Autopsy of a Father by Pascale Kramer

Author:Pascale Kramer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781942658252
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Published: 2017-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

ANIA WAS HOME BY EARLY AFTERNOON. She was no longer accustomed to the stress, and Clara’s temerity had exhausted her. The stores were all closed when she passed the exit to the train station, where the empty boxes from the morning market were piled up. The sidewalk in front of the building had been rinsed with a hose and life had settled into the rhythms of sleep until the following day. She found Novak on the phone in her bedroom and Théo with his nose in a console, sitting on the floor in the middle of a large puzzle whose borders remained unfinished on two sides. The blinds had remained shut; the apartment looked as if it had been steeped in a gray haze all morning long. She was surprised, however, to find that the dishes had been washed and the beds made.

She crouched down next to Théo and surprised him with a kiss on his shampooed hair, allowing herself to be knocked over by the tender savagery of his response. He had turned around and gotten to his knees, facing her, examining her eyes like the watcher that he was of her moments of anxiety and sorrow. Ania took his hand and got up. The upheavals of the past two days were beginning to exhaust her vigilance, and she didn’t want to cry in front of the boy.

Novak soon joined them in the kitchen, an empty cup in his hand. He looked like the bad old days, like a man up to his old tricks, his body impatient, his eyelids a bit brazen beneath brows raked by a series of fine scars. The comments about Gabriel on the television had made him edgy. But that their names would appear on the announcement pleased him a great deal. “Nobody understood what he was trying to say,” he explained sententiously, pulling on the crotch of his track pants. Ania stared at him with a hint of pity. He had so little idea of what Gabriel might have had in mind. With the years, and as she had begun to acknowledge the world of difference that separated her and Novak, no matter what she might want to believe, the ability to wound had passed from him to her. This discovery—the beginning of a slow return to a humdrum existence—had filled her with sorrow.

Théo continued to hold on to her, clinging to her waist, his cheek against the warmth of her flesh, obsessively examining his father, who was standing near the door, the father who was never on time, who had never learned to approach him without making him jump. Novak smiled as he played with the pockets of his jacket. Ever since Ania had told him to get out of their lives, he always seemed to arrange it so that she had to chase him out again whenever he showed up. “Are you going to inherit the house? The place is worth money,” he opined, with an expression of candor and boastfulness. Ania said nothing, no longer having the patience for his unwarranted swaggering.

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