Читать книгу Suzanne - Anais Barbeau-Lavalette - Страница 12

We are on our hands and knees, searching.

Your closet. Hats. Dresses. Lots of black clothes.

I can’t help but plunge my nose into the fabric. Smells are usually so revealing. But here even they are furtive. Subtle, faint, hard to pin down. An accidental blend of incense and the sweat of days spent not moving. A subtle note of alcohol, perhaps?

In a shoebox there are pictures of us: me and my brother, at every age. You kept them. And my mother kept sending them to you year after year. Our ages are written on the back, traces of time lost, wasted, slipped away. It’s your loss.

My mother is sitting in your rocking chair. Gently, she touches you. Rests her hands where you rested yours. Rocks to the rhythm of a lullaby, the one she never heard.

I find your red red lipstick in the small bathroom. And short sticks of kohl, which you lined your eyes with, giving them power. I draw a line under mine.

My mother finds a piece of furniture, made by her father a long time ago. We take it down to the car. She takes the rocking chair too, carrying it on her back, and my father lashes it securely to the roof.

We’re leaving soon. I’m in your room. There is a small green plant in the window. It is leaning against the pane, drawn by the day.

Books are piled by the foot of your bed. I read a few passages at random, suddenly greedy for clues about you.

I find a yellowed cardboard folder between two books on Buddhist zazen.

It contains letters. Poems. Newspaper articles.

A gold mine, which I stuff into my bag like a thief.

We are leaving. I slip a worn copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra into my pocket.

We close the door behind us, forever.

We drive slowly through the storm. On the roof, the rocking chair cuts through the wind, heroically. I don’t know it yet, but I will rock my children in it.

I flip through Nietzsche, yellowed with age. There is a laminated newspaper article stuck between two pages.

The picture of a burning bus.

1961, Alabama.

In bold type: Freedom riders: political protest against segregation.

Around the bus are young Black people and White people, in shock, refugees from the flames. A young woman is on her knees. She looks like me.

You had to die for me to take an interest in you.

For you to turn from a ghost to a woman. I don’t love you yet.

But wait for me. I’m coming.