The White Book

On cold mornings, that first white cloud of escaping breath is proof that we are living.

For the first time, she had a real sense of the power that lay within this material: the power to preserve, the power to sterilize and to heal.

Standing at this border where land and water meet, watching the seemingly endless recurrence of the waves (though this eternity is in fact illusion: the earth will one day vanish, everything will one day vanish), the fact that our lives are no more than brief instants is felt with unequivocal clarity.

Against the background of a black coat sleeve, a large flake of snow will reveal its crystals even to the naked eye. A scant couple of seconds and she has witnessed it all. Mysterious hexagons melting clean away.

Now I will give you white things,

What is white, though may yet be sullied;

Only white things will I give.

No longer will I question

Whether I should give this life to you.

Perhaps I, too, have opened my eyes in the darkness, as she did, and gazed
out.

Because the girl had never learned language at all. For an hour she had held her eyes open, held them in the direction of our mother’s face, but her optic nerves never had time to awaken and so that face had remained beyond reach. For her, there would have been only a voice. Don’t die. For God’s sake don’t die. Unintelligible words, the only words she was ever to hear.

What do the ghosts of this city do, these muffled early-morning hours?

Slip soundlessly out to walk through the fog that has been holding its breath and waiting?

Do they greet each other through the gaps between those water molecules that bleach their voices white?

The more stubborn the isolation, the more vivid these unlooked-for fragments, the more oppressive their weight. So that it seems the place I flee to is not so much a city on the other side of the world as further into my own interior.

Why do old memories constantly drift to the surface here in this unfamiliar city?