Read After Auschwitz: A Love Story for Free Online

dangling between his legs and a white slice of diaper. We talk. He insists on pushing his walker down the hall to the kitchen and bringing a glass of wine.
    â€œLet me do that,” I beg him, walking behind him. Wondering whether I could hold him if he falls. He condescends to let me bring in a bowl of olives and some napkins. Gabriella is depressed and he’s not sure she’ll join us. But she does and she is wearing a beautiful Chinese robe. Holding her elegant head high, arms outstretched to greet me. I’ve brought her a catalogue of the Pre-Raphaelite show.
    Lucian’s doorbell rings and to my surprise it’s Ernesto and Elena. Gabriella looks at the pictures while Lucian monologues about his life to the young wife. I’m jealous—I thought she was just interested in Hannah and me. Is she going to be promiscuous then, collecting old codgers for some project of hers—Communists in the Forties? Reds on the blacklist? Lucian is wearing a hearing aid and can only hear me from the left side. Gabriella tries to comment occasionally on the paintings but he ignores her. She shrugs.
    â€œHe can’t hear me anymore,” she says with a note of desperation. No wonder she spends much of her time in bed.
    Back home the gulls are circling, giving their sunset calls. I love the inexorable progress, the same year in, year out, from the blue-green elegant eggs kept warm by mother and father in turn, to the newly hatched chicks stumbling when they try to walk on their big black feet; later, the adolescents unfolding their wings for practice, not yet aware of their power. And then one day they take off on a favorable current.
    But what I’m really jealous of is that they have no foreknowledge of death.
    Do you ever wake up in the morning so irritated that you scream if your psychic wound is touched by anyone—particularly by someone dear to you who is trying to help—and look for an object on which to discharge your anger? Of course you do. Kick the dog, curse the government.
    In my case I wake up angry with Hannah. She won’t sleep in my bed anymore. She just puts me to bed like a child, holding me until I fall asleep, then moves into the other room. She says I snore. It occurs to me that she humiliated me when our friend was here with his new wife. Hannah asked me to collect the plates and I couldn’t hear her. There must have been some conversation going on that interfered with my hearing aid, and I handed her the salt and pepper.
    â€œNo”, she said in a cranky voice, “not those.” Then more gently, “Why don’t you turn up your ears?”
    The young Elena had looked at me sympathetically and I blushed purple. That wasn’t at all the way I wanted to attract her attention! The truth is I love it when Hannah cuddles close to me and strokes my thinning hair. I love it way more than I am willing to admit, but my penis is ashamed that it no longer has a voice in what goes on. It lies quiet and limp between us—sometimes rousing a little—Hannah is still a handsome woman even though her magnificent braid is gray not gold.
    I’ve been trying to write down things that are important to me—a storehouse for my memories. I tell Hannah I am working on a memoir. I don’t tell her how difficult I find even recording my fleeting thoughts. My mind seems to take itself off on crooked little jaunts, mocking seriousness and relevance or even progression. Today for instance I am thinking about Lucian flaunting his urine in a plastic bag. If my penis is under-used and sad, think of how his must feel reduced to a waterspout. It took a certain kind of courage for him to show it off. Look, god damn you. You’ll get there too soon enough.
    At some point Gabriella brought in a photo of him from his twenties, slender with a hawk nose, thick black hair.She wanted to remind me of what he’d been. Instead I found myself getting bored as he reviewed his