They Dragged Them through the Streets: A Novel

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150 A V and I sat in her living room. Do you ever think of traveling ? I asked V. And who would take care of me, if I got sick in some other country? But you hardly get sick anymore, you live by yourself here, I said. But I know I always could—she smiled and ran her fingers over my knuckles, my hand was on the couch between us. It seems good for writing, I said, and Z— The other month when I was sick, she said, I lay in the garden by the clothesline. I’d washed the blankets a few days before, but then I was sick, I didn’t feel like dealing with anything , I couldn’t. So I left the blankets out and it rained every night. They were mildewing. Later I lay in the yard looking at the corner of one blanket where a spider had laid a sac of eggs. The spider was this translucent green-yellow, the sort of color that looks completely eerie in daylight. The egg sac was like this 151 too, but whiter. Around it the smallest web was stretched over the fabric. The spider didn’t move at all, just sat by the egg sac. The blanket smelled, I could smell it from where I was. I waited. What I mean is, she said, I didn’t travel to see it and I can say so little about it. I understand that, but— I know, she said, I’m impossible, irritating. But really, she said, what do you even think of palm trees? They always look fake to me, I said. Snow-topped mountains? I’ve seen those, but I was a child. I think of them as something I could have made up. I’ve seen them too, she said, but yes, the same. She said: Those rocks—erratics?—right on the very brinks of cliffs, they say glaciers left there? Implausible, I said, a cartoon of an ice age. That they can pull the brain out through the nose to mummify someone? I didn’t use to believe that, I said, but now I can see it. But did anyone ever believe the dead spent the coin left on the tongue? It’s a nice gesture, V said. That they boil silkworms alive to make blankets, I said. Fine, V said, of course they do. Children talking in other languages, she said. Gibberish, I said. 152 I said: The bombs they meant for the dictator’s sons didn’t kill them, but killed another family—a man who lived in the same neighborhood as a restaurant where the dictator’s family liked to go—the bomb killed his seven nieces and nephews. He found their bodies in the crater. V said: That would take me a while to believe, a day or two, or much longer. But, she said after a while, I believe they killed the dictator’s sons another way eventually. Of course they did, I said. ...