The White Book

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.

There are certain memories that remain inviolate to the ravages of time. And to those of suffering. It is not true that everything is colored by time and suffering. It is not true that they bring everything to ruin.

Each moment is a leap forwards from the brink of an invisible cliff, where time’s keen edges are constantly renewed. We lift our foot from the solid ground of all our life lived thus far, and take that perilous step out into the empty air. Not because we can claim any particular courage, but because there is no other way.

Looking at herself in the mirror, she never forgot that death was hovering behind that face. Faint yet tenacious, like black writing bleeding through thin paper.

Now and then, the passage of time seems acutely apparent. Physical pain always sharpens the awareness.

Learning to love life again is a long and complicated process

Sand And she frequently forgot, That her body (all our bodies) is a house of sand. That it had shattered and is shattering still. Slipping stubbornly through fingers.

White hair. She remembers one of her bosses, a middle-aged man who used to say how he longed to see a former lover again in old age, when her hair would be feather-white. When we’re really old... when every single strand of our hair has gone white, I want to see her then, absolutely. If there was a time when he would want to see her again, it would certainly be then. When both young and flesh would have fallen away. When there would be no time left for desire. When only one thing would remain to be done once that meeting was over: to separate. To part from their own bodies, and thus to part forever.

Now and then she finds herself wondering, and not out of self-pity, but with a detached, almost idle curiosity: If you could add up all the pills she’d ever taken, what would the total be? How many hours of pain has she lived through? As though life itself wished to impede her progress, she was brought up short again and again. As though the force that prevents her moving forward to the light stands always at the ready inside her own body. All those hours when she had lost her way, in hesitation and in doubt. How many would there be? How many small white pills?

There is none of us whom life regards with any partiality. Sleet falls as she walks these streets, holding this knowledge inside her. Sleet that leaves cheeks and eyebrows heavy with moisture. Everything passes.

This life needed only one of us to live. If you had lived beyond those first few hours, I would not be living now. My life means yours is impossible. Only in the gap between darkness and light, only in that blue-tinged breach, do we manage to make out each other’s faces.

I hold nothing dear. Not the place where I live, not the door I pass through every day, not even, damn it, my life.

Breath-cloud. On cold mornings, that first white cloud of escaping breath is proof that we are living. Proof of our bodies’ warmth. Cold air rushes into dark lungs, soaks up the heat of our body and is exhaled as perceptible form, white flecked with grey. Our lives’ miraculous diffusion, out into the empty air.

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.

That human beings are also constructed of something other than flesh and muscle seemed to her like a strange stroke of luck.

At times my body feels like a prison, a solid, shifting island threading through the crowd.

Were it not the case that life stretches out in a straight line, she might at some point become aware of having rounded a bend. Bringing, perhaps, the realisation that nothing of that past could now be glimpsed were she to cast a quick glance over her shoulder.

If there was a time when he would want to see her again, it would certainly be then. When both youth and flesh would have fallen away. When there would be no time left for desire. When only one thing would remain to be done once that meeting was over: to separate. To part from their own bodies, and thus to part forever.

because at some point you'll inevitably cast me aside. When I am at my weakest, when I'm most in need of help, You will turn your back on me, cold and irrevocable. And that is something perfectly clear to me. And I cannot now return to the time before that knowledge.

Why do old memories constantly drift to the surface here In this unfamiliar city? When I go out into the streets, the scraps of conversation that pull into focus when the speaker brushes past me, the words stamped on street and stop signs, are almost all incomprehensible. At times my body feels like a prison, a solid, shifting island threading through the crowd. A sealed chamber carrying all the memories of the life I have lived and the mother tongue from which they are inseparable. 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.

Is it because of some billowing whiteness within us, unsullied, inviolate, that our encounters with objects so pristine never fail to leave us moved?

When only one thing would remain to be done once that meeting was over: to separate. To part from their own bodies, and thus to part forever.

Her spirit still had flesh to house it. Like the remaining section of a ruined brick wall, which the bombing had not managed to destroy completely, since moved and incorporated into another structure – from which the blood has been washed clean. Flesh which was now no longer young. As she walked she imitated the steady gait of one who had never been broken. A clean cloth veiling each unstitched place. Doing without farewells, without mourning. If she believes that she has never been shattered, she can believe that she will be shattered no more. And so, there are a few things left to her: To stop lying. To (open her eyes and) remove the veil. To light a candle for all the deaths and spirits she can remember – including her own.

Unable to fathom what on earth it could be, this thing so cold, so hostile. This vanishing fragility, this oppressive weight of beauty.

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.

Your eyes I saw differently when I looked with your eyes. I walked differently when I walked with your body. I wanted to show you clean things. Before brutality, sadness, despair, filth, pain, clean things that were only for you, clean things above all. But it didn’t come off as I intended. Again and again I peered into your eyes, as though searching for form in a deep, black mirror. If only we’d been living in a city back then, I heard my mother say several times during my childhood. If only an ambulance could have taken me to hospital. If only they’d put her in an incubator, that tiny rice cake of a baby. They were a new thing then, incubators. If only you hadn’t stopped breathing. And had therefore been granted all this life in my stead, I who would then never have been born. If it had been granted to you to go firmly forwards, with your own eyes and your own body, your back to the dark mirror.

We lift our foot from the solid ground of all our life lived thus far, and take that perilous step out into the empty air. Not because we can claim any particular courage, but because there is no other way.

With those voices, those lights near at hand, our mother's ashes would lie in changeless calm inside a sealed stone drawe.