Read Online Nocturne by Helen Humphreys - Free Book Online

we ever want to do is affirm our presence, as the graffiti was just names carved into the plaster walls. And there was your name,
Martinus
, and the date,
1730 AD
, on a giant’s white thigh.
    This afternoon I went to hear Virginia Woolf’s niece speak. She’s ninety-three, has the vacant stare of the elderly. Dad has that expression these days, especially since you died—a look of innocent confusion,almost childlike. The niece was on a panel with two academic experts on her aunt. They both talked for a long time about the importance of Virginia Woolf as a writer. Then they asked the niece to talk about this too. All she could say was that Virginia Woolf was a good aunt, and that she hadn’t read all of her books because, when she was young, her family never thought her aunt was a very good writer.
    It’s hard to be objective about someone you know. And really, how could the niece of Virginia Woolf talk about the writing without going through the filter of her relationship to her aunt? Maybe the more real thing is simply to say what she said, that Virginia Woolf was
amusing
, that she was
nice
.
    It was almost a day coming home, what with the various flights and a layover in Munich. The jet lag was bad, although it was hard to even recognize it as jet lag because it felt exactly like grief—complete exhaustion and a kind of dislocation from my surroundings. It’s how I’ve been feeling pretty much every day for a year and a half now. It’s strange that jet lag and grief should feel so much alike, although it makes a kind of sense too.

15
    The last time I was in Germany I was at the Frankfurt Book Fair, promoting one of my earlier novels. I was going to be interviewed, in tandem with an American writer, by a local celebrity known simply as “The Stag.” The Stag was a man in late middle age who had lived in the woods near a nuclear facility for a year, protesting the use of nuclear power and its potentially catastrophic effect on the surrounding humans and animal life. The Stag had dressed as a deer, complete with antlers and attired head to toe in buckskin. He gambolled through the trees. Sometimes the press came to the woods to interview or photograph him. Once a day his supporters brought him food and supplies.
    The Stag sat between the other author and me at a table on a stage at the front of a long room filled with journalists and others, most of whom were there primarily to see The Stag, who, although he no longer lived in the woods, still enjoyed celebrity status.
    When the event began, The Stag leaned into the microphone and said, “I haven’t read either of these books, and I have nothing to say about them.”
    The other author, a woman around my age, shot me a panicked look across the table, and in the awkward moments that followed, I know we were both desperately thinking of how to save ourselves.
    We ended up interviewing each other while The Stag played with the fringes on his buckskin jacket, looking completely bored, and he bolted the moment our allotted hour together was up.
    I don’t think that I ever told you this story, but you would have loved the idea of a middle-aged man leaping through the forest dressed as a deer, and his refusal to co-operate at the event would have made you laugh.

16
    I’ve been thinking about the human soul, about the presence of the unseen in our lives, about how, the moment you died, I felt you leave. What was it that left? And why did I feel that you did leave? It wasn’t simply that a light was turned off, that your consciousness was stopped, but rather that you moved swiftly from your dead body and went somewhere else. But where did you go?
    That’s the real question, I guess, and one we all keep asking, even now, a year and a half later.
    We weren’t raised with religion, but you were probably the most religious of us all, mainly because you spent a lot of time inside churches. As you would probably be the first to point out, churches usuallyhave good