Moon Palace by Paul Auster

Author:Paul Auster [Auster, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101563816
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2010-12-27T16:00:00+00:00

5

That was as far as we got that day. As soon as he had uttered the last sentence, Effing paused to catch his breath, and before he was able to go on with his story, Mrs. Hume walked in and announced that it was time for lunch. After the terrible things he had recounted, I thought it would be difficult for him to regain his composure, but the interruption hardly seemed to affect him. “Good,” he said, clapping his hands together. “Time for lunch. I’m famished.” It bewildered me how he could shift so rapidly from one mood to another. Just moments before, his voice had been shaking with emotion. I had thought he was on the brink of collapse, and now, all of a sudden, he was brimming with enthusiasm and good cheer. “We’re getting on with it now, boy,” he said to me as I wheeled him into the dining room. “That was just the beginning, what you might call the preface. Wait till I get warmed up. You haven’t heard anything yet.”

Once we sat down at the table, there was no more mention of the obituary. The lunch proceeded as normal, with the usual accompaniment of slurps and outrages, neither more nor less than on any other day. It was as though Effing had already forgotten that he had spent the past three hours spilling his guts to me in the other room. We made our usual small talk, and toward the end of the meal we went through the daily weather briefing in preparation for our afternoon excursion. That was how it went for the next three or four weeks. Mornings, we worked on the obituary; afternoons, we went out for walks. I filled more than a dozen notebooks with Effing’s stories, generally at a clip of twenty or thirty new pages a day. I had to write at great speed to keep up with him, and there were times when my transcriptions were barely legible. At one point I asked him if we could switch to a tape recorder, but Effing refused. No electricity, he said, no machines. “I hate the noise of those infernal things. All whirr and whoosh, it’s enough to make you sick. The only sound I want to hear is your pen moving across the paper.” I explained to him that I wasn’t a professional secretary. “I don’t know shorthand,” I said, “and it’s not always easy for me to read what I’ve written.” “Then type it up when I’m not around,” he said. “I’ll give you Pavel’s typewriter. It’s a beautiful old contraption, I bought it for him when we came to America in thirty-nine. An Underwood. They don’t make them like that anymore. It must weigh three and a half tons.” That same night, I dug it out from the back of the closet in my room and set it up on a small end table. From then on, I spent several hours every evening transcribing the pages from our morning session.

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