Charlie Johnson in the Flames by Michael Ignatieff

Author:Michael Ignatieff
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Kosovo (Republic), Psychological Fiction, Political, General, Psychological, Fiction
ISBN: 9780802117557
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 1977-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

Etta flew home to the small town in what Charlie called her little country, and she let herself sink back into the rhythm of her parents’ lives. She took her mother shopping and her father to the doctor to have his injections. They were eighty and eighty-four, and they had lived in the same apartment since they were married. She sat with them at night, at the kitchen table, playing cards with her father, while her mother did the dishes. Nothing had changed since her childhood. The lined wallpaper was the same. The fireman’s calendar by the door was the same, though a new one came every year. The rituals were the same – reading the local news paper aloud, while her father nodded and her mother stacked the plates on the draining board. She was glad to be home.

By day, she ironed for her mother and listened to the gossip, noting how the ambit of what she talked about in her small voice had shrunk from the town to the street and from the street to the stairwell of their apartment. Her father was forgetting, but it was the best kind of forgetting, the kind he didn’t notice. One night, she stood in the doorway of the room where they slept on separate beds and listened to them breathing slowly through their mouths and she felt that they had become as vulnerable as children.

She paid their bills and made arrangements with their neighbours to get the firewood carried up the three flights and stacked on the balcony. She went for walks on her own, out into the bare fields on the edge of town. One evening, when they were all heading for bed, her mother stroked Etta’s face, as they stood in the hallway by the kitchen and said that she looked worried. Care-worn was the actual word. Etta smiled and said she was fine. Her mother said she should go and pay a visit to Uncle Janos. His business was going well and he had moved to a big villa on the heights above town. He still lived alone. Etta kissed her mother on her forehead and told her she should get some rest.

‘Why don’t you see him? He asks after you.’

‘I’m happy for him. It’s late, let’s go to sleep.’

Her mother went into her bedroom, but as she closed the door she gave her daughter a look, both timid and questioning.

As Etta always did when she came home, she kept away from him. It had long ceased to hurt or even matter very much. She felt nothing, in fact, but she didn’t want to run into him and she didn’t want to discuss it with her mother, although she wondered what she did or didn’t know.

That night, when her parents were asleep, Etta phoned Meg and heard about the scene with Shandler and how it had occurred after Charlie had seen the tapes. Now he had disappeared, nobody knew where. Meg said he had been smiling when

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