Three Short Novels by Gina Berriault

Author:Gina Berriault [Berriault, Gina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619023604
Publisher: Counterpoint

11

When her heart waked her in the night she would get up, slip a sweater over her pajamas, sit down at her table, and call up from the past the one who was pleading with her to rescue him, the one she had kept at a distance so that he could never be recognized as her brother. In the middle of the night, every night, she was called out on a rescue mission, fearful over whom she must rescue, not her brother alone but herself along with him. Nobody else in the world was going to get up from bed and sit down at a notebook to rescue them from the dark.

Early on in their time together, Martin had told her about himself and his farm family in Montana in an amused, indulgent way like a father of himself, and that was the way he had told about them in his novel, and when he had asked Ilona about herself she had told him a few things, hesitantly, and then more, and everything she told him seemed to have been waiting to be told just to him. It was only the usual way lovers exchange stories about their lives, hoping, without knowing they were hoping, that years later when they had lost touch with each other, what little each had learned about the other would be remembered with understanding. Once when they were strolling and she glimpsed his reflection in a mirror in a store window she had mistaken his face for her own. They didn’t resemble each other. She had entrusted his face, his broad, wide-gazed face, with her own history, her own self, and his face had become so kindred, so dearly familiar, that to see his face as her own had been a natural enough mistake. But now this scribbling away in a dimestore notebook set her among those nocturnal souls who fill their pages—every inch and the margins too—with eternal concerns of no concern at all to anyone else.

Over and over in memory she approached the yellow stucco bungalow in the weeds, afraid to go in and see again the ones unutterably dear, those she could not tell about because to attempt to tell was like an invasion of sacred ground, because something was protecting them from her, from fallacy, from artifice, from failure. But at last she went in, choosing—among all the weathers in which she had approached that bungalow and gone in—a summer twilight, because the sky of that time of day had been filled with promise and the deeper the blue became the more certain she had become of the existence of the world’s great cities and far outposts.

She had always come home alone. She had a lover in that time, that last year, but she never brought him home to see her mother fading away in the tiny bedroom where the plaster had fallen in patches and the slats showed through like the bones of the house, and to see her brother

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