Read Online The Visible World by Mark Slouka - Free Book Online

miles and miles to a Gypsy camp and demanded her dog, only to be given a flour sack that might have held a rabbit, or a small carp, and how she had walked all the way home, the small dear, and buried the remains in the garden before returning to bed. Surely I remembered it now.
    I told them I did.
    This was a nice place, they said, looking around. It was odd, really. They hadn’t thought about my parents for years before they’d read that report about dogs in the paper, and yet, hardly two weeks later, here they were. Of course, it was probably because the article had started them thinking about my mother—though they hadn’t realized they were thinking of her at all at the time—that they had remembered our cabin and decided on a whim to try and find it.
    They wouldn’t have been surprised, now that they thought of it, if my parents hadn’t told me the story of my mother and her dog. A terrible thing to tell a child. How she must have suffered, the poor dear, walking all those miles with that sack at her side. Still, they agreed, the story said something about her character. How strong she was. They nodded, agreeing with each other. The Lord only visited those who could bear it, they said.

8
    SHE HAD BEEN BEAUTIFUL. I HAVE A FEW PHOTOGRAPHS , favorites I salvaged after my father died from the shoeboxes I found piled in the basement by the folded ping-pong table: one of a black-haired tomboy standing by her bicycle in the Vysočina forests, looking at the photographer as if wondering whether he’s going to try to take it away from her; another of a young woman on a windy corner in Brno, too impatient to be fashionable, pinning her hat to her hair as the statue of a dead saint, behind her, points to an escaping trolley; a third—overexposed—of my mother against a white sea of cloud in the Tatras, the hand of a companion—not my father—visible at her waist.
    And then there’s the one of him, or so I have to assume. I’ve looked at it closely. At the overlong sleeves of the sweater—the left pushed partway to the elbow, the other almost covering his hand. I’ve studied the cigarette, like a tiny stub of light clamped between the tips of his fingers, protruding from inside the wool. There’s nothing to see. A man standing in the snow, squinting into the glare. Not particularly handsome. The snow on the hill behind him has partly melted.
     
    I don’t know what he meant to her exactly. Or how he died. I only know that his face, the sound of his voice, never really diminished for her. That she simply refused to give him up.
    There are people like that, after all—individuals who resist the current, who hold out against that betrayal. Who refuse to take their small bouquet of misremembered moments and leave. You’ll run into them at the deli counter, or while waiting in line at the theater, and they’ll say, “I had an acquaintance many years ago” or “I once knew someone who I cared for very much who also hated sauerkraut,” and suddenly, standing there waiting to give the butcher your order, or clutching your paper ticket, you can see them leaning into the current’s pull, hear the rocks of the riverbed clattering like bones.
     
    It wasn’t a matter of jealousy or fear. My parents never slept in separate beds or took vacations with “old friends” or hurt each other more than husbands and wives generally hurt each other. It was subtler than that. My mother respected my father’s strength, his endurance, was grateful to him for taking on the role he had for her with such tact, but hated him for it too. And because she recognized the injustice in this, she loved him—or tried. And because she knew he recognized it too, she failed.
    And my father? My father saw it for the perfect thing it was, appreciated it the way a master carpenter will appreciate a perfectly constructed joint, the tongue mated to the groove like an act of God. Kafka would have understood: he would do the right thing—the only