Christmas in Austin by Benjamin Markovits

Author:Benjamin Markovits [Benjamin Markovits]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571339778
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2019-02-15T16:00:00+00:00

After lunch, Paul said to Liesel, “Do you think we can see a doctor today? I wanted to get Cal checked out.”

“Don’t you have a doctor?”

“This is not one of the things I’ve dealt with yet.”

She stood up from the table. Clémence was already clearing up, and Nathan had started making some counter space for himself. He had complicated plans that required a lot of room; his cooking was always something of an operation. Ben and Julie were old enough by this point they were expected to bring their dishes to the dishwasher, but they needed chivvying, Ben especially. Clémence said, “I don’t know what to keep and what to throw away, I don’t know the Essinger algorithm.”

“Bill’s not here,” Paul said. “Throw everything away.”

“I’ll deal with it.” Susie was shifting containers in the fridge. “My kids like rice, it’s an easy meal.”

Willy and Margot had run into the yard.

Liesel said, “Come to my study. I need to look up the number.” And Paul followed her.

“Armes Kind. Wo tut es weh?” she asked, making her way slowly through the house, out of the kitchen and into the corridor, past the stairs and through the living room, where the winter sunshine, broken up by pyracantha leaves, left footprints on the rug. Poor kid, where does it hurt? She opened the sliding doors to her study and sat down at her desk, which faced the back of the yard. Willy was running in the grass, under the mild blue skies. He carried something in his hand, and Margot followed him in an attitude of complaint or protest, dragging her feet and waiting for him to stop. He stopped and then she started toward him, and Liesel lifted the lid of her computer. She pushed the mouse around, with an impatient and strangely touching gesture, to wake it up, and Willy ran away.

“He says his ear. I figure we may as well get it checked out.”

“I think I left my glasses in the kitchen. On the windowsill over the sink, maybe. Bill always tells me to put them in the same place.” And Paul went to get them, feeling childish.

For a moment, when she looked at the screen, she remembered the work she needed to get done, one of her jobs for the day: transcribing the rest of the letters her brother had sent her. Mostly from her parents to each other, when they were separated toward the end of the war. Her mother took the kids to Berlin, to an uncle’s apartment, while her father stayed at the front in Gotenhafen—now Gdynia, waiting for the Russian assault. But she was thinking about her brother for other reasons. His wife had died; he was living alone, and the last time she saw him, in July (every summer Liesel returned to her childhood home in northern Germany), he looked very thin. He looked, in fact, like Paul, and for some reason the resemblance struck Liesel with particular force as Paul came back and said, “They weren’t on the windowsill.

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