Margaret Leigh

Or you can think about nothing at all and just laze mindlessly, time belongs to you, not the reverse. You’re not driven onward by that frantic mill wheel of hours and seconds, you glide through time, eyes closed, as though in a rowboat with oars pulled in. Christine lies there, enjoying this new feeling, her blood pulsing pleasantly in her ears lik

Christine is instantly awake. Taking care of her mother has accustomed her to being alert at the slightest touch. “Am I late already?” she stammers guiltily. All office workers are afraid of being late for work. For years she’s gone to sleep afraid and awakened afraid at the first blast from the alarm clock. The first thing she does is check the ti

In her sleep the frightened girl has drawn her arms over her chest, as though to protect herself. This simple gesture is touching, childish, as is the half-open, almost frightened mouth; the eyebrows too are somewhat raised, as though she’s in the grip of a dream. Even in her sleep, her aunt thinks with sudden clear-sightedness, even in her sleep s

For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidized flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicolored rows; he watches over each of them with an old-fashioned gardener’s delight, holds them like fragile objects in his thin, bloodless hands.

She pleases him, this shy slip of a girl who doesn’t dare to look up, who’s so unlike those flappers over there, whom he detests in a grouchy sort of way because a gramophone always rattles to life when they show up and because they sashay through the room as no woman in Holland ever would have in his day.

She no longer thinks about what she’s left behind. Her mother, the office, the village, all are forgotten; forgotten too is the tenderly drawn map in her handbag from which she could have learned the names of all the peaks, all the streams tumbling into the valleys; forgotten is her own self of the day before. All that’s left is soaking up this eve

She murmurs a quick embarrassed hello as she passes each pair of knees, as if this courtesy might excuse her presence. But no one answers. She must have failed the sixteen inspections, or else the passengers, Romanian aristocrats speaking a harsh, vehement French, are having such a good time that they haven’t noticed the slender specter of poverty

In another shop a pair of dress shoes, a flowing silk scarf, and yet more wonders. Christine has no experience of this kind of shopping and is agog at this new marvel, this buying with no concern for cost, without the eternal fear of the “too expensive.” You choose things, you say yes, you don’t think about it, you don’t worry, and the packages are

It’s ivory-colored, with floral edging in a Japanese style; it seems to glow in contrast to the next one, a midnight-black silk dress with flickering red flames. The third is pond-green with veins of silver, and all three seem so fantastic to Christine that she doesn’t dare to think they could be hers. How could she ever wear such splendid and frag