The waiting is frozen and we cling in and to the night. Soundless at first. Ardent for death. Every touch, even the smallest caress, makes the pain sing through her bones. Yet since the shivering would kill her (though ironically that’s not merely what she wants but also what brought us here to the world’s edge) nonetheless I hold her, trying to become what a man cannot,womb and oneness, surface for surface, all shore and heat itself.
Thinking memory might offset the pain and pass time, I ask how much she recalls of when we met. She shivers in my arms under thick slavic sweaters and a cloth coat and yet somewhere down there I can feel her rise like a trout beneath the pooling darkness, the dark cottony fabric of dusk nubbed with small concentric circles of feeding things. She is so weary but still she plays along,talking, rising, dark eyes still searching the black shore for the boat which will bring blessed death.
“You were a clown, of course,” she says, squeezing my arm comfortingly though the gesture makes her grimace with pain, “Caught in a clown’s history. The two of you. Such assholes!”
We both laugh, a crazy quaking which is as much shivering and convulsion as it is laughter, gone mad on a far shore.
“One year...” she says, “One year made you each clowns...Had my husband come to this country one year before he would have been a hero of democracy, a brave refugee. As it was he seemed a coward, someone who left a moment before history would have blessed him as it did Walesa... The same is true for you, of course: one year later and no one would have taken notice of your pitiful crime. For awhile it seemed as if every parent in America was kidnapping her own children from their estranged mates. You can’t imagine what a circus it seemed to a foreigner and a lawyer; all this marital wrangling and for what? the end of the family? the end of history? Who knows... This is the nature of history, of course, perhaps one year from this night and I would have chosen to live rather than see the twilight doctor. Perhaps one year from this night and I could have chosen to live...You see how it is, my friend, we are a caravan of clowns and this is how we met...”
“Caught in the ardent light of history,” I say, recalling the term to her though knowing there is no need. She kisses me ardently on the forehead, lips warm despite the seeping cold. Somewhere down there beneath her scant flesh the radiated marrow of her bones shines like phosphorescent coral under a dark sea, the buried light so searing and transcendent that it is marked by passing satellites and spy planes of decades past.