Paradise and Elsewhere by Kathy Page Page B

arrange the quilts and pillows for later. I go to the window. Karel from downstairs stands stock-still while his half-breed dog careens about in the night, its breath smoking. On Monday, if the weather holds, the old women will be out with their twig brooms, clearing everything away, last year’s rubbish, the weekend’s dogshit. I see too that the old person in the torn coat is rummaging about in the bins again, pulling out the cardboard cartons and the bottles and putting them into separate carrier bags: another new thing. Lights burn behind the thin curtains. Most things are thin here and curtains are a good example: I have seen foreign ones in magazines, velvet drapes on heavy rails, but here they are scanty pieces of cloth or net which only gesture at concealment. I made our curtain hooks myself, bending them from wire. I am an intellectual and not a naturally practical man but circumstances compel. The flat opposite ours has a brand new white venetian blind, but that is very unusual and I wonder how they came by it. Carpets too are thin, not like the ones you find in hotels, and mostly clothes are thin as well, which surprises visitors. Coats are one exception: woollen, kapok-lined. Without such a coat, here you would die… Things, so many things.
    I love my wife. I want her to come with me into our future. But the washing of dishes and the making of soup and the counting of books—surely, this trivia should not occupy so much of our time?
    It is easier to talk in the dark. When finally she comes to bed I whisper my plans. She does not seem surprised—after all, she knows me well. You would enjoy the life, I say, would you not? You would make a fine ambassador’s wife. We could live part of the year in a foreign city. We would be more at home in a cosmopolitan atmosphere, a city centre—an apartment with high ceilings, shutters, wooden floors, close to the caf é s and shops. Perhaps a drier climate, milder winters. You could go on with your translations, of course, meet the writers and talk with them so as to get your text exactly right. Yes, she says, perhaps. You would like it, I tell her. The wallpaper would be on straight. The plumbing would be fixed. And neither of us would have to do the shopping and so on.
    I love you, but you don’t quite understand, she says.
    What? What is it I don’t understand? What?
    We must learn to talk to each other differently now, she repeats.
    Can some things not stay the same? It comes from outside, this, from something she is reading, but she will not tell me what. She says she is not ready to; it is difficult, she wants to be sure; she has always been careful that way.
    I taught my wife English, in which she has since far surpassed me. I gave her personal tuition, because she was a gifted student and also because I liked to look at her. I remember explaining the tenses, the future conditional, the future in the past—all those tenses we do not have in our own language; they are hard to translate. I remember watching her mind work while her lips waited for the right word to come; I remember the dim light of the classroom, the creaks from the stove as it cooled and the metal contracted. In winter her lips were cracked, in summer they glistened. She was still a child. Afterwards I went home to my first wife, and lay next to her, and my young son was in the cot beside us. I lay sleepless the night through: I knew that there was more to life than I had expected, and there could be no peace until I had it.
    And now at the beginning of spring neither of us sleeps. Our flat is near one of the few working lamps that stand like extra trees in the courtyard and pinkish light glazes the room. They have not yet installed individual switches and so the heating will be on until May; tonight it is far too warm, we have thrown the covers off and lie naked but not touching. The books we have read together, or separately and then told each other about,