Blank Pages by Blank Pages & Other Stories (retail) (epub)

Author:Blank Pages & Other Stories (retail) (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

In the kitchen he found matches where he’d left them and lit the fire. He pulled a bentwood armchair close to the stove and sat, shaking and staring. The pale flames, edged with blue, moving up the crumpled newspapers. The door he’d dragged home and reduced to kindling wood had been painted and he watched it bubble as the fire engulfed it, cracking and spitting. The cinders glowed as they caught, the coal fragments reddened at the edges. He increased the draught. Felt heat coming in his direction. But it was of little use. It could not reach into his bones, which were cold at the centre of him. Each limb with its core of cold bone. Was this trying to tell him something? Edi with child, stretched on a bed. And him unable to weep? His only response, to draw her? Over and over again. What a fucking jerk he was. All the women of his life . . . He caught sight of himself briefly in the kitchen mirror – looked like an old shawlie. A woman in her eighties. Scared him a little, at first glance. Just one more woman to add to the queue of women. Edi had been a change, someone good. Someone respectable to be his wife. Carefully chosen to be advantageous. And she had carried out her strait-laced role so well. Three married years of enhancing him. Encouraging people’s respect for him. Because to say that his reputation was in the gutter was to speak too highly of it. Certainly her mother, Frau Harms, fought tooth and nail to end the relationship with what she called ‘This fly-by-night. This purveyor of pornography’. What airs and graces! In arguments with his wife, Egon would say, ‘If my mother-in-law doesn’t like it, I must be doing something right.’ Other times, especially of late, Mother-in-law could be cordial enough. She and Egon had constructed a way of behaving and working, of falsely smiling while in each other’s company. ‘Nothing wrong with a little politeness,’ was what she said. But Edi had fought her corner, insisted her man was good at heart and stuck by him. As for the father, old Johann, he was easier to handle. He was a locksmith who became a railway engineer. Egon even liked him. He became a substitute for his own dead father. And he used this fondness to gain Edi’s respect. Be nice to the father and she would seek to repay the favour. Egon did many drawings and portraits of his father-in-law in the short time he knew him. The old man talked a lot at these sittings – could be entertaining, even when describing how locks worked. And knobs. He had much to say about knobs. You wouldn’t fall asleep listening to him. He was very droll. He’d ask questions to keep you on your toes. ‘And are there not vistas through keyholes?’ he’d say and all but wink. When he died two years ago Egon was moved enough to made a death mask of him.

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