Cat's eye полностью

I cross the street, cut in behind a small church, left stranded here when they redeveloped. Sunday’s sermon is announced on a billboard identical to the kind for supermarket specials: Believing Is Seeing. A vertical wave of plate glass breaks against it. Behind the polished façades, bouquets of teased cloth, buffed leather, cunning silver trinkets. Pasta to die for. Theology has changed, over the years: just deserts used to be what everyone could expect to get, in the end. Now it’s a restaurant specializing in cakes. All they had to do was abolish guilt, and add an S.

I turn a corner, onto a side street, a double row of expensive boutiques: hand knits and French maternity outfits and ribbon-covered soaps, imported tobaccos, opulent restaurants where the wineglasses are thin-stemmed and they sell you location and overhead. The designer jeans emporium, the Venetian paper knickknack shop, the stocking boutique with its kicking neon leg.

These houses used to be semihovels; Josef’s old territory, where beer-saturated fat men sat on the front porches, sweating in the August heat, while their children screamed and their dogs lay panting with frayed ropes tethering them to the fence, and paint peeled from their woodwork and the dispirited cat pee marigolds wilted along their cracked walkways. A few thousand dollars in the right place then and you’d be a millionaire today, but who could have guessed? Not me, going up the narrow stairs to Josef’s second floor, with my breath quickening and his hand weighing on the small of my back, in the dying light of summer evenings: slow-paced, forbidden, sadly delicious.

I know more things about Josef now than I did then. I know them because I’m older. I know about his melancholy, his ambition, his desperation, the corners of emptiness in him that needed to be filled. I know the dangers.

What for instance was he doing with two women fifteen years younger than himself? If one of my daughters fell in love with such a man, I’d be frantic. It would be like the time Sarah and her best friend came rushing home from school, to tell me they’d seen their first flasher in the park. “Mummy, Mummy, a man had his pants down!”

To me it meant fear, and a ferocious anger. Touch them and I’ll kill you. But to them it was merely noteworthy, and hilarious.

Or the first time I saw my own kitchen, after I had Sarah. I brought her home from the hospital and thought: All those knives. All those sharp things and hot things. All I could see was what might hurt her.

Maybe one of my daughters has a man like Josef, or a man like Jon, hidden away in her life, in secret. Who knows what grubby or elderly boys they are bending to their own uses, or to counterpoint me? All the while protecting me from themselves, because they know I would be horrified. I see words on the front pages of newspapers that never used to be said out loud, much less printed—

sexual intercourse, abortion, incest—and I want to hide their eyes, even though they are grown-up, or what passes for it. Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked; as I never was when I was not one.

I should get a little present for each of them, as I always did when they were younger and I went away. Once I knew by instinct what they would like. I don’t any more. It’s hard for me to remember exactly what age they’ve reached. I used to resent it when my mother would forget I was an adult, but I’m approaching the maundering phase myself, digging out the yellowing baby pictures, mooning over locks of hair.

I’m squinting into a window at some Italian silk scarves, wonderful indeterminate colors, gray-blue, sea-green, when I feel a touch on my arm, a chilly jump of the heart.

“Cordelia,” I say, turning.

But it’s not Cordelia. It’s nobody I know. It’s a woman, a girl really, Middle Eastern of some kind: a long full skirt to above the ankles, printed cotton, Canadian gum-soled boots incongruous beneath; a short jacket buttoned up, a kerchief folded straight across the forehead with a pleat at either side, like a wimple. The hand that touches me is lumpy in its northern mitten, the skin of the wrist between mitten and jacket cuff brownish, like coffee with double cream. The eyes are large, as in painted waifs.

“Please,” she says. “They are killing many people.” She doesn’t say where. It could be a lot of places, or in between places; homelessness is a nationality now. Somehow the war never ended after all, it just broke up into pieces and got scattered, it gets in everywhere, you can’t shut it out. Killing is endless now, it’s an industry, there’s money in it, and the good side and the bad side are pretty hard to tell apart.

“Yes,” I say. This is the war that killed Stephen.

“Some are here. They have no, they have nothing. They would be killed…”