Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [53]
“It’s my price. Shut up,” her mother said.
She drew a cigarette from the pack and held it. She seemed to be thinking into some distant matter, not remembering so much as measuring, marking the reach or degree of something, the meaning of something.
“The one wall that holds an object is in Berlin.”
“The wanted poster.”
“The poster does not hang. He keeps the poster in a closet, in a mailing tube. No, it’s a small photograph in a plain frame, hanging over his bed. He and I, a snapshot. We’re standing before a church in one of the hill towns in Umbria. We’d met only a day earlier. He asked a woman walking by to take our picture.”
“Why do I hate this story?”
“His name is Ernst Hechinger. You hate this story because you think it shames me. Makes me complicit in a maudlin gesture, a pathetic gesture. Foolish little snapshot. The one object he displays.”
“Have you tried to determine whether this man Ernst Hechinger is wanted by the police somewhere in Europe? Just to know. To stop saying I don’t know.”
She wanted to punish her mother but not for Martin or not just for that. It was nearer and deeper and finally about one thing only. This is what everything was about, who they were, the fierce clasp, like hands bound in prayer, now and evermore.
Nina lit the cigarette and exhaled. She made it seem an effort to do this, breathe out smoke. She was drowsy again. One of her medications contained codeine phosphate and she was careful when taking it until recently. It was only days in fact, a week or so, since she’d stopped following the exercise regimen without altering her intake of painkillers. Lianne believed that this slackness of will was a defeat that had Martin in the middle of it. These were his nineteen, these hijackers, these jihadists, even if only in her mother’s mind.
“What are you working on?”
“Book on ancient alphabets. All the forms writing took, all the materials they used.”
“Sounds interesting.”
“You ought to read this book.”
“Sounds interesting.”
“Interesting, demanding, deeply enjoyable at times. Drawing as well. Pictorial writing. I’ll get you a copy when it’s published.”
“Pictograms, hieroglyphics, cuneiform,” her mother said.
She appeared to be dreaming aloud.
She said, “Sumerians, Assyrians, so on.”
“I’ll get you a copy, definitely.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Lianne said.
The cheese and fruit were on a platter in the kitchen. She sat with her mother a moment longer and then went in to get the food.
Three of the cardplayers were called by last name only, Dockery, Rumsey, Hovanis, and two by first name, Demetrius and Keith. Terry Cheng was Terry Cheng.
Someone told Rumsey one night, it was Dockery the waggish adman, that everything in his life would be different, Rumsey’s, if one letter in his name was different. An a for the u. Making him, effectively, Ramsey. It was the u, the rum, that had shaped his life and mind. The way he walks and talks, his slouchings, his very size and shape, the slowness and thickness that pour off him, the way he puts his hand down his shirt to scratch an itch. This would all be different if he’d been born a Ramsey.
They sat waiting for R’s reply, watching him linger in the aura of his defined state.
She went down to the basement with a basket full of laundry. There was a small gray room, damp and stale, with a washer and dryer and a metallic chill that she felt in her teeth.
She heard the dryer in operation and walked in to see Elena leaning on the wall with her arms folded and a cigarette in her hand. Elena did not look up.
For a moment they listened to the load bounce around the drum. Then Lianne put her basket down and raised the lid of the washer. The filter pan held the lint rubble of the other woman’s wash.
She looked at it briefly, then took the pan out of the washer and extended it to Elena. The woman paused, then took it and looked. Without changing position she used a backhand motion to bang the pan twice against the lower part of the wall she was leaning on. She looked at it