Free The Age of Radiance by Craig Nelson Page A

grief, loss, death:
    They brought you in and placed you on the bed. . . . I kissed you and you were still supple and almost warm. . . . Pierre, my Pierre, you are there, calm as a poor wounded man resting in his sleep, his head bandaged. Your face is sweet, as if you dream. Your lips, which I used to call hungry, are livid and colorless. . . . Your little graying beard; one can barely see your hair, because the wound begins there, and on the right one can see the bone sticking out from under the forehead. Oh! How you were hurt, how you bled, your clothes were inundated with blood. What a terrible shock your poor head, that I had caressed so often, taking it in my hands, endured. And I still kiss your eyelids which you close so often that I could kiss them, offering me your head with the familiar movement which I remember today, which I will see fade more and more in my memory. . . .
    We put you in the coffin Saturday morning, I held your head. . . . Then some flowers in the casket and the little picture of me . . . that you loved so much. . . . It was the picture of the one you chose as your companion, of the one who had the happiness to please you so much that you didn’t hesitate to make her the offer of sharing your life, even when you had only seen her a few times. And you had saidto me many times it was the only time in your life when you acted without any hesitation, because you were absolutely convinced that it was right. . . .
    Your coffin was closed and I could see you no more. . . . I was alone with the coffin and I put my head against it. . . . I spoke to you. I told you that I loved you in that I had always loved you with all my heart. . . . I promised that I would never give another the place that you occupied in my life and that I would try to live as you would have wanted me to live. And it seemed to me that from this cold contact of my forehead with the casket something came to me, something like a calm and an intuition that I would yet find the courage to live. Was this an illusion or was it an accumulation of energy coming from you and condensing in the closed casket which thus came to me as an act of charity on your part? . . . I got up after having slept rather well, relatively calm. That was barely a quarter of an hour ago, and now I want to howl again—like a savage beast. . . .
    In the street I walk as if hypnotized, without attending to anything. I shall not kill myself. I have not even the desire for suicide. But among all these vehicles is there not one to make me share the fate of my beloved? . . . I feel very much that all my ability to live is dead in me, and I have nothing left but the duty to raise my children and also the will to continue the work I have agreed to.
    Bronya had arrived to comfort her grief-wracked sister for two months, and now it was time for her to return to Zakopane. Marie asked her to come with her to the bedroom, where, in the middle of a hot June, the fireplace roared. The widow locked the door behind them and took a bulky package from her armoire. Retrieving a strong set of shears from the mantel, she asked her sister to sit beside her, before the fire. Then she cut open the parcel to reveal the bloody, mud-drenched clothes Pierre had been wearing when he was killed, which Marie had been saving all this time. She began cutting the material into pieces and throwing it onto the flames but, finding pieces of her husband’s body on part of a coat, she burst into tears and began kissing it. Bronya took the scissors from her and continued cutting, and burning, until everything was consumed. Marie then asked, “Tell me, how am I going to manage to live. I know that I must, but how shall I do it? How can I do it?” She fell into a spasm of sobbing, and Bronya tried to comfort her.
    Marie could no longer live where she and Pierre had spent the whole of their married life and went to look for another home, deciding finally tomove to 6