as if they felt obligated to simulate keeping up a conversation that not even they were really listening to. My sister started to cry when she saw me, as if I were bringing terrible and unexpected news, or as if I myself were that news, returning horribly mutilated from a never-ending war. I handed them some chocolates and a bottle of schnapps that I’d bought in Germany,in the airport, and my sister started laughing and crying at the same time.

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    My father was lying beneath a tangle of cords like a fly in a spiderweb. His hand was cold and my face was hot, but I noticed that only when I brought my hand to my face to wipe it.

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    I stayed with him that evening, without really knowing what to do except look at him and ask myself what would happen if he opened his eyes or spoke, and for a moment I hoped that he wouldn’t open them while I was there. Then I said to myself: I’m going to close my eyes and count to ten and when I open them none of this will be real, it will never have happened, like when films end or you close a book; but when I opened my eyes, after having counted to ten, my father was still there and I was still there and the spiderweb was still there, and we were all