Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION GRO | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Following his magisterial To the End of the Land, the universally acclaimed Israeli author brings us an incandescent fable of parental grief--concise, elemental, a powerfully distilled experience of understanding and acceptance, and of art's triumph over death.
In Falling Out of Time, David Grossman has created a genre-defying drama--part play, part prose, pure poetry--to tell the story of bereaved parents setting out to reach their lost children. It begins in a small village, in a kitchen, where a man announces to his wife that he is leaving, embarking on a journey in search of their dead son. The man--called simply Walking Man--paces in ever-widening circles around the town. One after another, all manner of townsfolk fall into step with him (the Net-Mender, the Midwife, the Elderly Math Teacher, even the Duke), each enduring his or her own loss. The walkers raise questions of grief and bereavement: Can death be overcome by an intensity of speech or memory? Is it possible, even for a fleeting moment, to call to the dead and free them from their death? Grossman's answer to such questions is a hymn to these characters, who ultimately find solace and hope in their communal act of breaching death's hermetic separateness. For the reader, the solace is in their clamorous vitality, and in the gift of Grossman's storytelling--a realm where loss is not merely an absence but a life force of its own.
Author Notes
David Grossman was born in Jerusalem on January 25, 1954, is an Israeli author of fiction, nonfiction, and youth and children's literature. His books have been translated into many languages. He is most known for his non-fiction work, The Yellow Wind. This is his study of the Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. He was awarded the Prime Minister's Prize for Hebrew literature (1984) and the Israeli Publishers Association Prize for best Hebrew novel (1985). Grossman lives in Mevasseret Zion on the outskirts of Jerusalem. He is married to Michal Grossman, a child psychologist and the mother of his three children.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Although it's identified as a novel, this searing narrative from Israeli writer Grossman is not cast in traditional form. A mixture of free-verse, prose, and stage directions, it's a searching cri de coeur-an impassioned exploration of existential questions about life and death. In Grossman's previous novel, To the End of the Land, a son is lost in battle; while Grossman was writing that book, his own son was killed in Israel's 2006 war with Lebanon. Here, a bereaved father, who, after five years, still cannot come to terms with his son's death, leaves his wife and home to try to find the "there," where the boy's soul resides. As he relentlessly walks through and around his village, the Walking Man is joined by others who have lost their children. His voice-intense, anguished, almost deranged by grief-is mediated by the Town Chronicler, who also introduces the voices of the other seekers-the net mender, the midwife, the duke, the cobbler, the math teacher, the centaur-who join the Walking Man. In hoping to be granted even a moment of communication with the dead, the Walking Man laments "the vast expanse his death/ created in me," and his need to embrace "this/ lonely/ dead/ child." This piercingly sad elegy culminates in a moment of peace in which the community of the bereaved contemplates the cycle of life and death. The precision and sensory depth of Grossman's language renders this unconventional work an unforgettable and magnificent document of suffering. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* With a strange and wonderful tale, Grossman challenges the boundaries separating life from death, sanity from madness. Announcing I have to go, a grief-stricken Israeli villager takes leave of his bewildered wife, embarking on a journey to there an impossibly undefined place where he hopes to find and to speak with his dead son. As he sets out walking, in ever-widening circles around his village, the Walking Man becomes a Pied Piper of Bereavement, drawing behind him the Midwife, the Net-Mender, the Elderly Math Teacher, the Duke all staggering under loads of sadness due to the loss of a loved one. Even the Town Chronicler who narrates the bizarre quest joins his distraught wife in the company following the Walking Man into a dreamscape where the deepest fears stirred by death collide with the most passionate hopes for life. Together these grim marchers unfold a dark colloquy by turns heartrending and comforting on what it means to love the departed, what it means to accept or defy death. Intensifying the pathos, deepening the soul-searching, husbands and wives repeatedly struggle to preserve their union despite sharply contrasting ways of dealing with their shared loss. A potent fusion of poetry, fiction, and drama sweeps readers into very deep waters!