Read Online All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Miriam Toews
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laid?
Just now I’m worried that “get laid” is a term no longer used but I’m too ashamed to ask Nora for an update. I’m at an age where I’m stuck between two generations, one using the term “getting laid” and the other “hooking up,” so what are you supposed to call it? I sat in the little kitchen of the attic apartment Radek is renting on Academy Road and talked to himabout Elf, about her despair, her numbness, her “hour of lead” as Emily Dickinson puts it, and my house-of-cards plan to make her want to live, and about futility and rage and the seas on the moon named Serenity and Cleverness and which one would he prefer to live next to (Serenity) and did he know there was a glacier somewhere in Canada called Disappointment and that it feeds into Disappointment River and that the Disappointment River empties into the Disappointment Basin but that there is no Disappointment stopper in the basin? And Radek nodded and poured me wine and made me food and when he walked past me on his way to the kitchen to stir the pasta or the rice he kissed me on the back of my neck. He is very pale with black wiry hair that covers his entire body. He jokes in broken English that he is not quite fully evolved and I tell him that I admire him for not burning it or ripping it all away like North Americans who are terrified of hair and fur in general. Body hair is the final frontier in the fight for the liberation of women, Radek. I’m so
exhausted
. He nodded, ah, yes?
When he gently placed the pasta on the table, he said, I have seen your sister play.
What? I said. You have? You never told me that.
In Prague, he said. And I am not surprised.
Surprised by what? I asked him.
By her suffering, he said. When I listened to her play I felt I should not be there in the same room with her. There were hundreds of people but nobody left. It was a private pain. By private I mean to say unknowable. Only the music knew and it held secrets so that her playing was a puzzle, a whisper, andpeople afterwards stood in the bar and drank and said nothing because they were complicit. There were no words.
I thought about his words for a while, his old European charm, and the way he talked. Maybe we could fall in love and move together with Will and Nora to Prague, and my life would become less like my life and more like Franz Kafka’s. Will and Nora could study tennis and gymnastics and Radek and I could go to operas and ballets non-stop and become intense and poetic and revolutionary.
I would put her in the same category as Ivo Pogorelich, or perhaps Evgeny Kissin, he said. She understands that the piano is the perfection of the human voice.
She has a glass piano inside of her that she worries will break, I said.
Yes, he said. Maybe it already has. And she’s barely holding the pieces in place before it shatters. I think I fell in love with her just suddenly that evening. I wanted to protect her.
Oh, great, you’re hot for my sister? He laughed and said no, of course not but I figured he was lying. So much for my Prague fantasy. Well, I thought, Prague obviously hadn’t been a barrel of laughs for Franz Kafka anyway, so never mind, never mind!
Do you want more wine? he asked. What was she like as a child?
All she did was play the piano, I said. And petition for things.
Ah well, if there is one thing you’re going to do in life it may as well be playing the piano, said Radek. But you must have other memories, no?
She learned French when she was really young, I said, and sometimes that’s all she spoke and sometimes she’d stop talking for long periods of time like our father. She had differentnicknames for me: Swivelhead, Mayhem. She tried to pretend that our Mennonite town was an Italian village in Tuscany or something by renaming everything and everyone. All the streets, everything. She became obsessed with Italy. When our old Mennonite relatives came over she’d address them as
signor
and
signora
and offer them espressos
Just now I’m worried that “get laid” is a term no longer used but I’m too ashamed to ask Nora for an update. I’m at an age where I’m stuck between two generations, one using the term “getting laid” and the other “hooking up,” so what are you supposed to call it? I sat in the little kitchen of the attic apartment Radek is renting on Academy Road and talked to himabout Elf, about her despair, her numbness, her “hour of lead” as Emily Dickinson puts it, and my house-of-cards plan to make her want to live, and about futility and rage and the seas on the moon named Serenity and Cleverness and which one would he prefer to live next to (Serenity) and did he know there was a glacier somewhere in Canada called Disappointment and that it feeds into Disappointment River and that the Disappointment River empties into the Disappointment Basin but that there is no Disappointment stopper in the basin? And Radek nodded and poured me wine and made me food and when he walked past me on his way to the kitchen to stir the pasta or the rice he kissed me on the back of my neck. He is very pale with black wiry hair that covers his entire body. He jokes in broken English that he is not quite fully evolved and I tell him that I admire him for not burning it or ripping it all away like North Americans who are terrified of hair and fur in general. Body hair is the final frontier in the fight for the liberation of women, Radek. I’m so
exhausted
. He nodded, ah, yes?
When he gently placed the pasta on the table, he said, I have seen your sister play.
What? I said. You have? You never told me that.
In Prague, he said. And I am not surprised.
Surprised by what? I asked him.
By her suffering, he said. When I listened to her play I felt I should not be there in the same room with her. There were hundreds of people but nobody left. It was a private pain. By private I mean to say unknowable. Only the music knew and it held secrets so that her playing was a puzzle, a whisper, andpeople afterwards stood in the bar and drank and said nothing because they were complicit. There were no words.
I thought about his words for a while, his old European charm, and the way he talked. Maybe we could fall in love and move together with Will and Nora to Prague, and my life would become less like my life and more like Franz Kafka’s. Will and Nora could study tennis and gymnastics and Radek and I could go to operas and ballets non-stop and become intense and poetic and revolutionary.
I would put her in the same category as Ivo Pogorelich, or perhaps Evgeny Kissin, he said. She understands that the piano is the perfection of the human voice.
She has a glass piano inside of her that she worries will break, I said.
Yes, he said. Maybe it already has. And she’s barely holding the pieces in place before it shatters. I think I fell in love with her just suddenly that evening. I wanted to protect her.
Oh, great, you’re hot for my sister? He laughed and said no, of course not but I figured he was lying. So much for my Prague fantasy. Well, I thought, Prague obviously hadn’t been a barrel of laughs for Franz Kafka anyway, so never mind, never mind!
Do you want more wine? he asked. What was she like as a child?
All she did was play the piano, I said. And petition for things.
Ah well, if there is one thing you’re going to do in life it may as well be playing the piano, said Radek. But you must have other memories, no?
She learned French when she was really young, I said, and sometimes that’s all she spoke and sometimes she’d stop talking for long periods of time like our father. She had differentnicknames for me: Swivelhead, Mayhem. She tried to pretend that our Mennonite town was an Italian village in Tuscany or something by renaming everything and everyone. All the streets, everything. She became obsessed with Italy. When our old Mennonite relatives came over she’d address them as
signor
and
signora
and offer them espressos
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