Kepler by John Banville

Author:John Banville [Banville, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: prose_history
Published: 2011-10-06T01:54:37+00:00

* * *

The children went out to the garden. He watched them from the kitchen window as they trailed moodily among the currant bushes and the stumps of last year's cabbages. Friedrich stumbled and fell on his face in the grass. After a moment he came up again in laborious stages, a tiny fat hand, a lick of hair with a brown leaf tangled in it, a cross mouth. How can they bear it, this helpless venturing into a giant world? Susanna stood and watched him with a complacent sneer as he struggled up. There was a streak of cruelty in her. She had Barbara's looks, that puffy prettiness, the small bright mouth and discontented eyes. The boy wiped his nose on his sleeve and waded after her doggedly through the grass. A flaw in the window-pane made him a sudden swimmer, and in the eyepiece of Kepler's heart too something stretched and billowed briefly. Just when he had given up all hope of children Barbara had begun to flower with an almost unseemly abundance. He no longer had any trust, thought they would die too, like the others; the fact of their survival dazed him. Even yet he felt helpless and unwieldy before them, as if their birth had not ended the process of parturition but only transferred it to him. He was big with love.

He thought of his own father. There was not much to think of: a calloused hand hitting him, a snatch of drunken song, a broken sword rusted with what was said to be the blood of a Turk. What had driven him, what impossible longings had strained and kicked in his innards? And had he loved? What, then? The stamping of feet on the march, the brassy stink of fear and expectation on the battlefield at dawn, brute warmth and delirium of the wayside inn? What? Was it possible to love mere action, the thrill of ceaseless doing? The window reassembled itself before his brooding eyes. This was the world, that garden, his children, those poppies. I am a little creature, my horizons are near. Then, like a sudden drenching of icy water, came the thought of death, with a stump of rusted sword in its grasp.

"… Well, are we?"

He jumped. "What?"

"Ah! do you ever listen. " The baby in her arms put forth a muffled exploratory wail. "Are we to lodge in this… this house? Will there be room enough?"

"A whole family, generations, lived here once…"

She stared at him. She had slept briefly, sitting by the table. Her eyes were swollen and there was a livid mark on her jaw. "Do you ever think about-" "Yes." "-these things, worry about them, do you?"

"Yes. Do I not spend every waking hour worrying and arranging and-do I not?" A lump of self-pity rose in his throat. "What more do you want?"

Tears welled in her eyes, and the baby, taking its cue, began to bawl. The door to the front room had the look of an ear bent avidly upon them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.