The Grasshopper King by Jordan Ellenberg

Author:Jordan Ellenberg [Ellenberg, Jordan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781566893862
Publisher: Coffee House Press

That night I slept at my card table, my head resting on the X of my crossed forearms, the workman’s legend—“THIS IS THE LIFE”—grinning down at me from the wall. The next day, to my surprise, Julia wordlessly gathered her things and accompanied me to Higgs’s house. Along the way I attempted a rapprochement, filled with thin hope and self-recrimination; I spoke jauntily of the day’s news, various of our former acquaintances, even the weather. I listed and repudiated my unappealing qualities, one by one, with a grit-toothed likeness of cheer. I flung apologies like candy from a float. None of it availed me anything. When we arrived at the house, Julia started immediately on a stack of jugs and pots that occupied the corner by the stairs, taking care to set each object in its place as deliberately and noisily as possible. I opened Kaufmann and closed it again, unable to bear the sight of that same page: bum-bum. I rested my chin on my joined hands, clenched my eyes shut, tried to pull myself inward to some clear, meditative state, where the route back to normalcy would be apparent, a bright portal. But I couldn’t concentrate; couldn’t not notice the chalky scrape of pottery on pottery, the radio from upstairs, the chattering grasshoppers. I was trapped in the sensory world. I was sweating. I began to succumb to a matter-of-fact despair.

Who knows how long this might have gone on, had Ellen not interrupted us with news of the most startling kind?

We heard her shout from upstairs. Immediately she came barreling down, agitated into speechlessness, waving a fat blue envelope in her right hand. It was a letter: the first of two we would receive that week, in a house that didn’t see much mail. I stood up from my chair.

“A letter for Stanley,” Ellen forced out, catching her breath in whoops. “It’s a letter for Stanley from Germany.”

All of us looked at Higgs. I knew already of the letters Higgs had posted to Berlin in his attempts to uncover Henderson’s biography. But what sort of reply could take thirty years to compose?

“Open it,” I said. “He won’t mind.”

Ellen tore the envelope open and withdrew a neatly folded sheaf of papers. “It’s in English,” she said, flattening it out, and then—glancing once more at her husband—she began to read.

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