Live a Little by Howard Jacobson

Author:Howard Jacobson [Jacobson, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781473563803
Google: tIdzDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 42185875
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2019-07-03T23:00:00+00:00

25

Shimi pictures Ephraim passed away, getting colder by the second. Is there a limit to cold?

He puts his shaking hand to his throat where it’s warm.

There’s no recovering from the loss of a younger brother. Shimi might not have seen Ephraim for half a lifetime but his brother has always been a fixture of the heart. You don’t see your heart either. But there it is, and there Ephraim was. To remain alive – that was the unspoken contract – the younger brother must not die before the older.

Those Carpathian superstitions. When you fear something is wrong, something will be wrong. And when one of you is ill, the other will know of it, no matter how great the distance between you.

Shimi blames himself for not sensing Ephraim’s death, as a marked change in the universe, the minute it occurred. The sky should have darkened, volcanoes should have spat fire, his own heart should have burst when Ephraim’s did.

So how long is it since the brothers met? Would they have known each other had they passed in the street yesterday?

What did Ephraim look like? Not at the moment of his death, but essentially, for all time. Given how much Shimi remembers, how can he not see his brother’s face? There must be a reason he can’t reassemble it from the fragments of the past. He mustn’t want to.

He has no family photographs on his mantelpiece to help him, just postcards of far-away places, a collection of dusty phrenology busts – some antique, some of his own making – and a certificate of membership from the Society of Cartomancers. He stares at the mantelpiece, at the image that isn’t there, at the space where Ephraim should have been. The atmosphere of Ephraim fills the space. That’s sufficient, Shimi has always believed. The atmosphere of a person is all that matters. Who cares about the eyes and mouth? But he still wishes he could call back the face. Can he mourn him without the face? Can he even miss him? Then he remembers: buried at the bottom of his wardrobe is that commonplace biscuit tin of memorabilia everyone keeps for just such a day as this. Nearly thrown out, but not.

Once you’ve got rid of the biscuit tin the only thing left to get rid of is yourself.

He drags it out and there – miracle of miracles, absurdity of absurdity, at the very top of an unordered pile of frilly-edged black-and-white photographs and letters – they are, Ephraim and Shimi, unless it’s Shimi and Ephraim, impossible to tell apart under the cowboy hats they’re wearing, no matter that in life they bore not the slightest resemblance to each other, Ephraim and Shimi, Shimi and Ephraim, two apparently carefree pre-war boys of roughly the same age, fooling about in their garden in Stanmore, one in a wheelbarrow grinning, one pushing the wheelbarrow, grinning likewise.

Shimi, whichever one he is, grinning!

How old are they? Eight or nine, he estimates. So the garden is still paradisal. Shimi and his brother before the fall.

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.