--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE EMBLEMATIC MAN, any man, every man - dazed, heartsick, utterly bewildered - suddenly pushes away his dinner and gets up from the kitchen table. He can't take it any longer - the overwhelming, claustrophobic grief, which has hollowed him out - and so he decides to go "there." But where is there? That's what the emblematic Woman, any woman, every woman, can't figure out. That's what she wants to know. She understands, this woman who is also a mother, a wife, that there is no place to go when you've lost a child. You are already wounded by disaster, forever bereft. "In an instant we were cast out/to a land of exile," she remembers. But this man can't sit still any longer. The trouble has taken him over again. And so he sets out to go "there" anyway. It has been five years, and he is determined to see his dead son one more time, though no one has ever made the journey and come back alive. Like a figure in a myth, he is going to walk across a divide, leaving the living behind, the innocent ones, who still exist inside of ordinary time. The Israeli writer David Grossman has crafted a strange and riveting book - partly a folk tale, partly a play, partly a novel in verse. There's no genre to describe it. Capably translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen, some of it unfolds in prose, some in short lines, though the staccato line breaks are flawed and the lineation is probably the weakest aspect of this otherwise well-written book, which aspires to poetry. It succeeds instead as fiction, the storyteller's art. Grossman operates in a different register here than in his previous novel, "To the End of the Land," one of the great antiwar books of our era. In "Falling Out of Time" the characters are generalized types, as in a medieval allegory or a Beckett play, though their griefs are specific, their losses poignant and real. There is the Town Chronicler, a clerk, a village explainer who serves as the narrator, the deputy of a public voice. The center of the action, such as it is, is the Walking Man, a sort of Giacometti sculpture brought to life, a stubborn, wayward figure who paces in widening circles around the village and slowly picks up other distraught, grief-stricken figures - the reticent Net Mender (Woman in Net), the stuttering Midwife, the Cobbler, the Elderly Math Teacher - each ready to join the journey to nowhere, each in the grip of a staggering loss. There is also the tormented writer, whom the townspeople have nicknamed the Centaur ("I must re-create it in the form of a story!"), the Woman Atop the Belfry ("I walk alone now/in circles, around/a ferrous spire"), and the Duke, the benign ruler over this dark fairy-tale kingdom. And what holds this odd assortment of walkers together? They all belong to the saddest club on earth. Grief is democratic. It crosses barriers and strikes at will. "Mourning condemns/the living/to the grimmest solitude," the Woman recognizes. But these solitaries fall in together, shoulder to shoulder, neither awake nor asleep, obsessively talking to their dead sons and daughters, asking them unanswerable questions ("But where are you, what are you,/just tell me that, my son"), addressing one another, trying to understand the hole inside themselves, the memories now wedded to pain, the need to remember, the fear of forgetting, the compulsion to keep moving. They are deranged by longing. As the Town Chronicler explains: "They walk on the hills and I follow them, constantly darting between them and the town. They groan and trip and stand, hold on to each other, carry those who sleep, falling asleep themselves. Nights, days, over and over they circle the town, through rain and cold and burning sun. Who knows how long they will walk and what will happen when they are roused from their madness?" In the final section of the book the walkers sometimes speak in unison as a chorus of grief. They ask their fallen children about death. They see them alive again, frozen in childhood - jumping, dancing in the kitchen. Despair is with them, too, in their fruitless journey. "And you were right,/ my wife, righter than me - ," the Walking Man realizes: there is no there, there is no there, and even if I walk for all of time I will not get there, not alive. But the passion to walk continues to motivate them, like a curse. "Perhaps this walk itself is both / the answer and the question?" the Town Chronicler's Wife wonders aloud. And so the walk continues. life is suspended in this book, and the walkers travel in a timeless space. Yet somehow they come closer and closer to what they call "the blaze." "My heart tells me, my boy, that from the moment a person notices the blaze, he is destined to get up and go to it," the Elderly Math Teacher observes matter-of-factly. They discover a massive wall they hadn't seen before, a pit in the ground, the earth itself, the final threshold: one last line shared both by here and there, the line to which - no farther - the living may draw near. They approach it together, as one. "Falling Out of Time" identifies these mourners, the ones who are a few years out, as walkers moving into another stage of grief. They are everywhere shadowed by what has happened to them. Look closely and you'll see them circling the village, any village, every village. There is a special kind of sorrow etched into their faces. Some people bear a loss that seems unendurable, and yet it must be endured. It is unacceptable, and yet it must be accepted. Grieving parents, deranged by longing, try to understand the memories now wedded to pain. EDWARD HIRSCH'S new prose book is "A Poet's Glossary." His book-length poem, "Gabriel," will be published in September.
