Shroud by John Banville

Author:John Banville
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307427731
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Mama Vander’s pill-box was the first thing I ever stole—a surprisingly intense little thrill—although of course I did not think of it as stealing, only borrowing. I saw it there, in a drape-hung ante-room in the Vander apartment, resting on the edge of a pedestal that bore a bust of Goethe, where Mama Vander had put it down in passing and forgotten it; the silver glint of it was as inviting as a wink. I pocketed it without thinking, without breaking my stride. I needed money, and quickly, for there were books I was anxious to buy while there was still time, before they were banned from the shops, or consigned to the pyre. I intended to tell Axel what I had done, after I had redeemed the box, thinking it would surely amuse him, but I never did, tell him, I mean. What kept me silent was a sense of gravity, not the gravity of my misdemeanour, but of the thing itself: the stolen object, I discovered, takes on a mysterious weight, becomes far heavier than the sum of the materials of which it is made. That little box—all it contained was a few of the sugared violet pastilles that its owner, its former owner, was addicted to—was so ponderous in my pocket it made me feel I must list to that side as I hurried away with my purloined prize. I did not delay in getting rid of it. It turned out to be a valuable piece, French, early eighteenth century; old Wassermann was reluctant to part with it, I could see, when I came back to redeem it. After that I kept it, for many years, through all manner of vicissitude and loss, and although in time it ceased to be as emblematic as once it had been, it never quite shed that unaccountable, undue weightiness. Now it has disappeared, made off stealthily without my noticing, in that mysterious way that objects have of escaping one’s disregardant grasp.

That was the last time I was in the Vander apartment, the time I stole the pill-box. The theft was not the reason for my banishment ; I am not sure it was ever detected, or, if it was, that I was held to be the culprit. In those days of invasion, defeat, occupation—all of which dizzying disasters came quickly to be referred to primly as the events—I was no longer as welcome among the Vanders as I had once been. Nothing was said, of course, but there was a constriction that occurred in the atmosphere now when I entered those spacious, overheated rooms that my heightened sensibilities could not but register. So I withdrew. The break was decorous, and went unremarked, on both sides. It is a curious thing, how even the most violently disrupted circumstances will quickly improvise and impose their own rules of mannerliness. In the early days, after it had sunk in that les événements, de gebeurtenissen, were irreversible and would somehow or other have to

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.