Collected Prose

on the point of leaving when I walked in, I spent no more than five or ten minutes in her company. As usually happens in such situations, we talked about nothing of any importance: a town we both knew in America, the subject of a book she was reading, the weather. Then we shook hands, she walked out the door, and I have never seen her again.
    After she was gone, the friend I had come to visit leaned back in her chair and said, “Do you want to hear a good story?”
    “Of course,” I said, “I’m always interested in good stories.”
    “I like my friend very much,” she continued, “so don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not trying to spread gossip about her. It’s just that I feel you have a right to know this.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Yes, I’m sure. But you have to promise me one thing. If you ever write the story, you mustn’t use anyone’s name.”
    “I promise,” I said.
    And so my friend let me in on the secret. From start to finish, it couldn’t have taken her more than three minutes to tell the story I am about to tell now.
    The woman I had just met was born in Prague during the war. When she was still a baby, her father was captured, impressed into the German army, and shipped off to the Russian front. She and her mother never heard from him again. They received no letters, no news to tell them if he was alive or dead, nothing. The war just swallowed him up, and he vanished without a trace.
    Years passed. The girl grew up. She completed her studies at the university and became a professor of art history. According to my friend, she ran into trouble with the government during the Soviet crackdown in the late sixties, but exactly what kind of trouble was never made clear to me. Given the stories I know about what happened to other people during that time, it is not very difficult to guess.
    At some point, she was allowed to begin teaching again. In one of her classes, there was an exchange student from East Germany. She and this young man fell in love, and eventually they were married.
    Not long after the wedding, a telegram arrived announcing the death of her husband’s father. The next day, she and her husband traveled to East Germany to attend the funeral. Once there, in whatever town or city it was, she learned that her now dead father-in-law had been born in Czechoslovakia. During the war he had been captured by the Nazis, impressed into the German army, and shipped off to the Russian front. By some miracle, he had managed to survive. Instead of returning to Czechoslovakia after the war, however, he had settled in Germany under a new name, had married a German woman, and had lived there with his new family until the day of his death. The war had given him a chance to start all over again, and it seems that he had never looked back.
    When my friend’s friend asked what this man’s name had been in Czechoslovakia, she understood that he was her father.
    Which meant, of course, that insofar as her husband’s father was the same man, the man she had married was also her brother.

12

    One afternoon many years ago, my father’s car stalled at a red light. A terrible storm was raging, and at the exact moment his engine went dead, lightning struck a large tree by the side of the road. The trunk of the tree split in two, and as my father struggled to get the car started again (unaware that the upper half of the tree was about to fall), the driver of the car behind him, seeing what was about to happen, put his foot on the accelerator and pushed my father’s car through the intersection. An instant later, the tree came crashing to the ground, landing in the very spot where my father’s car had just been. What was very nearly the end of him proved to be no more than a close call, a brief episode in the ongoing story of his life.
    A year or two after that, my father was working on the roof of a building in Jersey City. Somehow or other (I wasn’t there to witness it), he slipped off the edge and started falling to the ground. Once again he was headed for certain disaster, and once again he was saved. A clothes-line broke his fall, and he walked away from the accident with only a few bumps and bruises. Not even a concussion. Not a single broken bone.
    That same year, our neighbors across the street hired two men to paint their house. One of the workers fell off the roof and was killed.
    The little girl who lived in that house happened to be my sister’s best friend. One winter night, the two