Guardian Review
In his Arthur Miller Freedom to Write lecture, delivered in New York in 2007 - a lecture that should be read by anyone interested in undertaking the emotional labour of making any kind of true art - the great Israeli novelist David Grossman said: "The consciousness of the disaster that befell me upon the death of my son Uri in the second Lebanon war now permeates every minute of my life. The power of memory is indeed great and heavy, and at times has a paralysing effect. Nevertheless, the act of writing creates for me a 'space' of sorts, an emotional expanse that I have never known before, where death is more than the absolute, unambiguous opposite of life." Falling Out of Time is the work of space and expanse produced in the aftermath of Grossman's terrible loss. It is not perhaps his best novel, because it is not a novel: it is a work of mourning. One of Grossman's earlier books was called The Book of Intimate Grammar: this is his Intimate Book of Grief. On the page the book resembles a play, or a prose poem, possessing at times the qualities of a religious or mystical text - wandering, sprawling, repeating itself like a cry or a prayer, returning again and again to questions about the meaning and nature of loss. Comparable books are perhaps Imre Kertesz's Kaddish for an Unborn Child, or the much-overlooked and underrated works of Charles Reznikoff: works of recitation and testimony. Characters give speeches; there is much rumination and reflection; but Grossman is also a storyteller, and Falling Out of Time does not entirely fall out of time. It goes inward, and around, but it also goes forwards. It has a narrative that reads as much like a parable as an autobiography. An unnamed man announces to his wife one day that he is leaving to go "there", to find their dead son: I have to go. Where? To him. Where? To him, there. To the place where it happened?' No, no. There. What do you mean, there? I don't know. You're scaring me. Just to see him once more. But what could you see now? What is left to see? I might be able to see him there. Maybe even talk to him? Talk?! And so the man sets off and begins walking, circling his town; he becomes simply "the Walking Man". He is seeking a way out of the void, through the void. On his journey, he meets others - the cobbler, the midwife, the net-mender, the elderly maths teacher, the duke, the town-chronicler and his wife - who have also lost their children and who are also lost in grief. They walk together and begin to share an identity. They become a kind of entity - the "Walkers". At times they are guided by a fire - "a small fire, the constant flame" - and eventually they reach a boundary, "a massive wall of rock bisected", which "cut the world right through". Readers will of course recognise biblical parallels here: the wandering in the wilderness, the pillar of fire. They might also recognise the presence of those other books and that other place that haunts so much of Grossman's work - the world described in the stories of Sholem Aleichem, the world of the eastern European shtetl, a place alive with cobblers and matchmakers, and alive also with the presence of the dead, and the living dead. "Under a street lamp," writes Grossman, "that glows with a yellowish light stands an elderly man writing in chalk on the wall of a house. A white halo of hair hovers around his head, his walrus moustache is silver, and my soul alights when I realise it is my teacher, my maths teacher from elementary school, a likable man who suffered a tragedy years ago, I cannot recall what, and disappeared. I thought he was dead, yet here he is . . ." If there is a lack of specificity in Grossman's description of the town and the walkers, and if the story perhaps sometimes becomes lost and confusing, then it is because the landscape and its inhabitants are really shadows, creatures of an interior world, whose journey and whose quest are within. Falling Out of Time is short, and clearly a deeply personal book, but its importance and impact ought not to be underestimated. The great miracle of writing, Grossman concluded in his Freedom to Write lecture, is that "from the moment we take pen in hand or put fingers to keyboard, we have already ceased to be a victim at the mercy of all that enslaved and restricted us before we began writing. We write. How fortunate we are: the world does not close in on us. The world does not grow smaller." Ian Sansom's The Norfolk Mystery is published by Fourth Estate. To order Falling Out of Time for pounds 13.59 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. - Ian Sansom So the man sets off and begins walking, circling his town; he becomes simply "the Walking Man". He is seeking a way out of the void, through the void. On his journey, he meets others - the cobbler, the midwife, the net-mender, the elderly maths teacher, the duke, the town-chronicler and his wife - who have also lost their children and who are also lost in grief. They walk together and begin to share an identity. They become a kind of entity - the "Walkers". At times they are guided by a fire - "a small fire, the constant flame" - and eventually they reach a boundary, "a massive wall of rock bisected", which "cut the world right through". - Ian Sansom.
