The Curfew - Jesse Ball [0]
THE CURFEW
Jesse Ball (1978–) is a poet and novelist. His novels include The Way Through Doors (2009) and Samedi the Deafness (2007), which was a finalist for the Believer Book Award. He has published books of poetry and prose: The Village on Horseback (2010), Vera & Linus (2006), and March Book (2004). A book of his drawings, Og svo kom nottin, appeared in Iceland in 2006. He won the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize in 2008 for The Early Deaths of Lubeck, Brennan, Harp & Carr. His poetry has appeared in the Best American Poetry series. He is an assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and teaches classes on lying, lucid dreaming, and general practice.
www.jesseball.com
ALSO BY JESSE BALL
The Way Through Doors
Samedi the Deafness
A VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES ORIGINAL, JUNE 2011
Copyright © 2011 by Jesse Ball
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ball, Jesse, 1978–
The curfew : a novel / by Jesse Ball.
p. cm.
“A Vintage Contemporaries Original.”
eISBN: 978-0-307-74320-6
1. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.A596C87 2011
813′.6—dc22
2011001509
www.vintagebooks.com
Cover image: Andy Baker/Ikon Images/Getty Images
Cover design by Cardon Webb
v3.1
For Alda Aegisdottir
We are born in this cemetery, but must not despair.
—Piet Soron, 1847
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Here Acknowledge
PART 1
There was a great deal of shouting and then a shot. The window was wide open, for the weather was often quite fine and delicate during late summers in the city of C. Yes, the window was wide open and so the noise of the shot was loud, almost as though it had been fired in the room itself, as though one of the two people in the room had decided to shoot a gun into the body of the other.
This was not the case, however. And because no one in the room itself had been shot, the man, William Drysdale, twenty-nine, once-violinist, at present, epitaphorist, and his daughter, Molly, eight, schoolchild, slept on.
Those were their methods of employment. Daily, Drysdale went about to appointments while Molly went to school and was told repeatedly to repeat things. She could not, and didn’t.
In the street beyond the window, it was very shady and pleasant. An old woman was bleeding, hunched over a bench. Two men were standing fifty feet away, one holding a gun. Some ten feet from the bench, a man was lying underneath the wheels of a truck, which seemed to have injured him, perhaps irreparably. The driver was kneeling and saying something. He stood up and waved to the two men. The one with the pistol was putting it away. Another, smaller truck arrived for the bodies. The man who had had the pistol, but no longer showed it—he was directing people to go away. People were going away.
One minute after the gunshot, the street was empty. This was often the case. I shall introduce this city to you as a city of empty streets—empty only when something occurred, momentarily empty and soon full again, but empty nonetheless.
I shall introduce this city and its occupants as a series of objects whose relationship cannot be told with any certainty. Though violence may connect them, though pity, compassion, hope may marry one thing to another, still all that is in process cannot be judged, and that which has passed has gone beyond judgment, which leaves us again, with lives and belongings, places, shuttling here and there, hapless,