Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me Read Free

wasn’t so ill that she had forgotten about me, she was considerate regardless of the circumstances and even though she was dying, in my brief acquaintance with her she had struck me as being a considerate person (but then we didn’t know that she was dying): “Poor thing,” she said, “you weren’t expecting this. What an awfulevening.” I hadn’t been expecting anything, or perhaps I had, the same thing that she had been expecting. The evening hadn’t been awful up until then, perhaps a touch boring, and I don’t know if she sensed what was about to happen to her or if she was referring to the excessively long wait we had had, because the child had not wanted to go to sleep. I got up, walked back around the bed and lay down on the side I had occupied before, on the left side, thinking (again I saw the nape of her motionless, striated neck, hunched as if she were cold): “Perhaps I should just wait and not ask her anything for a while, just leave her to be quiet and see if it passes off, not force her to answer questions or try and assess every few seconds if she’s a little better or a little worse, thinking about an illness only intensifies it, so does watching it too closely.”
    I looked at the walls of the bedroom which I had not even glanced at when I first entered it, because I had been looking at the woman who, before, had been by turns vivacious or shy and who was now in a bad way, the woman who had led me there by the hand. There was a full-length mirror opposite the bed like in a hotel room (they were a couple who liked to look at themselves before going out into the street, before going to bed). The rest of the room, on the other hand, was a domestic bedroom, for two people, there were telltale signs left by a husband on the table on my side of the bed (she had immediately gravitated towards the half she occupied each night and each morning – something beyond dispute, mechanical): a calculator, a letter opener, a sleep mask given out by some airline to shut out the glare of the ocean, a few coins, a dirty ashtray and a radio alarm, in the lower compartment there was a carton of cigarettes of which only one pack remained, a bottle of extremely virile Loewe cologne that someone must have given him as a present, possibly Marta herself on the occasion of a recent birthday, two novels, also presents (or perhaps not, but I couldn’t imagine myself ever buying them), a tube of Redoxon, an empty glass he hadn’t had time to put away before leaving on his trip, a magazine supplement listing the television programmes, programmes he would not see, for he was away that night. The television was at the foot of the bed, beside the mirror, they were people who liked their comforts, for a moment it occurred to me to use the remote control to switch iton, but the remote control was on the other bedside table, on Marta’s side, and I would have to walk around the bed again or bother her by stretching my arm above her head, what would she be thinking about now, if it was just depression or fear that had gripped her. I stretched out my arm and picked up the remote control, she didn’t notice even though the rolled-up sleeve of my shirt brushed her hair. On the left-hand wall, there was a reproduction of a rather kitsch painting by Bartolomeo da Venezia that I happen to know well, it’s in Frankfurt, it depicts a woman with rather straggly ringlets and wearing a laurel wreath, a circlet and a diadem on her forehead, she is holding a bunch of small flowers in her raised hand and has one (rather flat) breast exposed; to the right, there were fitted wardrobes painted white like the walls. Inside would be the clothes that her husband hadn’t taken with him on his trip, most of them, it was a short trip according to what his wife Marta had told me during supper, to London. There were also two chairs with clothes draped over them, the clothes were perhaps dirty or newly washed and still unironed, Marta’s bedside lamp