Garrulous note pigsD?rfinna’s living room looks exactly as it does in my earliest memories of it, from a quarter century ago. Little Harpa Eir, able to talk in quarter centuries now. While everything else that lives and breathes changes, the flowers in D?rfinna’s living room remain the same. Is it theoretically possible that they could live so long? Maybe if they were clipped regularly. Maybe these are the scions of scions of the flowers that I can first remember. The angel returns her dress, having worn it at a soir?e where everyone could admire it; the angel returns it saying that she had ordered a red velvet gown when in fact she had ordered it in black, as can be proved by the purchase order, signed by her. I have dressed the whole world and, today, it goes about naked. I check the backseat to make sure Edda has her headphones on. Iribe wanted to relive with me, step by step, the whole of that past lived without him and to go back through lost time, while asking me to account for myself. One day, he took me to the heart of the Auvergne, to Mont-Dore, to set out on the trail of my youth. We found the house of my aunts… As I walked beneath this avenue of lime trees, I really felt as if I were beginning my life again. I lingered behind. Iribe walked on alone and, on the pretext of finding somewhere to stay, he asked to see my aunts. They had not changed their attitude towards me, after so many years; he was told that if I showed my face, I would not be made welcome. After he graduated from medical school Neelo had his accountant set up a private insurance plan for girls in the business. The primary five got special treatment. We were all his aunts. “Thanks for the pep talk,” Kush said. “But I’m going to pass.” “She’s not in,” she whispered. “How are you getting on with your Englishman?” Working in secret, seamstresses searched every evening on leaving the workshops, counterfeit proceedings, spies, samples that vanish, patterns that are fought over as if they contained the secrets of the atomic bomb, all that is pointless, puerile and ineffectual. I began with two collections a year. My colleagues embarked on four of them, so as to have time to copy mine. (“Only better,” they used to say; and occasionally they were right.) “Another… another driver.” She grinned with abandon and then laughed. “I am a captain in the king’s infantry. You are a naval ensign seconded to the Virginia water militia.” Woolford made a wide gesture toward the windows and the town beyond. “Perhaps you have noticed that you are on dry land. In the colony of Maryland.” “Who?” Duncan demanded. “Who said that?” You don’t say, I said. “Try white satin,” I told them. “No, and you’re not going to make a fool of me or get an innocent person into trouble.” “Told us?” Hobart asked. Again I felt something. There was some kind of truth in her statement. I knew what she said was right but I couldn’t have explained why. Edda helped with the housework. She had specific tasks and was conscientious about performing them. When I came home from my evening shifts, my child would be sleeping beneath clean sheets, an edifying book beside her, most often from the City Library on?ingholtsstraeti. If her cold toes peeked out from under the blanket, Mommy came and covered them and stroked her child’s cheek.. |