Shroud Read Free Page B

bedroom. The margins of my world were disappearing, crumbling into this grey penumbra of soft dirt.
    Widowed, or widowered? Is there such a word? Sometimes even still the language puts out a foot for me to trip over.
    In her last years it was a mystery to me how Magda passed the time when I was not at home, as increasingly I made sure not to be. Housework was hardly the whole answer, even for one as slow-moving and deliberate as she always was. Whenever I enquired of her what she had done during the day she would take on a cornered look, holding her face at that three-quarters angle away from me and letting one shoulder droop, so that I felt I was being edged around by a large, wary ruminant. These cringing reactions of hers always annoyed me, although I could not think in what terms exactly to protest, and I would have to content myself with giving her my steeliest, white-lipped smile, drawing air in swiftly through my nostrils with a reptilian hiss that made her flinch. After these exchanges it gratified me that she would go about the house all evening heaving troubled little sighs, or being extra quiet, as if she were listening anxiously for the abatement of my anger. When we were in company together, at some unavoidable party or college reception, I could not resist making dry asides about her, inviting those unwise enough to engage us in conversation to join in my amusement at her incongruous, ill-attired, mute presence by my side. Those witticisms of mine at her expense were at least part of what made her into a public joke; through the years I had overheard her referred to variously as “Vander’s Mädchen,” and “Mutter Vander,” and, mysteriously, “Old Eva.” She did not seem to resent these petty public cruelties to which I subjected her, and would even smile a little, shyly, as if in pride at how appallingly I could behave, her large, button-black eyes shining and her upper lip protruding plumply. And of course this happy tolerance infuriated me all the more, and I would want to strike her, as she stood there amid the press of people in her overcoat and her broad, flat shoes, holding a glass of wine she kept forgetting to sip, contentedly isolated in the unfathomable depths of herself, my big, slow, enigmatic mate whom for the best part of forty years I must have loved or else I would have left.
    I stood up from the couch and went into the bedroom again, where I was startled to discover that I had already packed a suitcase. I must have done it in the early hours, when I was drunk. I had no memory of it. I recalled telephoning the airline, and my surprise at being answered not by a machine but by a wide-awake and irritatingly bright human voice—I cannot adjust to the world’s increasing nightlessness—but after that there was only the fuzzy, faintly humming blank of inebriated sleep. Perhaps it was more than the bourbon, I thought; perhaps my mind was going. How would one detect the encroachment of senility, when what is being attacked is the very faculty of detection itself? Would there be intervals of respite, flashes of frightful clarity in the midst of maunderings, moments of shivery recognition before the looking-glass, goggling in horror at the dribbled-on shirt-front, the pissstained flies? Probably not; probably I shall shuffle into senility all unaware. The onset of extreme old age as I am experiencing it is a gradual process of accumulation, a slow settling as of soft grey stuff, like the dust in the untended house, under which the once-sharp edges of my self are blurring. There is an opposite process, too, by which things grow rigid and immovable, turning my stools into ingots of hot iron, drying out my joints until they grate on each other like pumice stones, making my toenails hard as horn. Things out in the world, the supposedly inanimate objects, join in the conspiracy against me. I misplace things, lose things, my spectacles, the book I was reading a minute ago, Mama Vander’s redeemed