All Whom I Have Loved

7

As we became ever more enchanted with provincial life, Father appeared. He stood in the doorway, dressed in a gray suit, and I hardly recognized his swarthy face.

“Father!” I called.

His face lit up a bit.

Mother offered him a cup of coffee, but Father refused, saying: “I've come to see Paul; I'll bring him back by evening.”

It was strange: I had almost forgotten him.

“And how is it here?” he asked when we were out of the house.

“It's good.”

We crossed the main street and strolled around the alleyways. Eventually we went into the café where I had sat with Mother. The cloud seemed to lift from Father's face, and I saw that he was squinting, as if he were unused to the light.

I couldn't bear his silence, and I asked: “How was the journey here, Father?”

“Splendid,” he answered, and it was obvious that he wanted to make me happy.

One evening Mother revealed to me that Father had been a painter and was successful when he was young, but that later on he had stopped painting. Now, for a living, he taught art at a high school. He didn't enjoy his profession, and most of the time he was very depressed.

“What's depression?” I fumbled like a blind person. Mother explained this word in different ways, but her explanations clarified nothing for me. Much later I envisioned Father pressed between two iron boards and felt a pain in my chest.

I sat in the café with Father. He drank a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette. It was hard for me to imagine Father without a cigarette; sometimes it stayed stuck to his lower lip. “In another week the school year starts,” he said, and I felt that this burden weighed heavily upon him. I tried to picture him sitting and painting. It was easier to imagine him looking at a painting than painting. When he looked at a painting he had a sour expression, as if there were a serious defect in it.

Father sat next to me and didn't speak. In my imagination, I recalled the places he'd taken me. The chapels, of course. He was extremely fond of these little shrines where passersby stopped to pray. Once, he said to me: “The icons in the chapels are so beautiful, it's only natural that they be used by those who worship God.”

Mother also told me that in recent years Father had become addicted to drink, and that he squandered most of his salary on it. It was hard for me to picture Father staggering and cursing in the streets like the drunks whom we came upon every Saturday evening.

When we left the café, we walked all the way down the main street again. It was clear that Father did not like the provinces. I tried to pull him toward the fields, but he refused, shrugging. We wandered around the houses and the stores. Finally we went into a tavern. Father gulped down two shot glasses and said, “That's more like it.”

When we arrived home, Father kissed me on my forehead but did not come into the house. He seemed a little more stooped, and his long arms hung limply. I wanted to call out, “Father, when will we meet again?” But I didn't manage to — he was already far off.

I watched how he walked. At first he walked in the middle of the street and kept turning his head to the side, and the farther he went, the clearer it was to me that he was looking for shelter from the harsh light in the street. Finally, he turned onto a dark side street and disappeared.

When I came in, Mother asked, “How was it?”

“We walked around,” I answered.

Only later did I feel the touch of Father's fingers, as if he were still holding my hand. I tried to remember what he had said to me, but I could recall nothing. His unmoving eyes continued to gaze at me for a long time.

Mother was making posters for her classes for the coming school year. I was glad that she left me alone and did not ask anything more. Each meeting with Father left me mute, as if he had poured his silence into me. Sometimes it seems to me that I'm like him, but when Mother holds out her hand to me, her mouth open and her eyes laughing, I immediately meld into her joyfulness.