Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick

Author:Cynthia Ozick
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Contemporary
ISBN: 9781848877351
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2010-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

27

AWAKENED BY CRIES, Iris thought at first of animal squeals. Then, as unsound sleepers ripped into sudden full consciousness are wont to do, she remembered where she was, and took in the unlikelihood of wild birds and street cats indoors in the middle of the night. The half-bottle of wine she had swallowed the evening before—it was intended to help her sleep—instead drew her to an insistent clarity. The wine was a discovery: it made her see. In this foreign city she had begun to comprehend everything that had gone before—those long strivings, the dogged classroom years and the noxious discipline of the laboratory, the solitary drive for perfection, for goodness, for her father's praise. She was perfect and she was good. She had earned prizes and fellowships. Whatever she did, she did diligently and well. But here—here she threw her stockings in the air and let them dangle for days from picture frames! Here it was normal to drink wine—people drank it daily with their meals, it was as ordinary as water on the table at home. And the wine found its own reasons: it was for pleasure, it was for digestion, it was for sleep, it was for ... other things. For getting free of being good. For not caring what you said, or to whom. Like a cave, like a labyrinth, the wine had its secrets. You could step into its mouth and then, little by little, wind gingerly on; the deeper you went, the more wine-drenched the walls, painting themselves brighter and brighter—as when eyes shut against the sun are left gazing at their own red blood.

The noises were coming from two rooms away. It was not their lovemaking. She was familiar with their lovemaking, the murmurs and echoes that gained and slowed and gained again, and then broke with the crystal crack of an eggshell, and the orange yolk spilling blindingly out. Their lovemaking seemed incessant, and tragic, like some terrible thirst, more Lili's than her brother's—the wine told her so. The wine was a teacher. She was listening for the pangs and blows of their bodies. These high strained cries weren't the bleats of their lovemaking, no: they belonged to the dreams. Bad dreams: even in childhood Julian had cried out in his sleep: he was falling, falling out of some great vulnerable vessel into a fire. The falling and the fire and the smell and the burning frightened and woke him. But it wasn't the falling into the fire, it wasn't the lovemaking. It was Lili. Lili's bad dreams made a strange piping, and sometimes a harsh grim grunt, or even a metallic click, like the cocking of a trigger. Lili's dreams were deadly. Only Julian knew why. And while Lili would laugh in the morning at Julian's bad dream—"Poor Julian, papa Freud pulls him through the womb again"—there could be no mention of Lili's pipings and grunts and clicks. The wine begged Iris to inquire, but Julian forbade it. Lili's dreams were wounds.

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