Free The Conversion by Joseph Olshan Page A

remembers little of her early life in that wealthy Italian city with high walls. She completely abandoned her native language while growing up and, when I was a child, rarely made reference to how our Italian relatives were herded into trains and transported to the death camps of Poland and Germany. The only thing she’d ever discussed in any great detail was the guilt of my grandfather, who managed to survive the Holocaust while losing most of his family. My grandfather died of a heart attack shortly after I was born.
    My mother once told me that my grandfather had an explosive temper and went into unbridled rages—I suppose much in the way Ed did—often over smaller, insignificant events or circumstances. I used to warn Ed that one of these fits might trigger a heart attack, but he never listened to me. I’ll admit there is part of me that worries that I stayed with him for the wrong reasons—not because I was in love with him (as it perhaps should have been), but rather because I so profoundly admired his mind and his writing. In light of this, I easily could have become his good friend instead of his live-in companion. But knowing I was short on money and badly wounded over Michel, he encouraged me to come and stay at therue Birague, perhaps hoping that from the height of my esteem for him I’d fall in love. I believe he hoped for this against the odds that I probably would be unavailable to anyone for a long time. And so, I ended up causing great pain to a vain man who’d been used to charming and sleeping with lots of attractive people. Ironically, the poet who could write beautifully about desire and the nuances of love just couldn’t accept the fact that I continued to be obsessed with somebody else.
    Again and again, I find myself involuntarily reliving that last night in Paris, the menacing men cloaking their identity in paramilitary garb, men who, when they entered the room, shifted my life into a strange gear, a third world nightmare of arms and hijackings and blithe murder without any sort of conscience. But then I remind myself that these intrusions underwritten by violence occur in America all the time, often without reason or for some spurious psychological motive.
    And then of course, his heart attack. If only I could’ve known the attack was happening to him when it did, been awake when it struck. For then at least I could’ve knelt down, reassuring him that everything would be fine, all the silly platitudes that you murmur to people who are dying. Yeah, I know they call death during sleep a blessing, but I also hate the idea of going out without even realizing it: going to sleep intending to wake up fully restored and never waking up again. It just reinforces the idea of the finality of death. As scary as it might seem, I think I’d want to know it if I was going to die.
    I may be dreaming again, but now there seems to be some kind of distant commotion going on, doors slamming and a woman shrieking. I sit up in bed and try to listen for further reports. I hear nothing and yet I get the distinct feeling that something outside my own head is actually wrong. And then I start worrying and switch on the night-table lamp. Exactly what I feared: I don’t see my old computer bag with Ed’s manuscript hanging where I’d left it in an open closet. Then I remember with a groan that yesterday Carla had kicked me out of the room in order to clean the bathroom and change the sheets. Did she move it? And if she did, where did she put it?
    I jump out of bed. I never want to find anything in my life as much as I want to find “Russell’s computer,” as Ed called his book. I begin scouring the room. Five fanatical minutes elapse before I finally locate it hanging from the inner knob of the bathroom door—a very odd place tohave left it. In fact, I don’t remember having done so. My heart hammering in my chest, I grab the shoulder strap and transport the bag to my bedside. The zipper is partially open and I