Kirkus Review
A genre-crossing, pensive, peripatetic novel by Israeli author Grossman (To the End of the Land, 2010, etc.). Grossman's previous novel described a walk across the scorching Judean desert in quest of peace. The walking continues in this book, a blend of verse, drama and prose that recalls Karl Kraus' blistering Last Days of Mankind (1919) in both subject and form. Where Kraus described the self-immolation of Europe in World War I, Grossman ponders a world in which "[c]old flames lapped around us," a world caught up in formless, chaotic conflict about which we know only a few thingsespecially that people, young people, have died. The "Walking Man" goes in quest of the lost, but, leaving his home and village, he manages only to encircle it in an ever-widening ambit. Says "The Woman," "You /circle / around me / like a beast / of prey," but he is searching, not hunting, his circling an apparent effort at exhaustiveness. Others join him, the predator-prey metaphor working overtime: One woman likens her spirit to "a half-devoured beast / in its predator's mouth." In the end, Kraus gives way to a modernist verse reminiscent of Eliot: "We walk in gloom. / Across the way, on gnarled rock, / a spider spins a web, spreads out his taut, / clear net." The lesson learned from such observations? Perhaps this: Though death is final, the fact of death continues to reverberate among the living, awed and heartbroken. Rich, lyrical, philosophically densenot an easy work to take in but one that repays every effort.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Shortly before publication of Grossman's recent To the End of the Land, which explores the emotional strains a family endures when a loved one is sent off to war, Grossman's younger son was killed in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War, or Second Lebanon War. Here, the author responds by examining aspects of silent and hidden mourning. Utilizing a variety of literary genres, each of which illuminates a means of releasing trauma and grief, he intertwines the lives of several nameless characters, among them the Walking Man, the Net Mender, the Midwife, and the Elderly Math Teacher, who have experienced the loss of a child. Each person carries a concealed burden, yearning for an overt articulation of their loss. It is through the discovery of their collective voice, written in poetic verse, that each character is able to unearth the covered traces of trauma and find closure. VERDICT Grossman's lyrical approach to the silent suffering of mourning is both a literary study in processing grief and a reminder that healing often comes through the action of putting into words the pain we thought was unspeakable. [See Prepub Alert, 9/9/13.]-Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
town chronicler: As they sit eating dinner, the man's face suddenly turns. He thrusts his plate away. Knives and forks clang. He stands up and seems not to know where he is. The woman recoils in her chair. His gaze hovers around her without taking hold, and she--wounded already by disaster--senses immediately: it's here again, touching me, its cold fingers on my lips. But what happened? she whispers with her eyes. Bewildered, the man looks at her and speaks: --I have to go. --Where? --To him. --Where? --To him, there. --To the place where it happened? --No, no. There. --What do you mean, there? --I don't know. --You're scaring me. --Just to see him once more. --But what could you see now? What is left to see? --I might be able to see him there. Maybe even talk to him? --Talk?! town chronicler: Now they both unfold, awaken. The man speaks again. --Your voice. --It's back. Yours too. --How I missed your voice. --I thought we . . . that we'd never . . . --I missed your voice more than I missed my own. --But what is there? There's no such place. There doesn't exist! --If you go there, it does. --But you don't come back. No one ever has. --Because only the dead have gone. --And you--how will you go? --I will go there alive. --But you won't come back. --Maybe he's waiting for us. --He's not. It's been five years and he's still not. He's not. --Maybe he's wondering why we gave up on him so quickly, the minute they notified us . . . --Look at me. Look into my eyes. What are you doing to us? It's me, can't you see? This is us, the two of us. This is our home. Our kitchen. Come, sit down. I'll give you some soup. man: Lovely-- So lovely-- The kitchen is lovely right now, with you ladling soup. Here it's warm and soft, and steam covers the cold windowpane-- town chronicler: Perhaps because of the long years of silence, his hoarse voice fades to a whisper. He does not take his eyes off her. He watches so intently that her hand trembles. man: And loveliest of all are your tender, curved arms. Life is here, dear one. I had forgotten: life is in the place where you ladle soup under the glowing light. You did well to remind me: we are here and he is there, and a timeless border stands between us. I had forgotten: we are here and he-- but it's impossible! Impossible. woman: Look at me. No, not with that empty gaze. Stop. Come back to me, to us. It's so easy to forsake us, and this light, and tender arms, and the thought that we have come back to life, and that time nonetheless places thin compresses-- man: No, this is impossible. It's no longer