Kate's Story

Wake up! In the morning of the Fourteenth of March, 1933, the blithe light broke through the lowered curtains, it was petaled everywhere, and awoke Isidore Bertrand from a wearisome dream. This had not happened in some years. As he laid there, he saw the streaks of light illuminating the small ebbs of dust above him, moving gently to and fro and then violently, as though going in streams, disappearing where the light did not meet them. He could see his breathe affect and part them, and his eyes widened. The room was covered in draperies, many things as though untouched in years, the light continued to be delighted in its play. He did not recollect anything then. Anna, his wife was sitting turned away from him at the other end of the bed. "I know her body," he thought, "but the shadows trailing from her neck moving upon her back, why are they moving? they seem like serpents." He could not make out what was casting these shadows, were there snakes in her, moving in venom down to him across the bed sheets? Her face was darkened, but a beam of light starkly shone above her bare shoulder, and the flakes of dust seemed to be serenading about her, now in song, mocking elves! now raining slowly drop by caustic drop, a whirling harmony. Time hovered, the vast coil of glittering atoms and their lashing and their malice.... the background darkening and absorbed. Anna seemed solitary in the webbing air, like she did and did not belong to that about her. The Little Miss Bourgeois Wife Of Petty Pretenses seemed to had grown a soul, Little Miss Traitor! Now invisible white strings of day and habit, do your work, take this burning and cleaving, take it all away. Now cry Anna liked to prepare dinner for hours. Marya, the house servant, was always amused by how delicately she placed everything. From the way she handled the spoons and knives, it was as if she was in a garden, picking this flower or that. And at times she would cough and withdraw her hand violently and quickly as though pricked by a thorn, and she would push everything away and glance at it with hatred. That evening, Isidore was delayed at work, she ate with her children Ephraim and Emile; they were very pleased that they could spend this time with her, it was unusual. Emile was a strange little girl, who always read her mothers books. She had a wild temper and an impertinent zeal, but she could fall into long silences. She thought herself poetic, but made everyone who heard her in her earnest laugh; for whenever she broke out into her monologues she would lose whomever heard her with the first sentence, for she always picked the most unfortunately expected imagery: forgotten lands, dew drops, austere skies, doves or eternity, and really she was best when
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imitating. She did not understand why everyone laughed at her. Ephraim did the most, but he loved her deeply, sometimes she was the only one he felt attached to. Today was one of her silent days, she wondered about her mother, how pretty she was with her black earrings, and in the dim light. Ephraim was a few years older at fifteen. He didn't quite seem to be himself anymore, as though vacant somehow. Anna perceived this the most. She ran her eyes over him pensively and with concern, till they just lingered there, resting. When the wind thundered against the windows and the children jumped, she hardly glanced up. She imagined a hosanna as though it was a fruit upon a bough, that caught her breathe and voice, slant branch on branch above her, and their green figures feeding her fever, no hope beyond the grass she imagined at her feet. Anna collapsed and fell to the floor, the children were frightened, Marya ran into the room. My parents love each otherWhen Emile grew up, she confused many of her lovers with her words. When here mother was sick, she once overheard Isidore speaking to her in a low voice. "We learn from books the words of love, and yet these writers, all of them, are bound to conveying the roles of their characters. One says he loves, and lo and behold, he is a lover, another conspires, and another is indignant- but my words do not correspond so readily. If I should speak, I would spend myself in hatred and disappointment. The gaps in my breathe are unending, is my love then the air or the breathlessness, and the gasping? the continuity or the thousand ends? Always you leave me, yielding so little, just lying there still, looking at me, bidding you farewell. Poor, poor always, not in my body, driven to I know not where, whilst you live in your ornate pleasures. Anna, I am so worried about you." It never occurred to Emile that perhaps her father did not love her mother, and so she began to speak like this. An engine in the cloud Seeing his wife so frail, and with no seeming end to the dust storms, Isidore decided take his family to [....]. His land was already leased out and their home in amidst it all, he no longer cared for it. Anna sat in a rail carriage by herself. She had been laying down in a fever for a while, and her husband had taken the children away so as not to add to her discomfort. She was wearing a black dress, and a mesh veil that hang from her hat. Her cheeks were not drained of their colour, and her skin was very white. That suffocation in her throat seemed to have left her for the moment. Red and flush faced, her brow sweating, and still light headed, she peered over the terraces, and the palms, and the sand. Her whole body heavy, she gently lifted her wrist making the motions of a fan. She tried to let it hover, and when she couldn't, she let her fingertips rest against the window. And in the roamings of her imagined fan, it was as if she was partaking in the doleful scene, and her lips curved and opened. And seeing her wet lip, a cloud of dust said covetously:
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"Her mind is making me mad, How content i shall be with her breast: I hated the weaving weeds, I hated the gnarled blooms, and the ashen groundI turned the leaves to sand, The rest to rust and bones And hurled my storm over shadows, to cover shadows; Now I`ll bury Oklahoma High! For nothing is left in it for me..." There are men of the East..... One day Isidore did not go straight home after work. He had forgotten the exchange, and without recall, lost in traffic, went about in the metallic arcades. His flickering eyes met that of a woman across an aisle. He brushed against her hand. She led him through beneath the grotesque lights, advertisements, and gyrating awnings. There are men whose words and deeds die out, as memory of everything fades, when they come out of the storm, and become but an atom in the shroud of men. An elevator will bring them back up again. The music of the bar was reassuring after he drank a little. For many months after moving to the city, Emile only ever say her brother writing letter after letter. She asked him if he missed the girl that would come to the house often. He smiled and soflty said, "Too heavy for my breast, small as it is in my wallet, there is no need to tell her off it." His smile widened. The end.

(I will not make any pretenses about this story, I struggled a lot for the imagery and language, and i relied heavily on Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane. I described Emile as i would Marya Zaturenska. I wanted Ephraim to be based on Louis Zukofsky, but "A" was very hard to understand, so I left the character without much of his uniqueness. His last words were from "A", I changed a passage to imply something else.)