Free Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick Page A

navigator. This light was different from California light: it fell out of a sky so much smaller, so much older: an old old sky, drooling wrinkled clouds.
    Out there on the balcony — two scarred wooden chairs — he began to speak of Lili. In spite of everything (but what, Iris wondered, was “everything”?) she was the strongest person he’d ever known, not in that bullying, self-deluding way they’d suffered under all their lives — she was a small sturdy stem: you could bend it and it would arch and never break . . .
    This was the familiar Julian, sidling into vapor. Iris felt she could put her finger all the way into such talk and never get hold of a single fact. His thinking wouldn’t come clean, it ran around corners, it was all melting words, you couldn’t pin it down — it was like those dirty street pigeons he’d made into glossy doves. Who was this Lili, where did she come from, what did he intend to make of her? Or she of him? He had always been excited about one thing or another. He was inconstant, subject to phases. He went from snarls to fustian. He didn’t have his hands on the lever of life — this was how her father put it, but her father . . . well, he was what he was, a man who couldn’tfeel. Or see. He couldn’t see Julian, the other meaning of him. What looked like volatility was absorption in the moment. Her brother, she knew, was born to feel. Listen to him now! He believed that a weed had a will. And this Lili, despite her name, was she a weed, one of those wandering European weeds? Those funny insertions in Julian’s letters, in that strange curly handwriting, what language was that?
    “Romanian,” Julian said.
    Distant, discordant, unreal. Waste and war, the weary guttural of one of those unimaginable hells. A place that wasn’t in any of the history books — not in California, anyhow.
    “What was the point of doing that, it might just as well have been Chinese —”
    “I made her,” Julian said. “It was telling without telling. Because nobody at home could read it.”
    “You could’ve written anything you wanted, they didn’t have a clue when a letter came. I had a system, I told you.”
    “But if dad just happened to get a look —”
    “He never did. And you know he wouldn’t let mom see anything upsetting.”
    “It’s not upsetting, it’s miraculous. But it couldn’t be told then, it wasn’t decided — Lili wasn’t decided. So I made her write it down that way, a sort of private code for herself, to convince her.”
    “Convince her of what?”
    Julian laughed, almost a giggle, childishly.
    “She was
supposed
to write ‘We are going to be married’ —”
    “Julian! You didn’t really, you aren’t —”
    “But what she actually wrote was ‘He is a foolish American boy.’ After the letter went off she admitted to it. She’s like that. She says what she thinks.”
    “In a language nobody knows, so how can anyone tell what she thinks? Julian, you
didn’t
do such a thing, you didn’t go and get yourself married! To someone no one’s ever heard of —”
    “Two months ago, beginning of June.”
    “You
are
a foolish American boy.”
    His little blond mustache quivered: each sparse thread had its own wet glint. Were they tears, those droplets all at once stippling the hairs on his lip? Foolish, foolish, yes! What had he done, what had he let himself in for? A feckless boy with a wife. That straggly mustache a callow banner.
    “Right you are. Foolish and happy.”
    But he was pulling a handkerchief out of the pocket of his shirt, and it was only that his nose was running, the start of a cold, he said, Lili had it first, he was bound to catch it, the people where she worked, refugees, DPs and such, half of them sickly, she was always bringing back the sniffles, or worse. They were mostly in trouble, those people, pleading and babbling in their worried old tongues, no use to them now, and dependent on a score of translators (Lili was one of them), and