possible that we, that the sun, that the watches, the shops, that the moon, the couples, that tree-lined boulevards turn green, that blood in our veins, that spring and autumn, that people innocently, that things just are. That the children of others, that their brightness and warmness-- woman: Be careful, you are saying things. The threads are so fine. man: At night people came bearing news. They walked a long way, quietly grave, and perhaps, as they did so, they stole a taste, a lick. With a child's wonder they learned they could hold death in their mouths like candy made of poison to which they are miraculously immune. We opened the door, this one. We stood here, you and I, shoulder to shoulder, they on the threshold and we facing them, and they, mercifully, quietly, stood there and gave us the breath of death. woman: It was awfully quiet. Cold flames lapped around us. I said: I knew, tonight you would come. I thought: Come, noiseful void. man: From far away, I heard you: Don't be afraid, you said, I did not shout when he was born, and I won't shout now either. woman: Our prior life kept growing inside us for a few moments longer. Speech, movements, expressions. man and woman: Now, for a moment, we sink. Both not saying the same words. Not bewailing him, for now, but bewailing the music of our previous life, the wondrously simple, the ease, the face free of wrinkles. woman: But we promised each other, we swore to be, to ache, to miss him, to live. So what is it now that makes you suddenly tear away? man: After that night a stranger came and grasped my shoulders and said: Save what is left. Fight, try to heal. Look into her eyes, cling to her eyes, always her eyes-- do not let go. woman: Don't go back there, to those days. Do not turn back your gaze. man: In that darkness I saw one eye weeping and one eye crazed. A human eye, extinguished, and the eye of a beast. A beast half devoured in the predator's mouth, soaked with blood, insane, peered out at me from your eye. woman: The earth gaped open, gulped us and disgorged. Don't go back there, do not go, not even one step out of the light. man: I could not, I dared not look into your eye, that eye of madness, into your noneness. woman: I did not see you, I did not see a thing, from the human eye or the eye of the beast. My soul was uprooted. It was very cold then and it is cold now, too. Come to sleep, it's late. man: For five years we unspoke that night. You fell mute, then I. For you the quiet was good, and I felt it clutch at my throat. One after the other, the words died, and we were like a house where the lights go slowly out, until a somber silence fell-- woman: And in it I rediscovered you, and him. A dark mantle cloaked the three of us, enfolded us with him, and we were mute like him. Three embryos conceived by the bane-- man: And together we were born on the other side, without words, without colors, and we learned to live the inverse of life. (silence) woman: See how word by word our confiding is attenuated, macerated, like a dream illuminated by a torch. There was a certain miracle within the quietude, a secrecy within the silence that swallowed us up with him. We were silent there like him, there we spoke his tongue. For words-- how does the drumming of words voice his death?! town chronicler: In the hush that follows her shout, the man retreats until his back touches the wall. Slowly, as if in his sleep, he spreads both arms out and steps along the wall. He circles the small kitchen, around and around her. man: Tell me, tell me about us that night. woman: I sense something secret: you are tearing off the bandages so you may drink your blood, provisions for your journey to there. man: That night, tell me about us that night. woman: You circle around me like a beast of prey. You close in on me like a nightmare. That night, that night. You want to hear about that night. We sat on these chairs, you there, me here. You smoked. I remember your face came and went in the smoke, less and less each time. Less you, less man. man: We waited in silence for morning. No morning came. No blood flowed. I stood up, I wrapped you in a blanket, you gripped my hand, looked straight into my eyes: the man and woman we had been nodded farewell. woman: No wafted dark and cold from the walls, bound my body, closed and barred my womb. I thought: They are sealing the home that once was me. man: Speak. Tell me more. What did we say? Who spoke first? It was very quiet, wasn't it? I remember breaths. And your hands twisting together. Everything else is erased. woman: Cold, quiet fire burned around us. The world outside shriveled, sighed, dwindled into a single dot, scant, black, malignant. I thought: We must leave. I knew: There's nowhere left. man: The minute it happened, the minute it became-- woman: In an instant we were cast out to a land of exile. They came at night, knocked on our door, and said: At such and such time, in this or that place, your son thus and thus. They quickly wove a dense web, hour and minute and location, but the web had a hole in it, you see? The dense web must have had a hole, and our son fell through. town chronicler: As she speaks these words, he stops circling her. She looks at him with dulled eyes. Lost, arms limp, he faces her, as if struck at that moment by an arrow shot long ago. woman: Will I ever again see you as you