Collected Prose

person who lives it; life itself will claim the living; to live is to let live. And in the end, by means of these three stories, the merchant’s life is spared.
    This is how The Thousand and One Nights begins. At the end of the entire chronicle, after story after story after story, there is a specific result, and it carries with it all the unalterable gravity of a miracle. Sherhzad has borne the king three sons. Again, the lesson is made clear. A voice that speaks, a woman’s voice that speaks, a voice that speaks stories of life and death, has the power to give life.
    “‘May I then make bold to crave a boon of thy Majesty?’
    “‘Ask, O Sherhzad,’ answered he, ‘and it shall be given unto thee.’
    “Whereupon she cried to the nurses and the eunuchs, saying, ‘Bring me my children.’
    “So they brought them to her in haste, and they were three male children, one walking, one crawling, and one sucking at the breast. She took them and, setting them before the king, kissed the ground and said, ‘O King of the age, these are thy children and I crave that thou release me from the doom of death, for the sake of these infants.’”
    When the king hears these words, he begins to weep. He gathers the little children up into his arms and declares his love for Sherhzad.
    “So they decorated the city in splendid fashion, never before was seen the like thereof, and the drums beat and the pipes sounded, whilst all the mimes and mountebanks and players plied their various arts and the King lavished on them gifts and largesse. Moreover he gave alms to the poor and needy and extended his bounty to all his subjects and the people of his realm.”
    *

    Mirror text.
    If the voice of a woman telling stories has the power to bring children into the world, it is also true that a child has the power to bring stories to life. It is said that a man would go mad if he could not dream at night. In the same way, if a child is not allowed to enter the imaginary, he will never come to grips with the real. A child’s need for stories is as fundamental as his need for food, and it manifests itself in the same way hunger does. Tell me a story, the child says. Tell me a story. Tell me a story, daddy, please. The father then sits down and tells a story to his son. Or else he lies down in the dark beside him, the two of them in the child’s bed, and begins to speak, as if there were nothing left in the world but his voice, telling a story in the dark to his son. Often it is a fairy tale, or a tale of adventure. Yet often it is no more than a simple leap into the imaginary. Once upon a time there was a little boy named Daniel, A. says to his son named Daniel, and these stories in which the boy himself is the hero are perhaps the most satisfying to him of all. In the same way, A. realizes, as he sits in his room writing The Book of Memory, he speaks of himself as another in order to tell the story of himself. He must make himself absent in order to find himself there. And so he says A., even as he means to say I. For the story of memory is the story of seeing. And even if the things to be seen are no longer there, it is a story of seeing. The voice, therefore, goes on. And even as the boy closes his eyes and goes to sleep, his father’s voice goes on speaking in the dark.
    *

    The Book of Memory. Book Twelve.
    He can go no farther than this. Children have suffered at the hands of adults, for no reason whatsoever. Children have been abandoned, have been left to starve, have been murdered, for no reason whatsoever. It is not possible, he realizes, to go any farther than this.
    “But then there are the children,” says Ivan Karamazov, “and what am I to do with them?” And again: “I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don’t want any more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to make up the sum of sufferings which is necessary for the purchase of truth, then I say beforehand that the entire truth is not worth such a price.”
    *

    Every day, without the least effort, he finds it staring him in the face. These are the days of Cambodia’s collapse, and everyday it is there, looking out at him from the newspaper, with the inevitable photographs of death: the emaciated children, the grownups with nothing left in their eyes. Jim Harrison, for example, an Oxfam engineer, noting in his diary: “Visited small clinic at kilometer 7. Absolutely no drugs or medicines—serious cases of starvation—clearly just dying for lack