The Physics of Sorrow Read Free Page B

race back to the mill?
    It’s wartime, they’re human, they won’t leave a three-year-old child all alone. He’s a boy, someone will take him in, look after him, there are barren women hungry for children, he’ll have better luck. Words that I try to find in her thoughts. But there is only silence there.
    We forgot him, we forgot him, the daughter chants behind her back through tears. Never mind that the word is different—we’ve abandoned him.
    Yet another long minute goes by. I imagine how in that minute the faces of the unborn look on, holding their breath. Therethey are, craning their necks through the fence of time, my father, my aunt, my other aunt, there’s my brother, there’s me, there’s my daughter, standing on tiptoes. Their, our appearance over the years depends on that minute and on the young woman’s silence. I wonder whether she suspects how many things are being decided now? She finally raises her head, as if waking up, turns in her seat and looks around. The endless plains of Thrace, the scorched stubble fields, the changing light of the sunset, the donkey that is chewing some burned grass, indifferent to everything, the three sacks of flour which will run out right in the middle of winter, three of her seven daughters, who wait to see what she will say.
    The sin has already been committed, she has hesitated.
    She considered, if only for a minute, abandoning him. Her voice is dry. If you want, you can go back. Said to Dana, the eldest, thirteen. The decision is shoved off onto another. She doesn’t say “we’ll go back,” she doesn’t say “go back,” she doesn’t move. And yet, my three-year-old grandfather still has a chance. Dana leaps from the cart and dashes back down the dirt road.
    We, the as-of-yet unborn, craning our necks through the fence of that minute, draw our heads back and breathe a sigh of relief.
    Dusk is falling, the mill is miles away. A girl of thirteen is running down a dirt road, barefoot, the evening breeze flutters her dress. Everything around is empty, she runs to tire her own fear, to take its breath away. She doesn’t glance aside, every bush resembles a lurking man, all the frightening stories she has listened to in the evenings about brigands, bogeymen, dragons, ghosts, and wolves run in a pack at her heels. If she dares turn around, they will hurl themselves on her. I run, run, run in the still-warm September evening, alone amid the fields, on the baked mud of the road, which I sense more intensely with every step, my heart is pounding in my chest, someone is there crouching along the road, but why is his arm twisted uplike that so strangely, oh it’s just a bush . . . There in the distance the first lights of the mill . . . There I should find my three-year-old brother . . . my grandfather . . . myself.
    The mother, my great-grandmother, lived to be ninety-three, passing from one end of the century to the other, she was part of my childhood, too. Her children grew up and scattered, they left her, grew old. Only one of them never left her and took care of her until her death. The forgotten boy. The story of the mill had entered the secret family chronicle, everyone whispered it, some with sympathy for Granny Calla and as proof of how hard the times had been, others as a joke, yet others, such as my grandmother, with undisguised reproach. But no one ever told it in front of my grandfather. And he never once told it. And he never parted from his mother.
    A tragic irony of the kind we usually discover in myths. When the story reached me on that afternoon, the main heroine was no longer with us. I remember how at first I felt anger and bewilderment, as if I myself had been abandoned. I experienced yet another pang of doubt in the justness of the universe. That woman lived to a ripe old age under the care of that once-abandoned three-year-old boy. And perhaps that was precisely her punishment. To live so long and to see that child before her every day. The