are, rather than as he is not? man: I can remember you without his noneness--your innocent, hopeful smile--and I can remember myself without his noneness. But not him. Strange: him without his noneness, I can no longer remember. And as time goes by it starts to seem as though even when he was, there were signs of his noneness. woman: Sometimes, you know, I miss that ravaged, bloody she. Sometimes I believe her more than I believe myself. man: She is the reason I take my life in your hands and ask you a question I myself do not understand: Will you go with me? There-- to him? woman: That night I thought: Now we will separate. We cannot live together any longer. When I tell you yes, you will embrace the no, embrace the empty space of him. man: How will we cleave together? I wondered that night. How will we crave each other? When I kiss you, my tongue will be slashed by the shards of his name in your mouth-- woman: How will you look into my eyes with him there, an embryo in the black of my pupils? Every look, every touch, will pierce. How will we love, I thought that night. How will we love, when in deep love he was conceived. man: The moment it happened-- woman: It happened? Look at me, tell me: Did it happen? man: And it billows up abundantly, an endless wellspring. And I know--as long as I breathe, I will draw and drink and drip that blackened moment. woman: Mourning condemns the living to the grimmest solitude, much like the loneliness in which disease enclothes the ailing. man: But in that loneliness, where--like soul departing body-- I am torn from myself, there I am no longer alone, no longer alone, ever since. And I am not just one there, and never will be only one-- woman: There I touch his inner self, his gulf, as I have never touched a person in the world-- man: And he, he also touches me from there, and his touch-- no one has ever touched me in that way. (silence) woman: If there were such a thing as there, and there isn't, you know--but if there were, they would have already gone there. One of everyone would have got up and gone. And how far will you go, and how will you know your way back, and what if you don't come back, and even if you find it-- and you won't, because it isn't-- if you find it, you will not come back, they will not let you back, and if you do come back, how will you be, you might come back so different that you won't come back, and what about me, how will I be if you don't come back, or if you come back so different that you don't come back? town chronicler: She gets up and embraces him. Her hands scamper over his body. Her mouth probes his face, his eyes, his lips. From my post in the shadows, outside their window, it looks as if she is throwing herself over him like a blanket on a fire. woman: That night I thought: Now we will never separate. Even if we want to, how can we? Who will sustain him, who will embrace if our two bodies do not envelop his empty fullness? man: Come, what could be simpler? Without mulling or wondering or thinking: his mother and father get up and go to him. woman: In whose eyes will we look to see him, present and absent? In whose hand will we intertwine fingers to weave him fleetingly in our flesh? Don't go. man: The eyes, one single spark from his eyes-- how can we, how may we not try? woman: And what will you tell him, you miserable madman? What will you say? That hours after him, the hunger awoke in you? That your body and mine, like a pair of ticks, clutched at life and clung to each other and forced us to live? man: If we can be with him for one more moment, perhaps he, too, will be for one more moment, a look-- a breath-- woman: And then what? What will become of him? And of us? man: Perhaps we'll die like he did, instantly. Or, facing him, suspended, we will swing between the living and the dead-- but that we know. Five years on the gallows of longing. (pause) The smell your body emits when your grief plunges on you, lunges; the bitter smell in which I always find his odor, too. woman: His smells-- sweet, sharp, sour. His washed hair his bathed flesh the simple spices of the body-- man: The way he used to sweat after a game, remember? Burning with excitement-- woman: Oh, he had smells for every season: the earthy aromas of autumn hikes, rain evaporating from wool sweaters, and when you worked the spring fields together, odor from the sweat of your brows, the vapors of working men, filled the house-- man: But most of all I loved the summer, with its notes of peaches and plums, their juices running down his cheeks-- woman: And when he came back from a campfire with friends, night and smoke on his breath-- man: Or when he returned from the beach, a salty tang in his hair-- woman: On his skin. The scent of his baby blanket, the smell of his diapers when he drank only breast milk, then seemingly one moment later-- man: The sheets of a boy in love. woman: Sometimes, when we are together, your sorrow grips my sorrow, my pain bleeds into yours, and suddenly the echo of his mended, whole body comes from inside us, and then one might briefly imagine-- he is here. (pause) I would go to the end of the world with you, you know. But you are not going to him, you are going somewhere else, and there I will not go, I cannot. I will not. Excerpted from Falling Out of Time by David Grossman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
